John McQuaid

This week’s TPM Cafe Book Club discussion on Cheryl Wagner’s New Orleans memoir Plenty of Suck to Go Around was interesting, and shows that like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, post-Katrina New Orleans is a living, changing, endlessly complex phenomenon not easily reduced to a single idea.

But the common theme is the resilience of people like those Cheryl depicts in the book – including herself – who slog onward, rebuilding their homes, dealing with broken bureaucracies, and sometimes having fun, because, well, this is still New Orleans.

In fact, New Orleans culture seems to have turned out to be more resilient than its own residents may have anticipated. “Suck” does an amusing job of sorting through the overlapping hierarchies of property damage and dedication: people with homes in sodden Mid-City naturally feel some jealousy toward residents of unflooded Uptown neighborhoods, but are also proud of enduring a struggle the Uptown folks can never know. Some people in Cheryl’s cohort of friends and acquaintances take the opportunity to alight for other funky, granola-friendly towns like Austin and Portland, while others double down on the Crescent City. Out of this churn, as Harry Shearer pointed out, New Orleans has seen a renaissance of civic engagement. People actually get up in the morning and think about how to improve community they live in – they have to! Louisiana residents have always taken an outsized interest in politics, but far less in the functioning of government and making things work. Katrina has altered that seemingly unalterable feature of New Orleans civic life.

This is a good thing, obviously, and not just for New Orleans. The city and its environs may be cultural and geographical outliers, but its predicament isn’t really so unique. It’s just on an accelerated timetable. Most of us are accustomed to a degree of environmental stability: summers are hot, winters cold. But that’s starting to change, and as the changes spread we’re going to be seeing more big storms, more floods – and more man-made systems failing. This on top of broader alterations in patterns of rainfall and drought that will affect food production, water consumption. In other words, things are already changing, and those changes will accelerate beyond the capacity of governments to keep pace. As everybody could see from Day 1 in New Orleans, the nation as a whole moves very slowly to address these kinds of threats. We’re likely to stumble from one disaster to another for quite a while.

I think the federal government needs to get out in front of these problems – and New Orleans should be (or ought to have been) the ideal opportunity to do so. But if that’s not going to happen, the kinds of resourcefulness and community-building we see in Cheryl’s book will provide a good model of its own. There’s no one-size-fits all solution for a lot of the problems we face, and many solutions will be local, and flexible. That doesn’t excuse the nation from shirking the challenges of climate change, but the example of New Orleans does offer some rays of hope.

Sorry for the long interregnum between postings. I got caught up in, you know, actual paying work for a while. And as others have discovered, Twitter tends to supplant blogging. Even before the recent interruption, I found I was blogging less, and my posts were typically longer. That is, they required me to actually make an argument, something you can’t really do effectively on Twitter. I hope there’s a felicitous balance in there somewhere.

Here are a couple of pointers. This week I’m participating in a TPM Cafe Book Club discussion of Cheryl Wagner’s post-Katrina memoir, Plenty of Suck to Go Around. It’s a very good read of the absolutely crazy aftermath of the storm from the street level of house-gutting, subletting, jobless craziness that so many in New Orleans endured and survived. As always, the question for me is, how is New Orleans going to survive a century of global warming without serious hurricane protection, and why can’t the U.S. government actually make that happen? All the valiant struggles of the past four years are at risk.

Last week I had a second piece up on Yale Environment 360 about mountaintop removal coal mining, this one focusing on what science tells us about the ecological effects of blowing up mountains. It may seem obvious that the effects would be devastating, but there are a number of regulatory fig leaves here. Mining operations are supposed to restore mined-out sites to the “approximate original contour” and revegetate them. Under optimal circumstances, they rebuild the mountain and plant trees. But even this responsible approach, which is rare, can’t undo the damage to hydrology and riverine ecosystems that have evolved over millions of years.

The science puts Obama, who has staked his repuation on following science, not politics, in an awkward spot. The EPA and White House want to broker compromises with mining companies to ease the impacts of mountaintop removal – the politically pragmatic approach. But the science is telling them that won’t do much good.