Unless you’ve been living under a rock — and these days, we can’t say we’d blame you — you’ve probably put at least a smidgen of thought toward the fate of New Orleans. It’s a rare thing to reconstruct an American city from scratch (though we can think of a few more cities we’d put on the list). There are some who advocate letting bygones be bygones, allowing the name and character of The Big Easy to fade into days of yore, but most people support the eventual rebuilding of the city. The question is, how should it be done, and to what end? Grist thinks it should be called New-New Orleans, because that’s fun to say, but after that we’re stumped.

Instead of racking our comparatively small brains for answers, we turned to a collection of environmental, political, and academic leaders who have bright ideas. We asked them all the same question: What’s the one thing you’d most like to see occur as part of the rebuilding of New Orleans?

Their answers ranged from building green to building on barges, from processing with residents to procuring ponies. Read on for inspiration, add your thoughts in Gristmill, and then come back tomorrow — we’ll print a batch of new answers every day this week.

Christie Todd Whitman

There’s been such a deluge of money, resources, and technical expertise — I hope that local authorities take just a modicum of time to thoughtfully plan and apply smart-growth principles to the redevelopment effort. For starters, it’s quite clear that there’s been a lot of development in the wrong places — not just in low-lying neighborhoods, but also along the barrier islands and coastal wetlands that historically have dampened the impact of storm surges. Local and state officials should seriously consider declaring some of those areas off-limits to development as part of a long-term strategy to restore those natural barriers, and instead encourage more compact development in suitable areas to ensure that there’s no net loss of existing homes or potential for new construction.

How we plan and design those new communities is also critical. An obvious priority would be to avoid recreating past mistakes, such as concentrating poor families in just a few wards and isolating them from the greater prosperity of the region. I’m also concerned that we’re going to see vast areas of new sprawl development in the rush to rebuild — exactly the wrong type of development for a time when infrastructure dollars and buildable land are in short supply. Instead, we need compact “walking neighborhoods” that feature a mix of market-rate and affordable housing, convenient transportation choices, and easy access to jobs, medical services, and other daily needs. Smart planning and an open public process can deliver those outcomes. The future of so many families depends on it.

Christie Todd Whitman was the administrator of the U.S. EPA from 2001 to 2003 and co-chairs the national advisory council of Smart Growth America.

Ari Kelman

I suppose the right answer is that I hope poverty and racism — root rather than proximate causes of disaster — will be washed away in the outpouring of concern following Katrina. And while I’m stumping to become Miss America, I’d also like every child along the Gulf Coast to have a pony. A really friendly pony that never bites. And can fly.

Inappropriate humor aside, the truth is we’re already starting to forget Katrina. There’s a Supreme Court nominee to squabble over, indictments to ponder, and tears to shed for earthquake victims. Add to that the fact that New Orleans is among the most complicated urban ecosystems in the nation, and it becomes harder still to imagine that we’ll maintain our focus for the years it will take to rebuild the city.

It’s that last point, about the complexity of the urban fabric in New Orleans, that leads me to what I really hope will come out of this: people should stop trying to separate social and environmental issues as they rebuild. Cities are not simply human artifacts. Nor, of course, are they wholly natural. They’re both: networks of human and non-human intermingled, prone to feedback loops across the nature/culture divide.

So rebuild New Orleans on a more solid foundation: the understanding that it’s futile to separate cities into compartmentalized zones — people here, nature there. Such antiquated thinking left New Orleans vulnerable over time, and then under water. Now wring out the city and rebuild it, acknowledging that people must live together with nature. This might yield sustainable urban spaces and a kind of environmental justice. Failing that, ponies are really soft — and we can ride them out of town when disaster next strikes. Because it will, and if the past is prelude there won’t be any gas left for our cars.

Ari Kelman teaches history at the University of California-Davis. He is the author of A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans. His essays on Katrina have appeared in Slate, House and Garden, and the Christian Science Monitor, Baltimore Sun, and Sacramento Bee.

Na’Taki Osborne

My greatest hope for the rebuilding of New Orleans is for equity and justice. In the short term, assistance should be given to help low-income citizens and families attain affordable housing units.

In the long term, permanent, affordable housing must be developed so that all who desire to come back to New Orleans have the opportunity to do so. This long-term strategy should build on principles of mixed-income housing distributed equitably across New Orleans, and should go against policies that promote the concentration of poverty in areas “undesirable” to live in by some. Historically, African-Americans were isolated to the swampy, low-lying areas, while rich whites built on higher ground. All citizens, regardless of race and class, should be given equal opportunity to live in both the urban and suburban areas of New Orleans, in proximity to jobs and with an adequate transportation system to get from home to work, school, and other services. As the rebirth of the city begins, it is imperative that we learn from past mistakes, starting with reconnecting with nature and building New Orleans back in an ecologically sound manner that works with the forces of nature and not against them. Extensive environmental cleanup is needed immediately, and all neighborhoods must have parks and open space.

People of color and poor people should not be concentrated in proximity to a proliferation of toxic waste and other pollution-generating facilities, or vice versa. People displaced by Hurricane Katrina were suffering before the storm touched down and before the levee broke. They were living in poverty and pollution before this natural tragedy. This injustice must not be sustained.

Equality of economic opportunities is also paramount in terms of jobs and contracts connected to the redesign, rebuilding, and cleanup of the city. Jobs in all sectors must conform to the practice of giving people living wages for their work. And citizens must lead the planning process — all residents of New Orleans, from the Garden District to the Ninth Ward, deserve to and must be involved in transforming the rubble and remains to an economically vibrant, environmentally sustainable, healthy, livable community.

Na’Taki Osborne, who grew up in the area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge known as Cancer Alley, is the national leadership development coordinator at the National Wildlife Federation.

Jacques Leslie

With its vast size and overwhelming destructiveness, Katrina seemed to herald an unprecedented era of hydrological menace, but New Orleans’ story is distressingly old. Indeed, as I watched the city’s submersion and subsequent disarray, I felt as if I knew the plot, for I’d just finished writing a book about dams. Over little more than half a century, large dams have displaced between 40 million and 80 million people: a population that is often indigenous, usually poor, and invariably disregarded by authorities.

Both dams’ construction and levees’ collapse scatter victims from their homes — usually to unwanted land, where they go hungry, or to the fringes of cities, where they become day laborers and beggars. The dam resettlers’ loss is for the nation’s good, say the dam builders; New Orleans’ “underprivileged” inhabitants will be better off, says Barbara Bush.

In New Orleans, as with dam resettlement, only one course is just: make the victims the first beneficiaries of the recovery. Whatever jobs and contracts are offered, the uprooted get first crack at them. What companies flourish must support vital institutions such as hospitals and schools. The least that the victims deserve is a stake in the outcome: ask them what they want, and heed the answers.

Jacques Leslie has written for Harper’s, Mother Jones, and The New York Times Magazine, and is the author of Deep Water: The Epic Struggle Over Dams, Displaced People, and the Environment.

We asked environmental, political, and academic leaders from around the country about their hopes for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Here’s what some of them had to say. Be sure to check out the rest of this week’s contributions, and add your thoughts in Gristmill.

Monique Harden.

Nathalie Walker and Monique Harden

New Orleans needs to be rebuilt so as to narrow the gap between the haves and the have-nots, better integrate the city racially, and embrace our poor African-American residents who have given the city so much of its identity, including its food, its music, and its celebrated street life. But it will only happen if the planning, redevelopment, and rebuilding decision-making include, engage, and are fully informed by all residents, including our poor African-American residents.

Nathalie Walker.

Coalitions of groups focused on accomplishing precisely this goal have already been established, and could readily facilitate such critical engagement. Accordingly, the blue-ribbon rebuilding commissions established by both the mayor of New Orleans and the city council must be reformed immediately to include representatives from these coalitions. Further, a victims’ compensation fund similar to the fund established after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks must be established to assist the neediest in recovering from this devastating catastrophe.

New Orleans attorneys Nathalie Walker and Monique Harden are the founders of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm dedicated to defending and advancing the human right to a healthy environment.

Bob Wayland

We must recognize the importance of Louisiana’s wetlands — coastal marshes, swamps, bayous — and make ecological restoration an integral part of recovery plans. This is necessary not just because these precious resources contribute so much to the gulf economy and way of life, but because they can play a role in protecting lives and property from future storms.

The “hard” engineering of the lower Mississippi helped create a false sense of security relative to floodwaters, and at the same time contributed to damaging the “green infrastructure” that historically protected inland areas from wind and storm surge. The federal-state Coast 2050 plan, supported by the America’s Wetland initiative, was based on this realization. Coast 2050 will have to be retooled in light of ecological damages from Katrina, but that undertaking should have a high priority. Regrettably, the bill introduced by Louisiana’s senators as the “Katrina recovery package” gave short shrift to ecological recovery.

Bob Wayland is the former director of the U.S. EPA’s Office of Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds.

Matt Petersen

Meeting the needs of the poor and low-income communities of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is of fundamental importance. Low-income communities in coastal cities are most at risk from natural disasters that are exacerbated by climate change. Nearly 150 million Americans live on the coasts, where rapid development has overwhelmed wetlands and other natural protections against tidal storm surges, leaving cities and towns more vulnerable to storms and natural disasters than ever. New Orleans should be a wake-up call to the nation that the cost of inaction on climate change is far too high a price to pay for ignoring the growing threat to ourselves and future generations.

Rebuilding a greener, smarter New Orleans and Gulf Coast can be an example to the world and the nation that we are capable of making great strides in reducing our dependency on oil, decreasing energy use, combating global warming, and meeting the needs of our society’s most vulnerable individuals, neighborhoods, and communities.

Global Green has launched a “Healthy Homes, Smart Neighborhoods” initiative and is collaborating with local and national housing, environmental, urban, religious, and other organizations to create a campaign to ensure we build healthy, energy-efficient housing for families in need in the Gulf Coast area. To guide and support our efforts, we’ve also established an honorary task force that currently includes Julian Bond, Gen. Wesley Clark, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lee Hamilton.

Matt Petersen is the president and CEO of Global Green USA, which works with governments, industry, and individuals toward a sustainable future.

Klaus Jacob

Rebuilding a sustainable New Orleans can mean just one thing: Attach it to the rising sea, not to the sinking ground. This implies a floating city that rises and falls with the tides. If a rebuilt New Orleans were to be founded on the sinking ground, it would be doomed to fail — perhaps not within one or two generations, but just several generations into the future.

Measurements of local relative sea-level rise within New Orleans are hard to pin down. But an accurate measurement exists from a tide gauge on Grand Isle, La., due south of the city: 3.23 feet per century, based on data between 1947 and 1999. About two-thirds of this rate is due to compaction of the Mississippi Delta sediments, and one-third due to global sea-level rise, in part contributed by global warming and human greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate models indicate that rates of global sea-level rise may double, or perhaps even triple, by the end of this century. If these forecasts materialize, the local sea-level rise in the delta by the year 2100 would increase to about 4.3 to 5.4 feet per century, and to higher rates in later centuries. To hide a “grounded” city behind sea walls would mean that they need to get taller and wider with the times — an almost impossible engineering feat to sustain for more than, say, a century or two.

Hence, a viable long-term solution to have a sustainable New Orleans is to fix it to sea level. This means: build it on barges, engineered and anchored to withstand future hurricanes. A city that rises and sinks with storm surges. A city that floats and flourishes, rather than floods, flounders, and falters.

Klaus Jacob is a geophysicist by training who has worked on disaster-resilient urban design and disaster risk management. He is a scientist and adjunct professor at the Earth Institute of Columbia University.

We asked environmental, political, and academic leaders from around the country about their hopes for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Here’s what some of them had to say. Be sure to check out the rest of this week’s contributions, and add your thoughts in Gristmill.

Laurie David

From the moment Katrina hit the abnormally warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and turned the Category 1 storm into a Category 4, my hope was that this tragic event would be the moment in time that inspired the great American awakening: the “aha!” moment when everyone, including the current administration and naysayers, finally acknowledged that the globe is warming and humans are causing it.

It took only a few days before the first courageous connections between hurricanes and global warming were drawn, and then only a few more before Time magazine put out a powerful cover story: “Are We Making Hurricanes Worse? The Impact of Global Warming.” Good Morning America, ABC News, and CNN also filed extensive reports.

If anything positive can come from this disaster, it has to be a recognition that we are impacting our weather to such a degree that life as we know it is changing. Katrina must be the mother of all wake-up calls. As the country continues to dissect this natural disaster, they must also focus on what aspects of this disaster weren’t natural: It’s unnatural to allow a football field worth of wetlands to be lost every half hour for years. It’s unnatural to allow the warming of our oceans, and it is unnatural to be the only country on the planet not seriously addressing this global problem, despite the fact that we are the world’s biggest contributor to global-warming pollution.

Katrina has left us with an unbearable amount of human suffering and new environmental problems to deal with, and could ultimately end up being the biggest environmental disaster ever in the United States — but we must simultaneously deal with the larger issues, or risk the possibility that this storm will seem run-of-the-mill by mid-century.

Laurie David is a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council and founder of the Virtual March on Washington to Stop Global Warming.

Pegeen Hanrahan

The indelible images of human suffering in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina created a dramatic response from even ordinarily dispassionate observers. But for those who were actually left on rooftops, trapped in flooded homes, or herded to overcrowded shelters, the mental and emotional toll must be crushing. As the city works toward rebuilding, from the gracious historic districts to the poorest wards, a sense of self-determination and real public input into the process are critically important.

New Orleans and her citizens have endured horrific assaults, not only from nature, but also from government institutions, insensitive and ignorant critics, and unprepared public officials. A real opportunity to have a voice in how the city rebuilds would have a healing effect in reclaiming the community for the people who’ve made their lives there.

Once stabilized, the city should make every effort to allow the residents to design the recovery. Should the most flood-prone areas be reclaimed as created wetlands or water bodies? Should new affordable housing units be built above flood stage, with garages and other non-living spaces on the first floor? How can the city be prepared for an effective evacuation in future hurricane seasons? Well, I don’t know. But the citizens of New Orleans do. The city should hold a series of public forums, door-to-door and phone surveys, online questionnaires, and other opportunities for residents to have a meaningful voice in what happens from here. For citizens from all walks of life to have a respected say in the solution will be empowering, and will lead to better results, both physically and emotionally.

Environmental engineer Pegeen Hanrahan is the mayor of Gainesville, Fla., and a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program.

Richard Register

I have an “eco-city mapping system” that can reshape cities to harmonize with their local environments and our global future. I’d like to see it used. If it were, New Orleans would find and strengthen its most vital centers with more density and diversity. Like Native American cities along the Mississippi 500 years ago, much of it would be rebuilt on elevated platforms of fill. Levees don’t work. If people were smart enough to create cities acting like islands in floods 500 years ago, why not today?

The map would show us where to focus development — what to preserve and where to say, “OK nature, have your ways. The bayou can come back in these low places. We appreciate your biological, safety, and economic services.”

Skip the cars this time. They take up far too much room for a city built on fill. They are ruining the climate system and biodiversity of the whole planet. It has to be a pedestrian city aided by bicycles and streetcars.

Front and side yards? Gone with the cars and replaced by graceful compact architecture like San Francisco’s side-by-side high density. Several plazas would face out on the water. Steps and ramps down to the water would be artistic features in their own right. Some waterfront plazas and parks would flood in a hurricane surge — no harm done. Bayous would come back. There would be bicycle and foot paths and streetcar lines to the neighborhoods reconfigured as island villages in the bay and among the mangroves. Nice!

Richard Register is president of Ecocity Builders, Inc., an educational and research nonprofit based in the San Francisco Bay area.

Parris Glendening

The greatest danger facing New Orleans is that in the rush to rebuild, we will rebuild where it was, as it was.

If we practice business as usual, the rebuilding will be in areas that are certain to flood again, and we will repeat other old mistakes, such as segregating people by income and isolating them from jobs and prosperity in communities devoid of real hope. A different hope, a different vision, recognizes that some areas should not be rebuilt. Instead, let us imagine that these areas would be converted to a beautiful center core of green spaces, public places, and parks. Around this we could rebuild higher density, mixed use, smart-growth communities, essentially making it an Olmsted community of the 21st century. New Orleans could become the envy of the world as a fun, pedestrian-oriented, beautiful place.

To get there, we would need to compensate property owners for their losses; we’d have to revise building codes to strengthen existing structures and ensure the construction of new ones that can withstand minor flooding; and we would need to rewrite zoning ordinances to encourage compact communities. The whole process must be built on a true commitment to equity, fairness, and inclusion. For those who are saying we can’t afford high-quality redevelopment, I say that we can’t afford to spend billions of dollars to fuel the next natural, social, or economic disaster. Let’s do the right thing! Let Frederick Olmsted smile at the 21st century implementation of his vision!

Parris Glendening was the governor of Maryland from 1995 to 2003. He serves on the board of Smart Growth America and as president of its Smart Growth Leadership Institute.

Cassandra Carmichael

In the Biblical creation story, God created the Earth, a world of connections: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the plants and animals we rely on for life. The world is about relationships — between our human neighbors and between the other species with which we share this planet.

Connection is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of New Orleans. It is a city that is distinct in its culture and history, its food, its dialect, its people. But connection is what was on my heart as I returned to my hometown of New Orleans last week. As I spoke to local pastors and heard stories of loss and hope, I felt a deep bond.

While my connection is palpable, it may not be evident for others who have never set foot in bayou country. But the family trapped on the roof of their home by floodwaters is a member of our family. The dogs and cats wandering deserted streets are ours to care for. The toxic legacy that we have left behind, a result of our collective lifestyle choices, is ours to clean up. We have always been connected, one to another. No matter the economic divide or ethnic differences.

Scripture calls us to care for the world, for the “least of these.” How we move forward, how we treat our “neighbor” and God’s creation, will say how we honor our relationships and connections with each other and the world in which we live.

Cassandra Carmichael is the eco-justice program director for the National Council of Churches.

We asked environmental, political, and academic leaders from around the country about their hopes for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Here’s what some of them had to say. Be sure to check out the rest of this week’s contributions, and add your thoughts in Gristmill.

Don Chen

I hope federal, state, and local authorities can stop squabbling about who should have done what and when, and instead reform the misguided policies that made New Orleans so vulnerable to “natural” disasters in the first place. For example, thousands of people were living in flood-prone areas because for decades the federal government generously subsidized drainage of wetlands, highway construction to encourage development on former wetlands, and flood insurance to artificially shield settlers from the true risks of building there. The poor were concentrated in those low-lying areas because that’s where federally subsidized housing units were located, and white flight to sprawling parishes sharpened this segregation. In most cases, states and localities were willing partners. And ultimately, the region’s geographic area exploded despite losing population, exhibiting anemic job growth, and suffering from extreme poverty in its center. This type of sprawl has made New Orleans much more susceptible to disasters of all kinds.

It would be unwise to rebuild on such a rotten foundation. Instead, we should end costly subsidies for sprawl and restore those natural areas. We ought to build mixed-use, mixed-income residential areas that allow everyone to have equal access to opportunities. We also can’t afford to rebuild communities that are predicated on cheap energy, so new plans should feature green building construction, New Urban design, historic preservation, and convenient transportation choices. Achieving these goals will lead to a more prosperous, equitable, and environmentally sound rebirth of Greater New Orleans to create a greater New Orleans.

Don Chen is the director of Smart Growth America and serves on Grist‘s board of directors.

Jim Vallette

The soul of New Orleans could be lost forever unless historic injustices are reversed through the rebuilding process. The great diaspora of New Orleans must seize control with their hearts and minds.

With New Orleanians in charge, government may at last zealously prosecute the petrochemical companies that have long polluted this area, the officials who failed to protect the city’s citizens, and the police who joined in the brutality. Reconstruction money could shift from corporate cronies to a new kind of relief that is healthy. This involves rebuilding communities with environmentally friendly homes, powered by renewable energy, creating expansive green spaces in all neighborhoods, and diversifying the economy.

To get from here to there, a big challenge is convincing longtime residents to come back when it is safe to do so. A recent survey of Red Cross applicants found that 39 percent have little intention of ever returning; black residents are twice as likely as whites to stay away. Historic disenfranchisement is a key factor.

Of course, the Bush administration may have a different agenda: by keeping New Orleanians out of the process, the Machiavellian White House could drive a stake into the heart of the national African-American political movement.

No organization should take federal money until Washington ensures this fundamental right to participate and reinstates the environmental and labor laws that it conveniently waived. Those who care about justice should help ensure that the people of New Orleans, not the Bush-Cheney gang, are at the helm of reconstruction.

Jim Vallette is research director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network and a collaborator in the new Green Relief movement.

Robert Mittelstaedt

The one thing I’d most like to see occur as part of the New Orleans rebuilding is a rational discussion, on a national basis, of a broad range of options. As New Orleans is one of the oldest parts of the United States, we all want to preserve the city’s history, culture, and unique vitality, but it is fiscally irresponsible and physically unsafe to simply rebuild the lower-elevation portions of the city in place. This needs to be a national discussion because we will all pay, directly or indirectly, for the rebuilding and future disasters if we make mistakes now. This is a unique opportunity to do something important and different.

New Orleans native Robert Mittelstaedt is dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He co-wrote an op-ed on the rebuilding for the Arizona Republic.

Anne Rolfes

Let’s face it: New Orleans was inching toward destruction long before Katrina. We have prostituted ourselves to oil and gas and are poorer because of it.

But what of the New New Orleans, that shining city in the swamp?

How about a city that reckons with its prostituted position? Let’s wean ourselves off of oil by implementing what is old news in progressive communities but bold concepts in this town. What about bike lanes, mass transit, and San Francisco-like resolutions about green building and renewable energy? What about doing everything we can to make our city one that recognizes that our oil supply is finite, and that supplying that supply has threatened our city, our coast, and our very way of life? We can be a cautionary tale for all other “resource rich” (subtext: you’ll soon be poor) communities around the world.

The best stroke of all would be to remove ExxonMobil’s oil rig from the shark tank in the downtown aquarium. “Oil rigs help marine life,” reads the tank’s plaque. On second thought, maybe we can leave Exxon’s rig up as a relic, the way statues of Stalin are left standing so we can let our jaws drop at the myopic past.

Anne Rolfes is the founding director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental-justice organization focused on communities that neighbor Louisiana’s oil refineries and chemical plants.

Brad Guy

I would like to see the retention of architectural character, prevention of further waste and environmental impacts, and local rebuilding by local citizens with the creation of “builders’ yards” for the recovery and local reuse of the building materials from destroyed and damaged buildings in the region.

Those buildings that must be removed should be “deconstructed” to recover the maximum amount of reusable materials. In this manner a restorative economy is fostered, making use of existing local resources and labor. Builders’ yards are a concept coined by Christopher Alexander as a means by which citizens are empowered to create and use local sources of building materials in the creation of their homes.

This recovery, reuse, and rebuilding process can be achieved with the resources and cooperation of federal agencies such as FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the EPA; the participation of state and local governments; and the participation of groups such as Habitat for Humanity, AmeriCorps*NCCC, Design Corps, university design/build programs, the historic preservation community, the national building deconstruction and materials reuse industry, and the “green” architecture and construction community. It means the empowerment of communities and resource efficiency as local sustainable economics.

Brad Guy is president of the Building Materials Reuse Association and director of operations for the Hamer Center for Community Design at Penn State University.

We asked environmental, political, and academic leaders from around the country about their hopes for the rebuilding of New Orleans. Here’s what some of them had to say. Be sure to check out the rest of this week’s contributions, and add your thoughts in Gristmill.

Photo: Terri Fensel.

Wilma Subra

Before the city is rebuilt, there is a need to remove the toxic chemical-contaminated sediments that were deposited by the storm surge. The sediments contain toxic heavy metals and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons in excess of the Environmental Protection Agency Residential Standards, and community members are coming in contact with the contaminated sediments. These contaminated sediments are now being dispersed into the air and are creating an additional unacceptable health risk to community members returning to the area, as well as response personnel. Allowing community members to return to the city, to live with the contaminated sediments in their yards and houses and breathe the contaminated dust, is not an acceptable environmental condition for rebuilding the city.

Wilma Subra is president and founder of Subra Company, an environmental consulting firm. She is also a chemist and member of the Leadership Committee of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.

Jim DiPeso

The Soviet Union’s 1957 Sputnik launch shocked a self-satisfied America. Khrushchev had caught us with our pants down, and we knew it. Yet out of that low moment came a new sense of resolve and national purpose.

Hurricane Katrina was an act of nature, not a chortling adversary out to show us up. But the effect has been the same. We feel ill-served by our leaders. We feel vulnerable. The flooding of New Orleans was a taste of the blowback that awaits from a twitchy climate that we are carelessly overloading with carbon waste.

The rebuilding of New Orleans can be this generation’s Sputnik moment. It can be the symbolic start of a new national purpose: an energy transformation.

The interrelated imperatives of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, building security, and giving hope to the impoverished argue for phasing out wasteful consumption of depletable hydrocarbons and phasing in a clean, efficient energy economy that can support prosperity without stirring up international conflicts or taking reckless chances with the climate.

Congressional leaders argue for drilling more oil wells outside hurricane country. That’s the wrong lesson from Katrina. The glory days of easy oil are over. Even oilmen know it. Chevron’s CEO said this year that “we are experiencing the convergence of geological difficulty with geopolitical instability.”

The right lesson from Katrina is to rediscover conservative virtues that D.C.’s machine politicians have forgotten — thrift, prudence, and diversifying assets — and to build a safer, more reliable energy economy founded on those time-honored traditions.

Jim DiPeso is the policy director for REP America, the national grassroots organization of Republicans for Environmental Protection.

Photo: Environmental Leadership Program.

Felicia Davis

It is a lift to have this opportunity to respond to such a provocative and timely question. There are many things that I would like to see occur as part of the New Orleans rebuilding. I shall leave it to my colleagues to address all of the green building, sustainable energy, walkable neighborhoods, urban gardens, green space, and greener visions.

I pray for the resurrection of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice as a state-of-the-art incubator, economic engine, and anchor for Dillard and Xavier Universities and the larger black community in greater New Orleans and the global diaspora. I envision an eco-building that has space for all sorts of enterprise, research, and activities; a center poised at the nexus between “town and gown” that links the academic community to local redevelopment.

In order for this to happen, there will need to be new alliances among mainstream environmental advocates, progressive funders, and the environmental-justice networks. This center should attract leading experts from around the globe with a focus on environmental equity. The goal is to create a well-endowed environmental-justice think tank, information resource center, and urban demonstration center. There is no more perfect place on the planet to locate a center that will move aggressively to analyze such issues as climate change, public transportation, pollution, and economic development from the perspective of the environment and the impact upon black America and people of color around the globe.

Felicia Davis is executive director of the Benjamin E. Mays National Education Resource Center, an educational advocacy organization committed to universal access to technology, global education, and sustainable development.

John Norquist

New Orleans is almost empty of people. It needs its people back soon or it will wither. Can they come back? Will they come back? To what will they return? These questions need answers — and FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers are not set up to give quick answers. New Orleans and its citizens need to know where to build in order to know what to build. So if the Army Corps, the EPA, and the State of Louisiana are going to eventually go the Dutch route and make the lowlands of NOLA dry and secure enough to support rebuilding, it would be good to know that soon while billions of federal Katrina money is around.

My guess is that Americans want to surrender to the charms of New Orleans and want it rebuilt. The city of streetcars and desire would lose touch with reality if it were reduced to a Garden District-French Quarter tourist zone that echoes Branson, Mo. The next challenge is to rebuild New Orleans’ low-price neighborhoods. With so many houses to build, building costs will need to be kept down. New designs for modular shotgun and other traditional local housing types could help narrow the gap. Fast permitting and urban coding could also accelerate the rebuild. New Orleans is one of America’s places of the heart. Just as hearts need blood, cities need people.

John Norquist is the president and CEO of Congress for the New Urbanism.

Alex Wilson

I’d like to see a comprehensive planning process that involves leading-edge thinkers in sustainable design from around the country, along with at least an equal number of participants from New Orleans and the surrounding area. For any progressive measures to be adopted in the rebuilding of New Orleans, it is essential that there be full buy-in by residents. If we simply let outsiders determine the future of New Orleans, we will almost certainly see a dramatic gentrification of the area. Look to the model of North Charleston, S.C. and the Noisette Project for a vision of how this can happen.

Beyond the planning effort itself, I’d like to see locally owned businesses set up to deconstruct damaged buildings and salvage materials that can be reused. A vision of sustainability has to include the residents, who have long been underemployed with far too many living in poverty. Let’s help residents set up cooperatively owned businesses that can make money in the deconstruction and demolition that has to occur. Through this process, we will build up a bank of environmentally friendly building materials that can reduce the ecological footprint of the replacement buildings.

Alex Wilson is president of BuildingGreen, Inc. in Brattleboro, Vt., and executive editor of the Environmental Building News, which recently published a 10-point plan for the sustainable redevelopment of New Orleans.