Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Link to New Orleans

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New Orlean’s daily newspaper The Times-Picayune is now publishing out of Baton Rouge including onto the internet, see http://www.nola.com/ .

This newspaper has a weblog: http://www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/.

Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog has a post about the situation in New Orleans and links to some bloggers writing from, and about, the situation in New Orleans:

I noted the comment after his post:

“They say that every society is only three meals away from revolution. Deprive a culture of food for three meals, and you’ll have anarchy”.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Rick says

    I wonder…

    If you pay a large minority of your workforce about $8 an hour and a significant proportion of your employers use WPAs ruthlessly to drive down working conditions, would you achieve a state of anarchy after two dinners instead of three?

    The economic cost of this sort of melt down seems to be difficult to put into the balance sheet.

    Would a society with greater emphasis on social equality last four dinners, and hence avoid anarchy more often than a society which runs strictly according to the principles of a meritocracy?

    Over the long term, which is the more productive society?

  4. rog says

    It has to be asked, just what were all those people doing living below sea level in an area known for its flooding and storms? Its a bit like lying in the middle of the road and hoping a car wont hit you.

    People put up a house in the wrong place then demand the Government spend funds on ensuring that their decision was the right one.

    Is it the Federal Government or local town planners or the residents who are to blame? If people demand their rights they should also accept their responsibility.

  5. Louis Hissink says

    roq

    Excellent question.

    Real estate developers ignorant of geoscience. We had a potential instance decades ago in NSW north coast (Myal Lakes area) where it was proposed to fill in low lying areas for habitation.

    (I should point out that I am Dutch and quite aware of the complexities of living below mean sea level, though being born in Java, and having spent most of my life in Oz, does not mean that I am inexpert in these matters.)

    The issue reduces to individuals choosing outcomes and living with the consequences of their decisions (Liberalism) or living in a totalitarian state, which Ender, Done, Miles and others seem to prefer, to order us where to live in an ecologically sustainable manner.

  7. jennifer marohasy says

    People live in New Orleans because it is a major port city at the bottom of a catchment that drains about 42% of the land mass of the US (probably excluding Alaska). I understand about half the grain and oil seed exported from the US passes through New Orleans.
    So it may be below sealevel for the reasons I gave at http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000831.html , but it will be rebuilt.

  10. rog says

    “Many restoration efforts have been undertaken to save the coastline, including the Coast 2050 plan and the Louisiana Coastal Area plan, a $14 billion project to restore the structure and function of the coastal wetlands. But as coastal managers struggle to figure out how to mitigate problems, controversy keeps arising over just how rapidly the land is sinking relative to sea level, and why.

    “Most scientists would agree that the subsidence is caused by a combination of geologic and anthropologic factors,” Williams says. These factors include natural fault movement, compaction of sediments, and withdrawal of oil and gas, common in the oil-producing Gulf. But, he says, scientists don’t know what the individual contribution of the factors is to the overall subsidence rate.

    http://www.geotimes.org/aug05/NN_sinkingGulf.html

    http://www.geotimes.org/aug05/WebExtra083005.html#links