Harvard University Press Blog

On the Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

August 29 is the fifteenth anniversary of when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. In his new, definitive history, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz shows how the decisions that caused the disaster extend across the twentieth century. Here is an excerpt.

On Sept. 29, 1915, at the muddy end of the Mississippi’s farthest reach into the Gulf of Mexico, 100 miles down river from New Orleans, an unnamed hurricane made landfall. An anemometer recorded wind gusts of 140 miles per hour there, at the town of Burrwood, La., where on easier days several hundred members of the Army Corps of Engineers lived in orderly cottages and worked to keep the shipping canal at the river’s mouth clear of sediment.

As the storm moved upriver, the barometer at Tulane University plummeted to 28.10 inches. The rain gauge filled with 8.36 inches of precipitation in 21 hours. Even in a region accustomed to hurricanes, these were extraordinary measurements. Isaac Cline, the chief meteorologist at the United States Weather Bureau in New Orleans, reported that the storm was “the most intense hurricane of which we have record in the history of the Mexican Gulf coast, and probably in the United States.”

On their own, these data reveal little about how the storm might have mattered to people, or how they might have responded to it. These precise metrics of wind speed, rainfall, and barometric pressure do not trace the shape of life in places that seem, repeatedly, to come under assault from the forces of nature. We need different tools to gauge those times when coincidences of earth, wind, and water upset the course of human events in ways so overwhelming that we name them with a word whose basic meaning suggests that the entire universe is out of joint: disaster.

Consider that during the 1915 hurricane, across the state of Louisiana, 275 people died. Property damage estimates ran to $12 million ($280 million in 2015 dollars). Upriver from Burrwood, only four houses remained standing in the town called Empire. East of New Orleans, in St. Bernard Parish, the settlement of Saint Malo was washed from the map entirely. A foot of water remained in parts of New Orleans for five days.

Nonetheless, once the storm passed, many New Orleanians celebrated. “Storm proof!” a newspaper proclaimed. The mayor quickly rejected outside offers of aid. Surveying the event a month later, the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board, the agency charged with protecting the city from floods, concluded that its new drainage system had passed a defining test. “It is safe to say,” its report asserted, “that no city anywhere in the world could have withstood these conditions with less damage and less inconvenience than has New Orleans.” The report reasoned that the recent extreme occurrence of wind and rain “renders more remote the probability of a repetition of any of these things in the early future.”

It was a curious logic in a city that had seen 92 hurricanes or tropical storms since its European colonial founding in 1718. Despite this history, the Sewerage and Water Board believed that even if another big storm came, New Orleans would be safe. The report’s authors reflected on the storm’s “lessons” this way: “there is no reason why this city and its surrounding country should not continue, even more successfully than heretofore, [its] developments in all directions.” The experience of the 1915 hurricane affirmed the consensus among engineers and investors, city planners and politicians, home builders and home buyers, that New Orleans should grow.

The city they created became one of the most celebrated places in the world. “Ain’t no city like the one I’m from!” the women in the Original Pinettes Brass Band sang a century later. New Orleans’s admirers lauded it as “The Land of Dreams,” “The Big Easy,” “The City that Care Forgot,” “America’s Most Interesting City,” and “the soul of America.” With its jazz, Mardi Gras, and other iconic contributions to world culture, more than any other place in America, New Orleans called to mind creativity, cosmopolitanism, and love of life.

But today, New Orleans also calls to mind catastrophe. The city drowned when its levee system collapsed on Aug. 29, 2005, killing hundreds of people, destroying thousands of homes, and precipitating not only one of the most horrific moments in modern American history, but offering an emblem for the idea of disaster itself: Katrina. The response to the 1915 storm thus cast a century-long shadow, because the new neighborhoods developed after that storm experienced the worst flooding in 2005.

More than any other single factor, including the race or class of its inhabitants, the age of a building best predicted how it would fare in 2005. Tracing the outline of the Katrina flood reveals the shape of New Orleans as it stood nine decades earlier: most houses built before 1915 did not flood, but most houses built after the Sewerage and Water Board’s 1915 call for further growth did.

Usually, we imagine disasters as exceptions. We describe them as external attacks, ahistorical acts of God, blows from without. That is why most accounts of Katrina begin when the levees broke and conclude not long after.

But these stories offer a denuded sense of what happened, why, or what might have prevented the catastrophe. Somebody had to build the levees before they could break.

I begin the story of Katrina in 1915 in order to pursue a different idea: that disasters come from within. Disasters are less discrete events than they are contingent processes. Seemingly acute incidents, like the largely forgotten 1915 hurricane, live on as the lessons they teach, the decisions they prompt, and the accommodations they oblige. Their causes and consequences stretch across much longer periods of time and space than we commonly imagine. Seeing disasters in history, and as history, demonstrates that the places we live, and the disasters that imperil them, are at once artifacts of state policy, cultural imagination, economic order, and environmental possibility.

And yet, if understanding history usually demands drawing connections between seemingly disparate dots, trying to make sense of what happened in Louisiana after Aug. 29, 2005, also poses the opposite problem, because the hurricane called Katrina did not cause many of the effects commonly attributed to it.

After the storm passed, New Orleans police officers shot and killed unarmed citizens. The Federal Emergency Management Agency gave flood victims trailers laced with formaldehyde. The New Orleans City Council voted to demolish the city’s public housing apartments. The Louisiana State Legislature voted to transform the city’s public school system into a confederacy of charter schools. Congress voted to fund the largest housing recovery program in United States history; the program appropriated money to homeowners but not to renters. New Orleans police officers arrested musicians for leading jazz funerals without permits, while violent crime plagued the city.

Louisiana State University shut down New Orleans’s public Charity Hospital, while rates of mental illness surged. The Army Corps of Engineers encircled the city with a new levee system, while the wetlands beyond the walls continued to erode and the city itself continued to sink. A decade after the storm, New Orleans’s population had fallen from 484,674 to 390,711. Of the people missing, the vast majority—nearly 92,000 people— were African American. We have come to refer to this sequence of events as “Katrina,” but for none of these effects was the hurricane the proximate cause. The flood line thus tells one important story, but it is not the only story that matters.

After the flood receded, policymakers reapportioned the challenges the water had posed. Legislators designed recovery programs that favored white people over African American people, wealthy people over poor people, and people who owned homes over people who rented them. These policies reinforced existing inequalities. And they often undermined what the many Louisianians who opposed them argued were essential facts of life: the bonds of family, the solidarity of community, notions of political legitimacy, feelings of cultural belonging, and a sense of moral order.

The etymology of the word disaster refers to stars out of alignment; but if the changes in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina seemed to some to proceed with the force of destiny, it is well to remember, as Shakespeare cautioned, “The fault . . . is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Humans and Nature, Hopelessly Entangled

Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.

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Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”

Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.

The Origins of the American Antiquities Act

Citing “abuses of power by previous administrations,” President Trump last week signed an order directing the Interior Department to review national monuments created under the American Antiquities Act since 1996. The “Presidential Order on the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act” calls for the Secretary of the Interior to consider the appropriate classification of landmarks, structures, and objects, the process by which designations were made, the effects of designations, the concerns of State, tribal, and local government affected by designations, and “the requirements and original objectives of the Act.” Those original objectives were recently outlined by historian Samuel Redman in Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, which traces how museums in the United States collected, researched, and exhibited human remains, starting around the time of the Civil War and stretching deep into the twentieth century. In the adapted excerpt below, Redman describes how the lawless looting of human remains led to the passage of the American Antiquities Act in 1906, an act that transformed the practice of archaeology in North America and had broad implications for environmental and historical preservation in the American West.

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Well before the end of the nineteenth century, serious researchers had come to a collective understanding: significant discoveries of human remains were managed poorly on a national scale. In 1887, Washington Matthews of the U.S. Army took over an expedition for the legendary anthropologist and adventurer Frank Hamilton Cushing after Cushing fell ill. Matthews was horrified to observe the state of important human remains littered throughout the American West. One account notes, “[Matthews] found that no attention had been paid to the collection or preservation of human bones, which were extremely fragile, crumbling to dust upon a touch, and which had been thrown about and trampled under foot by curious visitors, so that but little remained of value from the work which had been previously done.” Matthews took for granted the importance of certain remains, knowing even better than most anthropologists of his era the intellectual desires for skeletons—especially those of American Indians—for comparative anatomy or racial science. Since the majority of Anglo-Americans accepted the idea that the American Indian was, in fact, vanishing, it is unsurprising that Matthews was horrified to find naturally decaying skeletons—bones upended and exposed by looters—left to dust outside the protection of museum walls.

Other scientists, too, had grown concerned about looting from historic sites around the country, specifically those in the American West. Rediscovering striking archaeological sites in the American Southwest caused a stir both in the academic community and with writers who wrote for popular audiences. The territory of the United States, many were starting to realize, had a deep and rich history extending centuries before European contact. New discoveries in the American West suddenly seemed important to the growing investigation into ancient history in the Americas.

By the middle of the 1890s, newspaper editorials started to echo professional calls for the preservation of antiquities. An editorial appearing in the New York Herald in 1896 argued that “ignorant relic hunters” were clearly to blame for the destruction of antiquities and that only congressional action could save rapidly vanishing sites. The article urgently informed readers, “All these invaluable possessions are fast disappearing, simply for lack of proper legislation to protect them.” As proof, a growing tourist market had created a demand for ancient artifacts and works of art, which were easily bought and sold throughout the American West. If the government failed to act, the editorial warned, American heritage, in the form of “our heirlooms from the American aborigines,” would be unstudied and forever lost.

The mission of collecting human remains both synchronized with and actually advanced the arguments of those who were lobbying for the American Antiquities Act. Advocates in favor of legislating burial mounds, cliff dwellings, and other discoveries believed to possess historical significance on public lands represented museums in New York and Washington, DC, as well as anthropologists writing from the field. The chorus was strong enough to push Congress to finally pass the American Antiquities Act of 1906, which ultimately was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt.

More than a generation before the passing of the American Antiquities Act, looters, amateur archaeologists, and tourists started ravaging sites of ancient human occupation in the American Southwest. The market for antiquities formed a series of steady streams for museums in the United States. Artifacts in private collections were frequently donated to museums (later generations often failed to possess the esoteric drive for collecting mummies or skulls for display above the fireplace). With the rediscovery of Mesa Verde—a vast and complex series of stone structures in Colorado—the Wetherill brothers marked the most prominent of a series of finds in the late nineteenth-century American West. Major discoveries at spectacular places like Mesa Verde, which soon became a national park, became examples that punctuated the countless other smaller incidents of the removal and sale of artifacts—including human remains—occurring at the same time in the United States.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

Deepwater Horizon's Parable of Risk

The big-budget Hollywood take on the 2010 explosion of the offshore drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon opens today. Directed by Peter Berg and featuring Mark Wahlberg, the film arrives as a star-driven disaster movie, suspensefully depicting events that included the deaths of eleven men, the destruction of a half-billion-dollar drilling platform, and the worst human-made ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history.

As is frequently the case with big productions, where the film ended up isn’t where it was always headed, and initial director J. C. Chandor had a different vision for the story before being replaced over “creative differences” with the studio. Chandor’s plan was apparently to tell the story from the perspective of “everyone that was on the rig,” with an ensemble cast of over one hundred people. It’s worth noting that, according to a new analysis of the disaster by two senior systems engineers, Chandor’s version was on the right track.

Earl Boebert and James Blossom use a systems model to investigate what happened at the Macondo well, focusing on the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures. From their book, Deepwater Horizon: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster:

A system is a collection of components developed more or less independently—plus the people who operate them. Two things make it a system: it has an intended purpose, and it exhibits what systems engineers call emergent properties. An emergent property is something that arises from the interaction between components rather than from the behavior of a single one. Emergent properties are things like safety, security, and reliability. They are typically important and hard to quantify.

Emergent properties suggest the possibility of emergent events: events that result from a combination of decisions, actions, and attributes of a system’s components, rather than from a single act or from the failure of a single piece of equipment. The Horizon disaster was the very model of an emergent event.

A systems analysis resists the tendency to focus on a single cause, an urge so common, and so misleading, that it has a name: “root cause seduction.” That seduction, write Boebert and Blossom, “is typically at the heart of efforts to assign blame or liability rather than prevent future accidents.”

The Fragile Framework

In preparation for the Paris climate talks, comics artist, educator, and Unflattening author Nick Sousanis contributed a comic to a special issue of the journal Nature. Titled The Fragile Framework and co-authored with longtime climate writer Richard Monastersky, the comic examines the 25-year quest for a global climate treaty.

As the work brings readers through the disappointments of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the shortcomings of the subsequently-enacted Kyoto Protocol, and the failure of the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations, the complicated politics give way to the devastating realities of a warming planet.

The comic, the first panels of which are below, is available for download, will be printed in Nature, and was slated for distribution to attendees of the Paris talks, which began earlier today.

The Sickened Earth and Sky

There’s a strange sort of dovetail connecting the first-person account of a shaman from the Brazilian Amazon with an attempt by a French maven of science studies to taxonomize “modern” ways of being. The latter—Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence—is a project of diplomacy inspired by a clear need to reconcile the “plurality of truth conditions” that leads the world away from consensus on issues as critical as climate change. The former—The Falling Sky, by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert—details for Latour’s “moderns” a way of being that grows ever more threatened by that lack of consensus.

Kopenawa, the shaman, has become the face of the Yanomami people of Brazil, but his advocacy benefits indigenous cultures everywhere facing cultural repression, environmental devastation, and deaths resulting from epidemics and violence. In The Falling Sky Kopenawa offers his personal story interwoven with a history of his people and their cosmo-ecological thought, amounting in the end to an immersion so complete as to be deeply unsettling for readers who understand themselves to be the intended recipients of its warnings:

What the white people call the whole world is being tainted because of the factories that make all their merchandise, their machines, and their motors. Though the sky and the earth are vast, their fumes eventually spread in every direction, and all are affected: humans, game, and the forest. It is true. Even the trees are sick from it. Having become ghost, they lose their leaves, they dry up and break all by themselves. The fish also die from it in the rivers’ soiled waters. The white people will make the earth and the sky sick with the smoke from their minerals, oil, bombs, and atomic things. Then the winds and the storms will enter into a ghost state.

[…]

When the white people tear dangerous minerals out of the depths of the earth, our breath becomes too short and we die very quickly. We do not simply get sick like long ago when we were alone in the forest. This time, all our flesh and even our ghosts are soiled by the xawara epidemic smoke that burns us. This is why our dead shaman elders are angry and want to protect us. If the breath of life of all of our people dies out, the forest will become empty and silent. Our ghosts will then go to join all those who live on the sky’s back, already in very large numbers. The sky, which is as sick from the white people’s fumes as we are, will start moaning and begin to break apart. All the orphan spirits of the last shamans will chop it up with their axes. In a rage, they will throw its broken pieces on the earth to avenge their dead fathers. One by one they will cut all its points of support, and it will collapse from end to end. For this time there won’t be a single shaman left to hold it up. It will truly be terrifying! The back of the sky bears a forest as vast as ours, and its enormous weight will brutally crush us all. The entire ground on which we walk will be carried away into the underworld where our ghosts will become aõpatari ancestors in their turn. We will perish before we even notice. No one will have the time to scream or cry. The angry orphan xapiri will also smash the sun, the moon, and the stars. Then the sky will remain dark for all time.

Here’s Kopenawa introducing his message for the non-Indians:

 

At our website we’ve excerpted passages of The Falling Sky that address some of the many threats facing indigenous people. If any single person’s account could further the diplomacy Latour means to facilitate, The Falling Sky may well be it.

When Slow Violence Sprints

In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon joins eco-criticism and postcolonial studies to call our attention to forms of violence visited on the world’s most vulnerable populations at paces too slow to overcome the willful blindness of those benefiting from the runaway capitalism that’s most often at fault. The very environment is the medium for the infliction of much slow violence—climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills—and, as Nixon shows, its victims are pioneering new forms of environmental justice work in their resistance. We’ve seen some such activism in response to the destruction wrought by Typhoon Haiyan, so we invited Nixon to help us understand these moments when slow violence suddenly sprints.

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Q: In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, you call for greater awareness of “violence that occurs gradually and out of sight,” so delayed and dispersed that it is usually not viewed as violence at all. Can you explain why climate change is so central to your conception of slow violence?

Climate change involves outsourcing violence on such a vast scale—temporal outsourcing and geographical outsourcing. It’s the ultimate form of incremental violence as it is shredding our planet’s life-sustaining envelope. Climate change can be mitigated only through a commitment—an ethical, political and imaginative commitment—to safeguarding people and other life forms that are remote from us in time and space. Such a commitment requires that we deeply value life thirty, fifty, one hundred, one thousand years from now. Countering slow violence requires reimagining responsibility over longer time frames.

As a sequel to Slow Violence, I have begun work on a book on the Anthropocene which raises the stakes of the planetary impacts of human actions, including but not restricted to climate change. The premise of the Anthropocene is by now familiar: that for the first time in Earth’s history a sentient species, Homo sapiens, has had a geomorphic impact. What does it mean to reimagine humanity as not merely a historical agent but a force powerful enough to transform the Earth’s very strata? How might asking that question reframe our understanding of human agency and human responsibility not only towards our own species, but toward the whole planet? If the advent of the Anthropocene involves layered forms of slow violence, climate change is a critical indicator of our alarming, often reckless morphological powers.

Excavating the Bay of Bengal

The historian Daniel Richter’s Before the Revolution is a centuries-deep excavation of the multiple pasts of the land that became the United States. “Excavation” is Richter’s own term, a metaphor that guides the book and offers a fruitful way of imagining the lineage of a land. “The American Revolution,” he explains, “submerged earlier strata of society, culture, and politics, but those ancient worlds remain beneath the surface to mold the nation’s current contours.” He describes these remaining traces, these temporal palimpsests, as “layered pasts,” the new always a product of the old, which itself must be understood in order to fully know the present.

In his own exciting new work of Indian Ocean history, Crossing the Bay of Bengal, Sunil Amrith cites Richter’s figurative geology in presenting centuries of forgotten interconnection that can help us better to understand our modern age, in which the lines drawn between cultures, states, and peoples are tested in ways that reveal their artifice. In laying bare the ever perforated barriers between Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia—today’s names for the lands whose coasts ring the Bay of Bengal—Amrith also highlights the “limitations of the artificial distinctions between economic, political, cultural, and environmental history—and of those between South Asian and Southeast Asian history.” Crossing the Bay of Bengal is, then, a work of history with implications as transformative for historiography as for our understanding of the past.

And also for our understanding of the present:

A history that seemed of little relevance in the heyday of postcolonial nation building now seems urgent again. In two key ways, the region is at the forefront of processes that are shaping Asia’s future. First, the Bay of Bengal is now, as it was in the eighteenth century, an arena for strategic competition between rising powers. Today those powers are Asian rather than European: India and China both eye the Bay of Bengal as a crucial frontier in their competition over energy resources, shipping lanes, and cultural influence. Second, the Bay of Bengal’s littoral stands at the front line of Asia’s experience of climate change: its densely populated coastal zone is home to nearly half a billion people. In this new context, the Bay of Bengal’s history can be a source of insight and explanation. A historical perspective can explain the potential for and the obstacles to greater regional integration. It can show us that many of the region’s current environmental challenges are the (often unintended) outcome of earlier movements of capital and labor. It can show us, too, that informal networks of mobility have always outstripped official attempts to control them—and that these old paths assume new salience today, as climate change threatens to displace millions of people. The Bay of Bengal’s history is, finally, an archive of cultural resources that might help us to reimagine solidarity across distance and to comprehend planetary change on a regional, even human scale.

In the video below, Amrith describes “the furies of nature and the fortunes of migrants” that his book presents.

 

You can read more about Crossing the Bay of Bengal in the New York Times Book Review.