Control freaks, everywhere

[Ed]

What was done to New Orleans, and what was done to Zeitoun personally, were both in part outcomes of decision-making where control was a higher priority than good. Another way to look at this is that the decision-makers had a narrow set of prescribed goals that did not allow for looking at what the best outcome might be on a larger scale.

The design of the dams, levees, and canals on the Mississippi is all about protection and enhancement of constituent interests. It is an engineered solution to an prioritized list of requirements. Where environmental degradation has not been recognized as harming any constituent in the short term, it has been low, if even present, on the list. The result is a system that historically has done a pretty good job of protecting the built environment around the river (Katrina notwithstanding), but is rapidly degrading the Mississippi River Delta at the rate of an acre (roughly a football field) every hour, due to spewage of sediment, which formerly sustained the delta, out into the depths of the gulf. The levee failures have been blamed in part on the fact that New Orleans is sinking an average of over 1/4 inch per year - in some places, over an inch - largely from human causes like drainage of wetlands and pumping of groundwater. (Sea level rise adds another 1/8 of an inch per year.) Development, and maintenance and improvement of shipping channels, has trumped the literal sustenance of littoral and land.

In Zeitoun’s case, the overriding priority was reestablishment of government control, where the response was cobbled together with little consideration for other priorities – in the Danziger Bridge shootings, even without regard for life itself.

[Siobhan]

I hope you get to watch _Treme_ sometime. In the first episode, John Goodman (playing a Tulane U. prof) issues a long screed about the failures of the levee system even to protect the built environment. He speaks for many NOLA residents (via the filmmakers, of course) when he says that the rebuilding since Betsy in 1965 was totally inadequate. And then, of course, remember that the Army Corps of Engineers has historically pursued the levees-only policy in that city, which is also widely agreed to be a failure.

But I take your point: if sustainability insists that we think of "coupled human-natural systems," the levees were built to protect the human without regard for the natural. . .which, in the end, has come round to bite everyone, because it turns out that humans need those wetlands for protection, too. And, as you say, after this storm, the government placed control ahead of all other considerations: a result, in part, of history, as FEMA has been put under (or subordinated to) Homeland Security since 9/11. So sustainability requires a consideration of ecological concerns, political concerns, historical concerns. . .the WHOLE picture.