Made Possible By The Puffin Foundation
Thank you, beautiful people at Puffin for helping me make this Elegy to New Orleans into a bronze thing and not a wax thing. The plan is to make a bronze memorial for each city we lose worldwide to climate change. Hopefully they will increase in size--this is disappointingly puny compared to how important New Orleans is culturally and historically...but you have to start somewhere.
Look forward to more pictures in a few weeks.
posted by fisher6000 at 7:58 AM
2 Comments:
Jamie,
I understand that the levees were designed and built poorly, but I disagree that New Orleans has nothing to do with climate change.
New Orleans is an important city to look at for many reasons:
*LA is losing solid ground at a very rapid rate because of climate change.
*Much of NO is, like Amsterdam (another city I am researching right now), below sea level and the sea level is rising.
*Katrina and Rita are part of a larger trend. As the ocean continues to warm, there will be more large hurricanes, hurricane season will last longer, and will move further up the coast.
Unnecessary devastation is worth remembering. Hurricane season is right around the corner again.
I don't say this or do this to pick on one place. We are all in the same pot of heating water. Cat 5 hurricanes in New York will be just as devastating, and they are pretty much inevitable at this point.
Hey Jaime, you may not be dead yet, and the efforts in NO to come back are impressive, but NO is a victim of things beyond the control of its citizens. In the scientific community it is common knowledge that under the best circumstances there will be no NO in a 100 to 200 years. Global warming is not only fueling more hurricanes of more ferocity, it is also speading up erosion, which is causing the Mississippi delta to sink faster. Efforts to prevent short term loss, such as levees, actually speed up the larger process. Building better levees will quicken the sinking, lowering the levees and leaving the city vulnerable to hurricanes again.
If we're going to survive our follies we will have to think longer term and differently.
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