New Orleans and Old Naples

It’s not Katrina’s fault. New Orleans survived the hurricane relatively intact. The current disaster is manmade. More later. But first an historical note on ecological disasters.

Southern Italy is notoriously poor and underdeveloped. Many communities are continually fighting epidemics of yesteryear, like cholera. Global trade is a rumor; wealth creation is a bizarre notion.

Southern Italy, also called the Mezzogiorno, is one of Europe’s backwaters, but unlike other underdeveloped districts of the EU, not much is changing. Ireland, Europe’s erstwhile poorhouse, is now among the richest countries in the world. Spain, a dictatorship until 1978 (the same year as the Iranian Revolution), is now prosperous but for a few quarters. Even Greece successfully pulled off the 2004 Olympics.

The Mezzogiorno, on the other hand remains poor, corrupt, and isolated. It shouldn’t be this way: the South of Italy stands in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and is thus immediately at the nexus between the Middle East and Europe. Unfortunately, history is once again bypassing southern Italy. Today the real crossroads of the Middle East and Europe are London, Paris and Rotterdam.

It all started long ago, as Roman infrastructures failed at the beginning of the dark ages. When coal became harder to get, the urbanites of the southern Italian peninsula stripped bare the hillside forests for fuel. The land could no longer absorb winter’s heavy rains, and flashfloods washed the soil away.

Without soil, crop failures ensued, which in turn led to famines and emigration. Since the educated and the strong are the ones most likely to avail themselves of the option to relocate, the poor and the weak were left behind – albeit without control of the land, as feudal princes became absentee landlords.

Without natural or cultural wealth, the world began to detour around the Mezzogiorno. Down through the centuries countless movements have arisen to uplift the Italian South, but few projects touch the heart of the problem: the Mezzogiorno’s poverty is in the first instance an ecological matter, paired with a political failure to reform. But that doesn’t solve the immediate problem: when people are hungry, undereducated and poor, planting trees doesn’t help. They need food. But in the long run, restoration may be the only option that will take.

New Orleans is our Mezzogiorno: a man-made ecological disaster with humanitarian consequences. The entire city is below sea level because the land is sinking. Sitting astride the mouth of North America’s largest river, New Orleans should naturally be flooded nearly every year.

The floods play an important role in the ecosystem, dumping thousands of tons of silt onto the land. New Orleans below ground is a living geological history of the middle of the United States.

Unfortunately, our society has not learned to live with floods, preferring instead to fight them off with dams and dikes. The Mississippi River’s deposits of silt are currently washing out into the Gulf of Mexico. And the city, absent continual deposits of new soil, is gradually settling. Currently a few feet below sea level and several feet below the level of the Mississippi River, the city has been unsustainable for quite some time. This problem has not been a secret.

Hurricane Katrina came and went on Monday morning. It caused a lot of wind damage, but the storm surge was not as bad as it could have been. Monday night the city breathed a sigh of relief. New Orleans had been spared; Biloxi had been hit harder.

Relief was short-lived, however, as the storm surge on the ocean overwhelmed New Orleans’ pumps early Tuesday. No longer able to keep Lake Pontchartrain (actually, a bay of the Gulf of Mexico) on out of the city, the levee gave way, flooding those parts of the city lying below sea level.

Entire neighborhoods are now submerged. Currently close to a half million are homeless, and the situation is getting worse. Hurricane Katrina will get the blame for overwhelming the levees, but the real culprits for the flooding are the very same levees: the walls keeping the sea out also allow the land to sink further below sea level. This was not a natural disaster, but a human disaster and a natural correction.

The only sustainable solution for New Orleans is to learn to become a water city like Venice, or to relocate entirely. If it doesn’t happen now, it will happen later – after more loss of life. But just like in Southern Italy, when people are drowning, it doesn’t help anyone to talk about the valuable two inches of silt the city is getting. Ultimately, man-made or not, this is a human disaster. And just like in medieval Italy, the poor will bear the brunt of the cost, while the rich and educated will simply move tohigher ground.

Home Sweet Construction

We've been out of house and home for a month now, because of a botched remodelling job to the upstairs apartment. The project ultimately engulfed the entire building, sending us into hotels.

The contractors have lied to us repeatedly about the duration of the project - basically promising work they had no intention of doing, simply because telling us what they thought we wanted to hear would get us out of their hair. It didn't work, because that's not how we operate.

But the project has also given us a taste of what the poor go through on a regular basis. The poor cannot appeal to an authority, because the entire system is in place to protect the propertied, not the unpropertied. The poor are often in poor health, because they can't access healthy food. We found the same - when you simply can't access a refrigerator, or a kitchen, you are stuck with the high-chemical pre-packaged foods available at the 24/7 convenience store. Such food also costs more.

Overall, this last month has been an education in how it feels to be helpless and without rights. We haven't truly been helpless, and we haven't truly been poor, but our eyes have been opened.

Bowl of Cherries

Summer means Cherries. Nothing in the world tastes better. I discover them new every year, having forgotten about these little bites of paradise in the intervening
eleven months. It's easy to forget about cherries, because they don't keep. Canned and frozen cherries are awful, whereas cranberries do perfectly well in a freezer.

But precisely because of this storage instability, cherries mark high summer like no other fruit. Peaches on roadside stands may provide a challenge to cherries' title, but cherries taste so good they make you happy.

When I was a kid, we had some friends with dozens of cherry trees, and we used to climb them on lazy summer days, reclining on shady branches, and eating cherries to our hearts' content. Every cherry I each today puts me back in those trees.

Happy July!

Cross-Cultural Bird Watching

Last week I heard an incredible bit of insight into the spiritual dynamic of crossing cultures, and "home". At a commissioning ceremony for new missionaries, an older, retired missionary gave the new class some tips and pointers.

"When you get to your new homes," he said, "watch birds."

When one moves to a new country, and lands in a new culture, beauty will come in unexpected packages. One's ability to prosper in that new land will hinge in part on opening those packages. Birds are part of the natural environment, and are thus less important for a sense of home than the cultural environment, but important nonetheless. They also teach us about the cultural environment.

For one thing, in the international, jet-setting world, people are so abstracted from their natural surroundings that every place is no place. It's hard to gain a sence of place when the economy revolves around a globalized everywhere. But locals still live there. They often have a work face and a home face, and sometimes they can't wait till the end of the day when they can be themselves again. When we only get to know a place through the locals' work faces, we miss out on the best that place has to offer.

For another, watching birds teaches us about the seasons and times of one's new home. We get to know our own hearts, and our own homes, better by watching a new place.

Update on Allied's Bike Path

Update on my post from May 20 ("Allied Gets a Bike Path"): A number of commuters using the Southwest Bike Path through the Allied Drive neighborhood have recently been attacked by some local teenage punks. No surprise here, because school has just ended for the summer. None of this changes my original point: Allied Drive is an isolated neighborhood, and most of the bike path's users are white commuters passing through. Predictably, the police are responding by taking care of the commuters - they've promised increased attention to the bike path, which means less attention given to the rest of the neighborhood.

Allied Drive needs police protection far more than the commuters migrating between tony neighborhoods to the south and decent jobs to the north.

Bounty

Perhaps Wisconsin's greatest natural gift to the human experience is its stunning sequence of the seasons. No other habit will make one sink roots into the cultural soil of this place than keeping a close watch on the minute changes of life throughout the year. It's not just for the food that upper Midwesterners love to garden; it's the celebration of life's cyles - the hope of spring, the bounty of summer, the riches of maturity, and the inevitability of decline. Gardens teach us all these things, and more. Gardens teach us about the place we're living in.

Spring has returned to Wisconsin. Some trees are more advanced, but here is a bud on a magnolia tree. I recently met someone newly returned from Zimbabwe, where he had lived for several years. He said he certainly loved the lushness of tropical Africa, with the huge flowers and crazy birds, but there was something different about springtime in northern climes, where plants and animals return after a lengthy absence. Africa provides objectively more beautiful flowers than Wisconsin, but Wisconsin provides that special delight known as spring. The farther north you go, the more precious spring becomes, because winter in harsher.

So now it is spring in Wisconsin. We've had hot days and snowy days in the last two weeks, but winter has finallly given up the ghost. And that is a delight indeed.

It's a Justice Issue

The Washington Post is writing on evangelical environmentalists, of which I consider myself one, as part of their efforts to understand these strange critters called evangelicals, who’ve occupied Washington, D.C. After biting on an old chestnut, that the world is all going to be consumed upon Christ’s second coming, the Post profiles several new ecological approaches within evangelicalism, from mercury in the environment, to global warming.

The trick, the article claims, to enlisting evangelical efforts in ecology, is billing the issues in the language of family values. Pollution is a family value, because it affects children’s health. Likewise global warming, because it affects our grandchildren.

Let’s be honest: altruism won’t save the world. People will not serve the common good for metaphysical reasons. The trick for ecologists is to convince people that the common good is also the immediate good. Hence pitching to family values. The trouble lies in the boundaries to family values, as currently defined in our civil discourse. When we say family values, we mean nuclear families, and we mean privacy, not community. We mean the nuclear family’s capacity to protect its moral and physical environment.

It’s an inherently individualistic approach, and can become addictive for the impatient activist. But the family values approach to recruiting evangelicals into ecology can stunt their eventual participation.

One of evangelical’s best qualities is their orientation toward truth. They believe in truth and stick to biblical truth like glue. Significantly, they are also quite willing to change their opinions on issues, once convinced of the biblical stance on the matter. Consider justice. Evangelicals spent a century on the outside of the major justice issues, because they were convinced that God cared about people’s souls, not their temporal predicaments.

But recent years have seen dramatic changes, as evangelicals have reread their Bibles and seen God’s mandate for justice. Fairly rapidly they’ve gotten over their qualms about “liberalism” and have become leaders in several causes, including Darfur in the Sudan, human trafficking, and AIDS.

Most major ecological-social problems occur in the developing world and in poor neighborhoods of the wealthy countries. (The picture above is of a car wash in Nigeria, taken by a friend. People are washing their cars right into the creek.) These affairs are notoriously difficult to connect to everyday life. In the case of the Nigerian car wash, for example, why should I be concerned
about that polluted creek?

If ecologists truly care to add evangelicals to their ranks, they’ll need a different approach than family values. Convince evangelicals that ecology is a justice issue, and you’ll get longer-term and broader involvement.

Ecology is not a family value per se; but both ecology and family are profoundly biblical values.

Winter Wonderland

Winter is at high tide in Madison. After last week's seven inches, this place is beautiful. I went out snowshoeing in a greenbelt south of town, and saw red-tailed hawks and whitetail deer.

It's tempting, when it's really cold and windy out, to spend the whole day indoors. But we really need to push ourselves to taste the season, and not just for the physical stimulation. Showshoeing is good for one's circulation, but seeking out beauty in a numbingly cold day is good for the soul. When the weather gets bad - and the weather gets very, very bad in these parts - and one hasn't learned how to live and laugh with the season, one could easily grow bitter about life in Wisconsin.

When my family moved here, while I was in high school, I was unhappy about the prospect. "Wisconsin?!" I said, "there's nothing to do in Wisconsin." My dad told me something that has changed my life: "When we get to Wisconsin," he said, "You're going to find people living there, who've lived there for a while. Most of them have had the option to move away, but they've chosen to stay.

"Your job is to find out why."

I've now been here for twelve years. My parents eventually had the option to move away, back to Idaho, but I've remained, trying to answer my dad's question. Why do people live here? The sight of that red-tail, floating across a winter wonderland, is part of the answer. It's just a small answer to the question of land, culture and belonging.

Religion Kills

According to a church in Atlanta, “Religion Kills.” That’s the message they’ve emblazoned on t-shirts for sale on their website.

But this is a church, after all. They have pastors and Bibles, and they preach about Jesus Christ. If that’s not religion, we’re merely quibbling over semantics. "Religion is death,” the reasoning must go, “and we’re about life. Therefore we must not be affiliated with religion.”

The folks at GetReligion quote the NY Times, which ran a profile of the church:

Revolution is one of several thousand alternative ministries that have emerged in the last decade, meeting in warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs, private homes or other spaces, in a generational rumble to rebrand the faith outside of what we think of as church.

So far so good. With clean-cut preachers and non-offensive worship services, the evangelical subculture in the United States is inaccessible to many down-and-outers. Revolution and similar churches provide that change. But then it gets ugly:

To travel among them is to feel returned to the alternative-rock scene of 15 years ago, just before Nirvana and Lollapalooza put it on the map. Instead of criticizing major record labels, these ministries criticize megachurches; instead of flattening the status of the rock star, they flatten the status of the pastor.

It's always a losing proposition to define yourself negatively – by what you aren’t. Revolution is a case in point. They're more afraid of looking like a “religion” than they are of spiritual immaturity. With their intentionally offensive “religion kills” campaign, they pronounce a radical gulf between themselves and the mainstream church. They are angered by the church, and with good reason: the church provides no home for these skater-punks.

But while it’s fine and good to give to the disenfranchised a Jesus who looks like them, it sure appears Jesus’ message of hope for the broken has taken a back seat to peer acceptance by those outside the church. After all, reconciliation and communion with the (embarrassingly conventional) Church would be “selling out.” In this twisted gospel, street credibility supersedes actual spiritual healing. And the appearance of freedom prevails over true freedom, because true power lies not in individual assertion, but in loving your enemies: just ask Martin Luther King.

Why does this matter? This is a blog about Home. Home is a place, but it’s also a state of belonging.

Revolution is preaching a gospel of individualism – a faith of alone. There is no belonging in their message, save in a metaphysical, “Jesus-is-my-home” sort of way.

But the gospel is not a story of individuals. It is a story of a community - one with dysfunctions, contradictions and major quarrels. God’s love, somehow, miraculously, manifests itself through this messed-up medium. Part of the miracle of salvation is the very existence of a community of eternal love and reconciliation. There is real peace, real well-being, real wholeness – in a word, shalom – in this message.

But the “good news” proclaimed by Revolution is partial good news: Yes, Jesus loves you, but you’re still alone. And your best hope at community remains the community you came from. You certainly don’t want to turn to the church for a home.

And the Revolutionaries are left with the same ghosts they came in with. They can’t grow up, and they’re not challenged to reconcile. It’s self-segregation and it’s ultimately unsustainable. After all, if we aren’t in community – if we don’t have a home - our souls will die.