Hartford: Safe in ivory tower, prof declares NOLA dead
Source: Hartford Courant
Here's another one of those supposed deep thinkers who just wants to lay it on the line. New Orleans as we know it is dead, he says. As dead as the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta. Harumph. Look at my Ph.d. framed nicely on my wall:
The brutal geological reality is that people of every color left New Orleans as climate-related refugees. I believe that the real reason New Orleans remains unfixed — without police and fire protection and with vacant hospitals — is because objective visionaries and smart money sees such rebuilding as a risky, if not wasteful war against nature.
The objective visonaries ... ah yes. So glad we're awash in objective visionaries. Here's more from Professor Harumph:
Of course most Americans would want to help. But perhaps the politicians need reminding that nearly 200 Alaska native villages exist on disappearing deltas and shorelines. In New Orleans, the soils are subsiding. In Newtok on the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta, the soils are melting. New Orleans is being flooded by the rising sea. Shishmaref on Alaska's northwest coast is being washed away.
Thanks for not only reminding us, but for checking your Almanac to get the spellings right. Impressive. Can I remind you that your state re-elected Joe Leiberman to the US Senate? That is as relevant to NOLA as Yukon-Kuskokwim's fate. Painting the flooding of NOLA with the deterministic brush of global warming — it's beyond our control, Mother Nature's wrath and all — misses the point that the flooding was (and is) very much in our control. Good levees would have controlled it. A little Dutch common sense and ingenuity would have controlled it.
Professor Harumph wants us to think that his willingness to write off large swaths of coastline because of the inevitability of global warming and the savvy of "objective visionaries" is intellectual integrity, when it's really just another lazy academic pontificating about stuff he only half understands. Boo hiss.
Comments
I think he's saying two main points--
1) sustainable living is living within one's environmental means. The environment is in constant flux and the cultural response (what people do) ought also be flexible, to adapt. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Rivers delta is a living biocultural system, for example.
2) ethically and morally, wouldn't barricading NOLA against environmental change in the delta be the same as barricading change in the YK delta? and therefore the billions of dollars required for either delta to rebuild the way it was, bad infrastructure and all, (rather than working with the change) come equally from everyone else?
Now, if the efforts were directed towards living *with* a delta system, the costs over the next 100 years would be considerably less and the resilient cultures even stronger. This isn't "writing off" the deltas and their people; it's preserving them.
NOLA is equally entitled to re-build bad design as YK. In fact, the Army Corps would love to fix our delta the same way they fixed yours over the decades. If we "re-build" one delta, then ethically "re-build" the other. We'll go first.
Posted by: mpb | July 7, 2007 11:45 AM
Thanks for your response. Perhaps you should have written the article. Your points are cogent and I don't disagree for the most part.
But the professor claims that the people of the Yukon delta aren't playing the race card when they emphatically are (check out the NYT article linked in the post above this one). The professor is at best ill-informed on the subject. His desire to strip away race and greed and other "secondary" issues in our understanding of the broken levees is horribly misguided. We need to understand all the elements of the problem, not just global warming, because, again, the floods of NOLA could have been prevented.
Rebuilding bad design, as you say, is not a great option. But the Dutch don't have bad design. Why do we have to?
Posted by: Bruce | July 7, 2007 10:18 PM