Louisiana
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David Helvarg sends a dispatch from the hurricane-ravaged South
David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, which originally published this article. He is also author of the forthcoming, revised Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America’s Ocean Wilderness (Sierra Club, 2006) and 50 Simple Ways to Save the Ocean (Inner Ocean, 2006). Thursday, 29 Sep 2005 NEW ORLEANS, La. The smell of New Orleans […]
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What New Orleans could look like the second time around
I heard that George Bush told New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin the city could be remade into “a shining example for the whole world.” If Bush did say that, it surely wasn’t an environmentally sound renaissance he had in mind. But that is precisely what is needed. Call it Eco New Orleans. It should encompass […]
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The environmental take on Hurricane Katrina
When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast, it stirred up not just gale-force winds and untold misery, but a host of difficult environmental questions. How did heedless coastal development exacerbate the hurricane’s toll? What’s behind the socio-economic disparity in environmental planning — and emergency response to environmental disasters? Did global warming make the storm […]
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Slow Katrina evacuation fits pattern of injustice during crises
Much of the world — including white America — has been shocked by the devastation in New Orleans, and by the ongoing failures it has exposed at every possible level of government. Even normally unflappable TV news anchors and politicians have been moved to outrage, asking why those left behind were mostly black, poor, disabled, […]
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Hurricane Katrina brings a foretaste of environmental disasters to come
If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story — the U.S. safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world — then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our […]
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Diamond chronicles how a small southern town made environmental history
When Margie Eugene-Richard won the Goldman Prize last year, it was a stunning public recognition of decades of struggle. Richard -- the first African-American to win the award, which some refer to as environmentalism's Nobel Prize -- had waged a 30-year campaign against Shell Chemicals with fellow residents of Diamond, La. Like the proverbial David, the African-American, working-class neighborhood took on a Goliath -- and won.
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Margie Eugene-Richard of Louisiana battled Shell on behalf of her neighborhood
Eugene-Richard. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. The Old Diamond neighborhood of Norco, in far southern Louisiana, sits between a Shell Chemicals plant and an oil refinery owned by a Shell joint venture. “We’re like the meat in the sandwich,” says Margie Eugene-Richard, 62, who grew up just 25 feet from the fenceline of the chemical plant. […]
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Forty
• percentage by which energy consumption in developing nations is expected to grow by 2010 • percentage of written prescriptions that are either based on or synthesized from natural compounds found in plants and animals • percentage of total paper used in Germany that goes toward packaging • percentage by which one can reduce pollution […]
