City of Nature – New Orleans’ blessing; New Orleans’ curse.
By Ari Kelman
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005, at 3:59 PM PT
[I found this article through Talking Points Memo. Ari Kelman, a friend and colleague of Josh Marshall wrote a book about New Orleans. His article is concise and so relevant right now.]
http://www.slate.com/id/2125346/nav/tap2/
[For those tired of reading, there is a link to an audio version in an MP3 download on Slate.com.]
New Orleans’ dysfunctional relationship with its environment may make it the nation’s most improbable metropolis. It is flood prone. It is cursed with a fertile disease environment. It is located along a well-worn pathway that tropical storms travel from the Atlantic to the nation’s interior. From this perspective, New Orleans has earned all the scorn being heaped upon it–the city is a misguided urban project, a fool’s errand, a disaster waiting to happen.
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But such insults miss why most American cities are built in the first place: to do business. In 1718, when the French first settled New Orleans, the city’s earliest European inhabitants saw riches inscribed by the hand of God into the landscape of the vast Mississippi valley. The Mississippi river system takes the shape of a huge funnel, covering nearly two-thirds of the United States from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. The funnel’s spout lies at the river’s outlet at the Gulf of Mexico, less than 100 miles downstream from New Orleans. In an era before railways, good highways, and long before air travel, much of the interior of the nation’s commerce flowed along the Mississippi, fronting New Orleans. The river system’s inexorable downstream current swept cotton, grain, sugar, and an array of other commodities to New Orleans’ door. Because of the region’s geography and topography, many 19th-century observers believed that God–working through nature, His favorite medium–would see to it that anyone shrewd enough to build and live in New Orleans would be made rich.
So, people built. Some lived. A lucky few even got rich. Many others, usually poor residents, died. They were carried away in floods. They were battered by catastrophic storms. They were snuffed out by yellow fever epidemics, like the great scourge of 1853 that killed nearly 10,000 people in the city. Over time, New Orleans developed a divided relationship with the environment: Nature, as embodied by the Mississippi, promised a bright future. But it also brought water, wind, and pathogens, elements of a fickle environment that in the past as now turned cruelly chaotic.
Ari Kelman ends with:
Most of the city’s residents will be saved, but its site cannot be airlifted to Texas. That was yesterday, each day that goes by the number of ‘saved’ is decimated.
His book is A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans
Since I have not read the book and can’t recommend it, here is an Amazon review of the book:
Interesting But Uneven, August 4, 2003
Reviewer: A reader
This is a book by an academic for academics. That being said, this topic ached to be addressed. Kelman has done his homework concerning the first two centuries of New Orleans’ relationship with the Mississippi. The third (1918-present) seems to stop with the defeat of the notorious riverfront expressway. The river is likely (according to some scientists) to shift away from New Orleans, leaving the riverfront a muddy trickle. Kelman is silent on this. The degree of pollution and the efforts to clean up the lower part of the river go unsung as well. The last parts of the book have a rushed feeling, as if the expansive early history sapped the author’s resources and there was little left worth saying. Lively it’s not, but the book is important and a good reference work for further research.
