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.
My tomatoes have arrived--the first ones at least. Now is the sweetest time of the year. Is there anything better? Perhaps growing one's own, from seed. We cheated this year, going with plants from the garden store. Our neighbor still has no fruit, and he started from seed. 
