New Orleans.

On October 21st I left for a week-long AmeriCorps training session and service project in New Orleans.

I didn't take any photographs--I was too wrapped up in thoughts to remember my camera before we went out to the work site on Caluda Lane in St. Bernard Parish. I regret this oversight now, but at the time it made sense just to experience without the mediation of a lens and that sort of intent. I can see in my imagination the pictures I would have tried to make. The NCCC member named Hank that was in charge of our house; the pecan orchard down the road; the akita puppies that hounded us at lunch; the wall I helped build, and the roof truss that fell on my hand; the normal-looking suburban homes (small and low, a lot like those in Arlington), destroyed, with FEMA trailers parked in the yard--the one home with "KATRINA YOU WON" scrawled in spray paint across the front wall.

Jack Wilson from Operation New Hope (one of LISC Jacksonville's other CDCs) just sent this slide show of images. The photos from the work site are the ones worth paying attention to. I'm digging through Flickr to find more.

There's a lot to learn from New Orleans, positive as well as negative. The negative lessons might appear obvious, but deserve some attention. Just judging from the fact that we ardent AmeriCorps volunteers were building new homes in St. Bernard Parrish, I don't even think that the city itself is studying these lessons hard enough, and might be setting up for a repeat. You can see in Jack's pictures the mudline on the houses on Caluda Lane. It's a flood zone. After two days of moderate rainfall our worksites had ankle-deep standing water in places. We were told our houses were built above FEMA flood plain levels, and it was clear that what we were building was better off than the existing neighborhood (all the homes were previously built on-grade, ours were raised up about 5 feet).

But there is a ton of literature on the future of New Orleans, and the most rational of the thinking about it suggests that rebuilding in the lower parts of the city (the poorer, underserved parts), is unwise. Here are just a few articles I have read, in ascending order of academic density:
Slate.com
Geology.com
Geoscience World

Last Friday I had further occasion to think about this issue. The Florida Coastal School of Law held their annual Environmental Summit, and the topic was climate change and sea-level rise. Not surprisingly, New Orleans is often cited as an ominous example of things to come. The most sobering fact I reacquainted myself with at the summit was the city's rate of subsidence. Subsidence is like erosion, it's the ground leaching away and sinking. Down in the delta, the annual flooding of the Mississippi River used to counteract the subsidence, but since the river has been managed by levees and canals, silt-rich floodwaters no longer replenish the banks. That wouldn't alone increase the rate of subsidence all that much, but the extraction of resources such as oil, gas and groundwater from the earth below the region is also destabilizing it.

New Orleans is sinking two inches per decade.
Over the same period, sea level rise from thermal expansion of ocean water has increased (and the rate of increase has increased) at three times the background rate from the past century.

My friend from Chicago asked of our homebuilding efforts, "Are we just building sand castles at low tide?"

Positively speaking, the social center of New Orleans has an unbelievably charming built environment and relationship to live music. Two- or three-story buildings with porches above and shops below form sheltered walkways between restaurants, bookstores and bars. On Friday night every tiny club had a band playing old jazz songs. People dance, for real. It made me envious for Jacksonville. I really would like to see that sort of density of social interaction here. It doesn't have anything to do with amount of people. Our city is larger, population wise. It's an issue of history, architecture, and culture.

Maybe after the Good Ole Boy political corruptness reaches a certain apex it actually increases quality of life...Maybe it's the french. Maybe it's the river. Maybe it's just a confluence of interacting factors. I don't know.

Point is, I learned a lot.

One last link, this one to what sounds like an incredible act of theater that I wish I could drive over to witness. JCNI has an event this Saturday...we're catering an all-local luncheon at the UNF Ethics Center's Symposium on Climate Change. But if we weren't, I would be in NOLA watching this:

Waiting for Godot in the lower 9th ward.