Anti-environmental groups are out in full force now in a second wave of the Hurricane Katrina disaster blame game (it's kind of sad that folks of any political persuasion feel the need to hold people responsible for chaos and disaster of this proportion). A tiny "article" was posted at the LibertyMatters web site on September 16, 2005. This group is a bit edgy, to say the least. The "article" refers to two different other “articles” from FrontPageMagazine.com which seems to be another rather edgy and interesting news source, but a bit right of Rush Limbaugh (don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against the Right, I just don't understand where they're coming from).
The National Review really got the ball rolling with their piece by John Berlau dated September 8, 2005. If it's true that the Justice Department is doing some Green head-hunting these day, then we may really have a problem. Who's watching the Justice Department and the FBI? The Homeland Security folks?
Salon.com did a nice little piece on the whole rigamarole so far. They end their piece writing:
"The Justice Department won't comment on the e-mail, but the Sierra Club isn't amused. 'Why are they trying to smear us like this?' David Bookbinder, a Sierra Club attorney, asked.
Let's hope the blame game gets played out this week in the mainstream media. It will be interesting to see how much more finger pointing there is at enviros. The truth is, as far as I understand it, there were two major alternatives for flood management reviewed in the 1970s. Shoring up levees was one. The other was to divert floods up the Mississippi to create a new delta in Lake Borgne.
“The first proposal reroutes the Mississippi River into Breton Sound, abandoning the river's present bird-foot delta at its mouth. The new path would build a new delta into the sound, with sediment drifting north into the eroding marshes surrounding Lake Borgne. As the existing delta's sediments are reworked by wave action, a new concave barrier island will be formed, adding protection to the south of the city.
The first, the so-called "left turn" proposal, has been opposed by shipping interests concerned about the time it would take to complete such a project and its potential disruption of business.”
That's an interesting little dichotomy there: one proposal rejected by business interests, the other rejected by environmentalists. Of course, the courts were the final arbiter for this second proposal...which is democracy at work, if you ask me.
All that said, in the past few weeks I've been recommending to anyone who will listen that they read the “Atchafalaya” essay in John McPhee’s 1989 book, The Control of Nature. It is a mind blowingly prescient social history of southern Louisiana and the attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the Mississippi so that people can live in the region. McPhee writes:
“Nowhere is New Orleans higher than the river’s natural bank. Underprivileged people live in the lower elevations, and always have. The rich—by the river—occupy the highest ground. In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp. The Garden District and its environs are locally known as uptown.”
When I first read this piece back in the early ‘90s, it really freaked me out (I’ve never been to New Orleans). Basically what they’ve been doing in the region since the beginning of the 17th century is camping out in the middle of the Mississippi. The region in one way or another has been flooded out dozens of times. They are basically ringing walls around cities to protect them from the river.
"In the nineteen fifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country stratight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The canal is known as Mr. Go, and shipiing has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years [that would be forty years now], is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh [read wetlands] will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inces of addtional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an interstate that jumps over the walls.
'The coast is sinking out of sight,' Oliver Houck has said. 'We've reversed Mother Nature.' Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north." --John McPhee, The Control of Nature, 1990, Noonday Press edition, pp. 62-63.
Last week's New Yorker "Talk of the Town" section, has published a lengthier excerpt from the book.
The implications of what McPhee has written, and others as well, would indicate that New Orleans is really not supposed to be sitting in the middle of the river; that, perhaps, as they look to rebuild the city, there should at least be a few rational public discussions about moving the whole community to higher ground. Otherwise, it seems like this kind of thing is going to happen again...and again...
Finally, I'd like someone to point me in the direction of city planning programs at major universities watching all of this unfold. This has to be one of the most profound educational opportunities ever conceived for city and regional planning students--and the rest of us.
The National Review really got the ball rolling with their piece by John Berlau dated September 8, 2005. If it's true that the Justice Department is doing some Green head-hunting these day, then we may really have a problem. Who's watching the Justice Department and the FBI? The Homeland Security folks?
Salon.com did a nice little piece on the whole rigamarole so far. They end their piece writing:
"The Justice Department won't comment on the e-mail, but the Sierra Club isn't amused. 'Why are they trying to smear us like this?' David Bookbinder, a Sierra Club attorney, asked.
We don't know if any of the local U.S. attorneys have provided the Justice Department with what it's hoping to find, but the lawsuit [by environmental groups] the National Review described isn't going to do the trick. As the Clarion-Ledger explains, that lawsuit concerned levees along the Mississippi River. 'The levees that broke causing New Orleans to flood weren't Mississippi River levees,' the paper says. 'They were levees that protected the city from Lake Pontchartrain levees on the other side of the city.'
Keep looking, Alberto."
Let's hope the blame game gets played out this week in the mainstream media. It will be interesting to see how much more finger pointing there is at enviros. The truth is, as far as I understand it, there were two major alternatives for flood management reviewed in the 1970s. Shoring up levees was one. The other was to divert floods up the Mississippi to create a new delta in Lake Borgne.
“The first proposal reroutes the Mississippi River into Breton Sound, abandoning the river's present bird-foot delta at its mouth. The new path would build a new delta into the sound, with sediment drifting north into the eroding marshes surrounding Lake Borgne. As the existing delta's sediments are reworked by wave action, a new concave barrier island will be formed, adding protection to the south of the city.
The first, the so-called "left turn" proposal, has been opposed by shipping interests concerned about the time it would take to complete such a project and its potential disruption of business.”
That's an interesting little dichotomy there: one proposal rejected by business interests, the other rejected by environmentalists. Of course, the courts were the final arbiter for this second proposal...which is democracy at work, if you ask me.
All that said, in the past few weeks I've been recommending to anyone who will listen that they read the “Atchafalaya” essay in John McPhee’s 1989 book, The Control of Nature. It is a mind blowingly prescient social history of southern Louisiana and the attempts by the Army Corps of Engineers to hold back the Mississippi so that people can live in the region. McPhee writes:
“Nowhere is New Orleans higher than the river’s natural bank. Underprivileged people live in the lower elevations, and always have. The rich—by the river—occupy the highest ground. In New Orleans, income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp. The Garden District and its environs are locally known as uptown.”
When I first read this piece back in the early ‘90s, it really freaked me out (I’ve never been to New Orleans). Basically what they’ve been doing in the region since the beginning of the 17th century is camping out in the middle of the Mississippi. The region in one way or another has been flooded out dozens of times. They are basically ringing walls around cities to protect them from the river.
"In the nineteen fifties, after Louisiana had been made nervous by the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Corps of Engineers built the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, a shipping canal that saves forty miles by traversing marsh country stratight from New Orleans to the Gulf. The canal is known as Mr. Go, and shipiing has largely ignored it. Mr. Go, having eroded laterally for twenty-five years [that would be forty years now], is as much as three times its original width. It has devastated twenty-four thousand acres of wetlands, replacing them with open water. A mile of marsh [read wetlands] will reduce a coastal-storm-surge wave by about one inch. Where fifty miles of marsh are gone, fifty inces of addtional water will inevitably surge. The Corps has been obliged to deal with this fact by completing the ring of levees around New Orleans, thus creating New Avignon, a walled medieval city accessed by an interstate that jumps over the walls.
'The coast is sinking out of sight,' Oliver Houck has said. 'We've reversed Mother Nature.' Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north." --John McPhee, The Control of Nature, 1990, Noonday Press edition, pp. 62-63.
Last week's New Yorker "Talk of the Town" section, has published a lengthier excerpt from the book.
The implications of what McPhee has written, and others as well, would indicate that New Orleans is really not supposed to be sitting in the middle of the river; that, perhaps, as they look to rebuild the city, there should at least be a few rational public discussions about moving the whole community to higher ground. Otherwise, it seems like this kind of thing is going to happen again...and again...
Finally, I'd like someone to point me in the direction of city planning programs at major universities watching all of this unfold. This has to be one of the most profound educational opportunities ever conceived for city and regional planning students--and the rest of us.
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