Help me write a platform for New Orleans

Thing is, you could take current environmental trends and write a piece about how it's futile to save the world. Does that mean we should throw up our hands and actively help destroy it?

of course if you let the world go there'd be nowhere for people to live. if you let the gulf coast slide into the sea, because trying to save it would be endangering the welfare of its inhabitants and monopolizing finite resources, there would still be places for people to live.

the land is too valuable though -- the sun belt is the fastest-growing region in the country and the proximity to a large body of water (the gulf) is very desirable. you can't really forbid people from moving there unless you turn it into a government-controlled wildlife sanctuary with heavy security.

Why would you wait for Nagin to do anything?

--It will be hard. Why bother?
--ACORN isn't a perfect organization. Why bother?
--Louisiana might not be here in 300 years. Why bother?

good point. i imagine if the government eliminated funding for things like levees and dredging (yes i know my position is getting more and more absurd by the moment) it would have the dual effect of returning the coast line to a more natural spongy state and dissuading people from building. thereby making the whole situation safer.

maybe. i really have no idea if i agree with anything i've said in this thread. but it seems like these ideas should at least be considered when figuring out what to do about nola.

i imagine there's a lot of this sort of discussion going on behind the scenes of the rebuilding project. of course no politician or bureaucrat would openly admit that they're considering abandoning nola.

My posts addressing you above are out of line, Curmudgeon. I seriously am not good at writing on ILE. Jhoshea, you're right that endangering people's lives is a serious consideration, and I'm sorry I caricatured your opinion. I would delete my last couple posts if I could.

Organic produce? Something we all can enjoy which no piece of legislation gave us. Food is better than ever thanks to small farmers, not politicians. A dumb list, but that's the reason I wrote that.

Is says: "the fundamental problem of southern Louisiana" is "the fact that making the area suitable for permanent settlement also tends to make it that much more impermanent."

In other words, the problem is man-made:

'In the nineteen-twenties, Percy Viosca, a Louisiana naturalist, warned that flood-control and land-reclamation efforts were "killing the goose that laid the golden egg"; he advocated that the state adopt policies to reestablish the "natural conditions" conducive to healthy marshes. Instead, though, virtually all the practices that exacerbate land loss were allowed to continue and, in some cases, even encouraged. Swamps were drained to create agricultural fields and housing developments; this caused the peaty marsh soils to oxidize and shrink, like a drying sponge, resulting, in many instances, in new expanses of open water. Navigational channels like the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet were dug; these carried salt water into what had been freshwater marshes, killing trees and grasses and inviting erosion. Thousands of miles of canals were cut into the wetlands to facilitate oil and natural gas exploration; much like the navigation channels, these canals wreaked havoc on the local hydrology. Where oil was found, the process of extraction caused some areas to slump—Louisiana "floats on oil like a drunkard's teeth on whiskey," A. J. Liebling once wrote—further contributing to subsidence.'

It goes on to say that attempts to redress these mistakes have been fatally slow.

I don't see, in other words, how you get from those conclusions to the idea that Southern Louisiana is just naturally sinking because of forces beyond humanity's control. (It probably doesn't help that the article seems to frame politics purely in terms of popular folly in the face of hard scientific realities.)

I also notice that there's some (quoted) editorializing in the piece about climate change. I have a question: Is global warming reversible?

The buildup of southern Louisiana and its wasting away are flip sides of the same deltaic process. Over time, sediments naturally compact and consolidate—or dewater—with recent layers, which are wetter, losing volume more rapidly. Once enough sediment has been deposited, the load begins to depress the earth’s crust, a process known as down-warping. (Down-warping occurs so gradually that the earth is still responding to sediment deposited tens of thousands of years ago.) In areas where accretion exceeds subsidence, new land is created. But the process works against itself. When too much sediment builds up at its mouth, the river, seeking a faster route to the sea, switches course, like a hose flopping around in the grass. A new bulge of land, or delta lobe, starts to form, while the old one slowly continues to sink and compact under its own weight. In the past eight thousand years, the river has built five major lobes, some of them overlapping. Western Terrebonne Parish is what remains of the delta lobe built during the time of the Assyrians; Lafourche Parish is what’s left of the lobe laid down during the Roman Empire. Many still more ancient delta lobes are now submerged. The Mississippi fan, an enormous cone of sediment that was laid down during the ice ages, now lies under the Gulf of Mexico; it is larger than the entire state of Louisiana and in some places ten thousand feet thick.

Like I said I was just going on memory. I likely forgot the most important parts.

Also, I wanted to say that even if we do disagree (not sure that we do), I whole heartedly encourage you to get involved in helping nola and the whole region. I'm sure they can use as may dedicated, intelligent people as they can get.

This conservative article in favor of dams, and tracking environmentalist opposition to them, is really interesting. It calls wetlands overrated as a means of flood control.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/006/565qnocx.asp

mississippi goddamn!

(sorry, still catching up with new posts... will try to post something helpful later.)

Not very snappy...

Folks in a gated community in the Algiers portion of New Orleans did not want FEMA trailers in one location says this article. Good ol' FEMA...

Here's an excerpt:

Security cameras watch the entrance of Lakewood Estates, and a sign proclaims "24-hour camera surveillance in progress." The collection of trailers sits on a two-acre plot on one side of a low wall, a humble contrast to the substantial, well-landscaped dwellings on the other side.

"If you look at this facility, it looks like Guantánamo," said the protest leader, Edward D. Markle. He was still furious at FEMA, though the site appears dead, for now. "It's bad," Mr. Markle said. "You've got a thousand locations that are better. I won't be able to take a bath without them seeing me."

He suggested that a much larger plot of land, across the road and away from the homes, would have made a far more suitable location.

"It's not an issue of we don't want them in our backyard," Mr. Markle said. "We invite them in our backyard. We just don't want them in our bathrooms and bedrooms."

ACORN needs to work harder to get attention for whatever they are trying to do in New Orleans.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/4/3/13938/09595

Virginia Boulet
http://www.virginiabouletformayor.com
Rev. Tom Watson
http://www.tomwatsonformayor.com

http://blogs.citypages.com/pscholtes/2006/05/a_platform_for.asp

At Jazzfest Charmaine Neville railed against FEMA, many others bemoaned the state of things, and Springsteen criticized "President Bystander" and noted in regards to his visit to the 9th Ward that "The criminal ineptitude makes you furious."

Bush and company keep insisting they are spending money down there and will bring the levees back up to level 3 scale (!) but I did not see much tangible results in the neighborhoods (the Times-Picayune keeps running articles on the Army Corps of Engineers failures both historic and current). It all seems very grim to me. The New Orleans culture that gave us Creole cooking, sucessive generations of new and different brass bands, Mardi Gras Indians, Fats Domino, Louis Armstrong, and more jazz, r'n'b, and rock performers is now spread out and dissipated throughout the country. Rents and housing costs in higher ground 'better' neighborhoods are out of the reach of many. A research scientist who lives in uptown New Orleans told me at the Fest that it looks like New Orleans will simply become "a port and a resort," but will no longer be a multicultural, multi-class vital living city.

Damnit. Wouldn't it be cool if this were to serve as a step in the right direction for rebuilding - actually attempting to reclaim as close to the original, and not just simulating or totally refacing?

This is the hard part of Pete's plan. For now the 9th Ward is not being bulldozed, but nor is it being restored. How do you decide to move people or where they should have to move to? The way it looks right now, a large chunk of the 9th Ward is just going to sit--neither as a true wetland or as a redeveloped neighborhood. The long-standing issues of race and class and how they play out, plus the city's longstanding crime and education problems factor in heavily. Someone(white guy) working at one restaurant told us they need to just bulldoze, and that venting waiter (white guy) I referred to above noted that while the city went without any murders for months after Katrina, recently a local had been murdered on the street not far from the tourist area of Jackson Square with a shotgun. The waiter complained "the trash are coming back."

"A lot of people are on hold," Floyd said. "We're coming into hurricane season. The levees aren't anywhere where they need to be. It's just a kind of wait-and-see attitude."

Some musicians who have tried to find housing report that rents have doubled." excerpt from "New Orleans musicians come home — for now"
By Paul de Barros, Seattle Times jazz critic
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002977610_nola07.html

There have been other sad articles in the Times-Picayune, plus a sad piece on media coverage 8 months later in the Washington Post.

Katrina Fatigue The Media's New Orleans Burnout

By Howard Kurtz
Sunday, May 7, 2006; Page B01

"I walked down the street next to a failed levee here the other day and saw house after house that had been pulverized by Hurricane Katrina. Eight months after the storm, and nothing, not a single cinder block, had been touched. An exterior wall of one home had been ripped away, revealing, amid the rubble, a sneaker, some batteries and a cardboard box for an NFL football. A thriving family once lived here, and in the next house, and in the house after that.

But it's old news, this tableau of destruction. Even if a reporter could track down the families on this block and recount each tale of woe, the camera lens would still be too close; it simply could not capture the magnitude of what happened to New Orleans last summer. And if you pull back the camera too far, you get those aerial shots we've all seen so many times, which provide a sense of the hurricane's scale but not of the human misery that each ruined home represents."

Nagin has at least unveiled an evacuation plan, which takes care of #6, maybe.

I'm sending money, once I catch up on bills, to Common Grounds.

By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, May 14, 2006; B01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/13/AR2006051300037_pf.html

"....Then the Corps failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, despite spending more in Louisiana than in any other state. Last month, the Corps commander acknowledged that his agency's "design failure" led to the floodwall collapses that drowned New Orleans. So why isn't everyone asking questions about the Corps and its patrons in Congress?

Somehow, America has concluded that the scandal of Katrina was the government's response to the disaster, not the government's contribution to the disaster. The Corps has eluded the public's outrage -- even though a useless Corps shipping canal intensified Katrina's surge, even though poorly designed Corps floodwalls collapsed just a few feet from an unnecessary $750 million Corps navigation project , even though the Corps had promoted development in dangerously low-lying New Orleans floodplains and had helped destroy the vast marshes that once provided the city's natural flood protection."

Pete:
Doing something about the Corps of Engineers needs to be a platform item (although it seems to enjoy Congresional and Presidential and military patronage and support that makes it untouchable).

See the May 22nd posting for one recent view

The million dollar complicated question: How do you change the education system, pre-care for kids issues, labor/work issues, mindset issues, policing issues, gun issues, drug issues etc. in New Orleans so as to decrease the violence?

Check out this depressing N.Y. Times article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/05/us/05crime.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

"In New Orleans, Dysfunction Fuels Cycle of Killing"

excerpt:
"Other cities have plenty of murders. But only in New Orleans has there been the uniquely poisoned set of circumstances that has led to this city’s position at the top of the homicide charts. Every phase of the killing cycle here unfolds under the dark star of dysfunction: the murderers’ brutalized childhoods, the often ineffectual police intervention, a dulled community response, and a tense relationship between the police and prosecutors that lets many cases slip through the cracks."

http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/05/appalling_conditions_at_new_or.html

excerpt below
Appalling conditions at New Orleans coroner's office reveal a crude, understaffed operation

Published: Sunday, May 22, 2011, 7:00 AM

By Laura Maggi, The Times-Picayune

In New Orleans, the murder capital of the United States, the local agency tasked with investigating exactly how people die is a crude operation at best, with pathologists performing autopsies in a dingy former funeral parlor, half of which was recently rendered useless by fire.

Without a proper ventilation system inside the autopsy area, the smell of dead bodies and cleaning supplies lingers in the air. Corpses are stored in refrigerated trucks out back.

Making problems worse, Coroner Frank Minyard is far from a vocal advocate for his office, rarely asking the city for money to alleviate the burdensome caseload of his staff. Despite holding the office for more than 30 years, Minyard blames his failure to land a state-of-the-art facility on a kind of political naivete.

Adam (New Orleans resident), any thoughts?

Rising Tide 6 Conference on New Orleans' future is at Xavier University on Aug. 27

Check RisingTideNola.com, the Rising Tide Blog & this page for details, y'all.

Friday Night Party Aug. 26 (TBA)

Amazing Speakers and Panels all day Saturday, Aug. 27.

Registration includes morning pastries & beverages and lunch by J'Anita's

Everyone is welcome!

The Rising Tide Conference is an annual gathering for all who wish to learn more and do more to assist New Orleans' recovery. It's for everyone who loves New Orleans and is working to bring a better future to all its residents.

Leveraging the power of bloggers and new media, the conference is a launch pad for organization and action. Our day-long program of speakers and presentations is tailored to inform, entertain, enrage and inspire.

We come together to dispel myths, promote facts, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels. We aim to be a "real life" demonstration of internet activism as we continue to recover from a massive failure of government on all levels.

This year's featured guests include the creator of HBO series The Wire and Treme, David Simon, and author of six critically acclaimed books on the physical and human geography of New Orleans, Richard Campanella. Past featured speakers have included Mac McClellan (blogger and writer for Mother Jones) Harry Shearer (writer, actor, host of the weekly radio show Le Show), John Barry (author of Rising Tide), Dave Zirin (author of Welcome to the Terrordome) and authors Christopher Cooper and Robert Block (Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security).

This year's main stage panel discussions include:

Social Media, Social Justice Panel – Cherri Foytlin, contributor to the Bridge the Gulf project; Jimmy Huck, Jr., Executive Committee member of Tulane University’s Center for Public Service; Jordan Flaherty, author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six; Stephen Ostertag, creator of PublicSphereNOLA; and moderated by Bart Everson from Xavier's Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Louisiana’s Coastal Health Panel – Moderated by Alex Woodward, writer for Gambit, panelists include Len Bahr, founding editor of LACoastPost; David Hammer, contributing writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune; Ann Rolfes, founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade; Drake Toulouse, blogger at Disenfranchised Citizen; and Bob Marshall, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the Times-Picayune.

New Orleans Food Writing Panel - Guests Peter Thriffley and Rene Louapre of Blackened Out and Offbeat Magazine will join Todd Price, author of A Frolic of My Own to discuss the eating out in New Orleans and writing about it, and the new generation of great online New Orleans food writers. Chefs and Restauranteurs: Green Goddess' Chris Debarr as well as Adolfo Garcia and Alex del Castillo.

Brass Bands Panel - featuring Lawrence Rawlins, band director of Roots of Music; Alejandro de los Rios, producer of the Brass Roots documentary; members of the TBC Brass Band Edward “Juicy” Jackson, Joe Maize and Sean Michael Roberts; moderated by writer Deborah Cotton; followed by a performance by the TBC Brass Band.

No more daily newsprint paper in new orleans

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/new-orleans-times-picayune-to-cut-staff-and-cease-daily-newspape/?hp

Also this fall, The Times-Picayune will begin publishing a more robust newspaper on a reduced schedule of Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays only.

Oh man, that really sucks.

At least their restaurant critc (and sometimes music critic) can do this I guess:

Times-Picayune restaurant critic Brett Anderson has been selected as a member of the Nieman Foundation Fellows Class for 2013. He is one of 24 journalists chosen, the Nieman Foundation announced Friday.

The Nieman Foundation administers the prestigious fellowship program, which allows accomplished and promising journalists a year of study at Harvard, with time to pursue individual areas of interest, along with integrated class work to enhance their expertise.

African-American New Orleans banker Alden McDonald has done what he can, but ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/why-new-orleans-black-residents-are-still-under-water-after-katrina.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-3&action=click&contentCollection=Magazine®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article

The city had a population of 455,000 before the storm, two-thirds of whom were black; by 2010 there were 24,000 fewer whites and 118,000 fewer blacks.

You could say Alden McDonald triumphed over adversity, too. Today he runs the country’s third-largest black-owned bank, according to the Federal Reserve. But despite his personal success, McDonald is still focused on the eastern half of that map that he marked up at our first meeting. There, the recovery is far from complete — and in some areas things are worse than before the storm. In this frustration, he represents what might be called the black Katrina narrative, a counterpoint to the jubilant accounts of Landrieu and other New Orleans boosters. This version of the story begins by noting that an African-American homeowner was more than three times more likely than a white one to live in a flooded part of town. Where Landrieu sees black and white coming together, many African-Americans recollect a different New Orleans: rifle-carrying sheriffs and police officers barricading a bridge out of an overwhelmed city because they didn’t want the largely black crowds walking through their predominantly white suburbs; a white congressman overheard saying that God had finally accomplished what others couldn’t by clearing out public housing; a prominent resident from the Uptown part of the city telling a Wall Street Journal reporter that in rebuilding, things would be ‘‘done in a completely different way, demographically, geographically and politically’’ — or he and his friends weren’t moving back.

Now there are still 100,000 fewer black residents living in New Orleans than at the time of Katrina. McDonald estimates that one-third of his friends have not returned, because their homes were destroyed. ‘‘I still have family members stuck in Houston, some cousins,’’ McDonald says. ‘‘They’re terribly homesick.’’ Only about 80 percent of the residents of New Orleans East, where a good portion of the city’s African-American middle class as well as a large share of the city’s black elite lived, have returned. In the Seventh Ward, he says, where he grew up, only about half of the homes are restored a decade after Katrina. ‘‘There was never a plan to bring people back home,’’ he says. ‘‘There was never a plan of any kind.’’