New York's Invasive Cultures: From the Sullivan Campaign to Harmful Algae Blooms

• In Event: Discursive Institutionalist Approaches to APD: Ideas, Identities, Institutions

Abstract

In 2018 Gov. Cuomo dedicated $65 of the budget to combating Harmful Algae Blooms (HABs) through the development of mitigation programs with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). For decades the blooms have been increasing and now lead to the closure of hundreds of public beaches each year across the state, toxic water dangerous to animals, and decreased tourism. HABs are representative of a whole range of looming environmental issues directly related to the long-term effects of climate change, as well as the continued mitigation of the causes of toxic effects, like HABs. HABs are a symptom of climate change but are potentially controllable without systemic changes through mitigating environmental policies such as farm run-off regulation and the development of new technologies to remove or prevent the blooms for occuring. In this way the multilayered approach to HAB mitigation is representative of more general patterns in policy development regarding environmental and health policy.

This paper uses a discursive institutional framerwork to explore this layered policy politics through feminist science studies theoretical work on care, (Ticktin 2019), distributed reproduction (Murphy 2013), and the anthropocene (Vergas 2017), to argue that these short term mitigating strategies will not be successful in the longer term in dealing with the combined effects of climate change at local and state level policy. By putting the policy development discourse in conversation with feminisnt science studies, this paper also argues that the roots of the systems and processes that lead to HABs are centuries old, not merely new developments associated with the discourse of climate change. That these short term and techo-centered policy solutions will not lead to clean water in the Finger Lakes, or Flint, or any of the communities across the country that face the effects of climate and capital after centuries of toxicity related to industrial production.

Author

• J. Ricky Price, St. John Fisher College