Category Archives: New Orleans

Haiti, Disaster Sociology, Elite Panic, and Looting

In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster writer Rebecca Solnit describes how people responded to disasters – from San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake to the Halifax explosion of 1917 to New … Continue reading

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Dams limit wetland restoration in Mississippi Delta

Cornelia Dean in the New York Times writes Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says. She describes recent research by Michael Blum and Harry Roberts Drowning of the Mississippi Delta due to insufficient sediment supply and global sea-level rise (doi:10.1038/ngeo553) … Continue reading

Posted in Ecological Management, New Orleans | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Kim Stanley Robinson on nature, architecture, and society

Geoff Manaugh recently interviewed ecological science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson about ecology, architecture and socieities on BLDGBLOG.  Manaugh writes: Robinson’s books are not only filled with descriptions of landscapes – whole planets, in fact, noted, sensed, and textured down … Continue reading

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Lessons of Katrina

It was roughly two years ago that New Orleans spectactularly failed to cope, technologically and socially, with Hurricane Katrina. Over 1,8oo people died, neighbourhoods and livlihoods were destroyed, and the storm is estimated to have caused over $80 billion in … Continue reading

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Mississippi meanders

NASA’s Earth Observation newsroom presents satelite images to go with the geological map of Mississippi Meanders used to make the top image of this blog. NASA explains: As it winds from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River … Continue reading

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Ecological Engineering and New Orleans

Robert Costanza, William Mitsch, and John Day, three ecologists with long experience with wetlands, New Orleans, and ecological economics, have an editorial in the journal Ecological Engineering on Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans (pdf). Their arguement is a … Continue reading

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Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes: … the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed … Continue reading

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Hurricanes, Risk Models, and Insurance

Roger Pielke Jr has an interesting post Are We Seeing the End of Hurricane Insurability? on the Prometheus weblog. The insurance industry uses models of expected losses to set rates for catastrophic losses – from things such as huricanes. However, … Continue reading

Posted in Ecological Economics, Ideas, New Orleans, Reorganization, Vulnerability | 2 Comments

Mapping Sea Level Rise

Jonathan Overpeck and others have a paper Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise in Science (24 March 2006) that suggests that sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change could occur much faster than people have … Continue reading

Posted in Greenlash, Ideas, New Orleans, Tools, Visualization, Vulnerability | 1 Comment

Ruin and Recovery

Ruin & Recovery is a special series of newspaper articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on how other cities responded to disasters: Galveston, TX – Galveston almost went under in the hurricane of 1900, but city leaders saved it, and … Continue reading

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