The Katrina essays

• “The Dutch appear to have achieved both a degree of safety and some measure of accomodation to nature—an achievement that seems unthinkable in the Mississippi Delta, at least in the short term. What differences in geography and history account for this discrepancy? The answer, in a nutshell, is threefold: scale, time, and water culture.” Cornelis Disco, Delta Blues


• “The tragedy of New Orleans (and of many other areas of the Gulf Coast) is not a watershed in American history because of the devastation and suffering, as horrible as they were, but because once and for all it leaves us without so much as a fig leaf to cover human conceit.” Martin Reuss, Searching for Sophocles on Bourbon Street.


• “The idea of museum collections built from disasters, natural or man-made, can be unsettling. Yet collections are the basis of everything that history museums do.” David Shayt, Artifacts of Disaster: Creating the Smithsonian’s Katrina Collection.


• Disasters outmuscle not only the invisible hands of capitalism but also the finest technologies arrayed by flesh and blood to control nature. How is it that we seem to learn so little from the past? Ari Kelman, Nature Bats Last.


• “When this photo on the cover and following page was taken in the spring of 1962 there was no other streetcar line in the world that ran through a setting as lush as St. Charles Avenue, and probably never had been. . . .” On the Cover: Robert Post, The Machine in the Garden District


• The lower Mississippi River region once offered an alluring prospect to the oil and chemical companies. Now the allure is diminishing. Craig E. Colten, The Rusting of the Chemical Belt


• “Land sinks. Water rises. Coastal Louisiana is losing ground to the ocean as fast as any region on Earth. . .” Todd Shallat, Holding Louisiana


• “This past August my husband and I evacuated New Orleans, the first time we had ever fled the city because of an approaching storm. . . Coming back home after Hurricane Katrina, I returned, in a sense, to the city of my great-grandmother.” Carolyn Kolb, Crescent City, Post-Apocalypse


• The 150-mile stretch of the lower Mississippi River between New Orleans to Baton Rouge is among the most toxic places in the United States and one of the cradles of the environmental justice movement. Now it is at a critical juncture. Barbara Allen, Cradle of a Revolution? The Industrial Transformation of Louisiana's Lower Mississippi River


• “What’s striking about Hurricane Katrina is that . . . everybody knew it was going to happen—sooner or later. Certainly anyone who’d lived in New Orleans or in Louisiana or on the Gulf Coast for very long knew.” Edward Constant, Certainties of Very Low Probability