Louisiana
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A new exhibit lets New Orleans residents tell their own stories
In the beginning of July, I arrived in New Orleans for an internship at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. I met with Anne Rolfes, the coordinator and one of the founders of the nonprofit health and environmental-justice organization, and we discussed the work I would be doing. I was to organize a photo exhibit displaying images […]
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The Army Corps of Engineers is the real culprit behind New Orleans’ devastation
The fate of this navigation channel on the Louisiana coast, shown in 1970 (left) and 2001, offered a glimpse of things to come. Photos: White House OMB If an unsafe building collapsed and killed 1,000 people, we wouldn’t blame the building’s manager, even if he bungled his evacuation plan, or its maintenance crew, even if […]
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A controversial New Orleans landfill is set to close, but eco-disaster still looms
The logistics of cleaning up New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are almost beyond comprehension. Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality says some 15,000 houses are slated to be torn down, and demolition is the likely fate of 80,000 more. As a result, DEQ estimates, the city will ultimately truck off and dispose of […]
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Meet Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice
Robert Bullard says he was “drafted” into environmental justice while working as an environmental sociologist in Houston in the late 1970s. His work there on the siting of garbage dumps in black neighborhoods identified systematic patterns of injustice. The book that Bullard eventually wrote about that work, 1990’s Dumping in Dixie, is widely regarded as […]
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Portraits of loss in the wake of Katrina
On a misty November morning in 2005, I was photographing in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward neighborhood a few blocks from where one of the levees had failed 10 weeks earlier. Squatting in a driveway in foul-smelling mud, adjusting the knobs on my camera, I stood up to stretch my back and noticed a man sitting […]
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In which we ask a mess of smart people what should happen in New Orleans
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 […]
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An eye on this year’s record-setting hurricane season
1 — rank of Hurricane Wilma in Atlantic storm intensity on record1 12 — Atlantic hurricanes so far this season, tying a record set in 19692 21 — named storms so far this season, tying a record set in 19332 145 — wind speed of Wilma at press time, in miles per hour3 140 — […]
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Post-Katrina floodwaters are dirty, but so are other U.S. waterways
Last month, “toxic gumbo” entered the American lexicon with the speed and force of the floodwaters it describes. A LexisNexis search of major U.S. publications doesn’t return a single hit for the phrase in the year before Hurricane Katrina. But in the 30 days after the storm’s landfall, 66 articles contained the phrase. Measure twice, […]
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Umbra on rebuilding the Gulf Coast
Dear Umbra, There seem to be plenty of good organizations accepting dollars to help the people of the Gulf Coast. But as The Nature Conservancy has said, “While current attention is rightfully focused on the immediate human toll and suffering of this tragedy, the ecological damage has yet to be assessed.” The rebuilding effort, it […]