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The Lower Ninth Battles Back (cont.)
To understand the strength of the Holy Cross Neighborhood Association, you
need to understand that the environmental and social issues here did not begin
on August 29, 2005. Founded in 1981, the HCNA had fought the attempt to build
another lock on the Industrial Canal more than ten years earlier. Darryl Malek-Wiley,
a big, cheerful white-haired white guy who lives at the opposite end of town,
became an environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club, and his focus
has long been on this neighborhood. So the Sierra Club and the HCNA were already
in place when Katrina hit; Common Ground, Emergency Communities, NENA, the
People's Hurricane Relief Fund and other organizations emerged in the wake
of the storm.
A lot of people elsewhere bought the story that these places did not make
environmental sense to reclaim and re-inhabit. Dashiell recalls that the developers
who were part of the city's Bring New Orleans Back Commission "were in
reality looking at ways to not bring the Lower Nine back. To hear what they
were really saying at that level and what they were doing was just unbelievable,
and for me that was a catalyst. We had to do something. We organized. We developed
a plan. We were everywhere we could be." Environmentalists were the ones "who
provided the support."
The HCNA pursued a rebuilding effort that would address the ways New Orleans
had chosen to violate the natural landscape. Unlike mostly middle-class, white
Lakeview or New Orleans East, home to many Vietnamese-Americans, the Lower
Ninth is not a new neighborhood or one on extremely low ground, and its ecological
precariousness is relatively recent. There were inhabitants here in the early
nineteenth century, long before the Industrial Canal cut off the Lower Ninth
along its western edge from the rest of the city. This canal, dug in the 1920s
to provide a direct waterway between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi
River, which forms the neighborhood's southern border, is penned in by levees
that had failed catastrophically before, in Hurricane Betsy in 1965.
Another watery border, this time in the bayou to the north, was gouged out
in the 1960s and named the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Canal, or MR-GO. It
created a shorter route for shipping traffic--and for storm surges, salinization
and the loss of some 27,000 acres of wetlands, making yet another unnatural
edge of vulnerability for the place. Thanks to erosion, it is far wider than
the US Army Corps of Engineers originally made it. Breaches of the MR-GO canal's
levees were responsible for much of the flooding of St. Bernard Parish and
the Lower Ninth in 2005, and water that surged up this "hurricane highway" may
have been responsible for the even more devastating breaches of the Industrial
Canal. It is quite literally a murderous piece of engineering, and in July
even the Army Corps of Engineers finally agreed that it should be closed.
Restoring the wetlands at the Lower Ninth's northern edge is a challenge that
has been taken up by the HCNA, with the University of Wisconsin's Water Resources
Management doing the research. One of the first facts that emerged is that
a forest had died there, in Bayou Bienvenue (which is also the southern periphery
of New Orleans East, though the two places are many miles apart by road). The
cypress forest that could still be seen in photographs from the 1950s died
of the salinity from the MR-GO canal, and with it went one layer of protection
against storm surges. A forest would buffer any future storm surge, and the
trees would help hold the wetlands as land rather than open water. One idea
under consideration is to develop the wetlands to serve as the final filtration
system for New Orleans's sewage-system discharge, which, unsurprisingly, comes
out near there. Such filtration systems have been developed in progressive/alternative
areas like Arcata, California; putting one in a poor community of color that
is as much the inner city as the ecological edge is a radical shift in who
gets to go green. Other proposals involve building nature trails and recreational
facilities. The landscape architecture department at the University of Colorado,
Denver, has also shown up to aid the Lower Ninth, and its students are participating
in landscape design for the wetlands.
And then there's the new development down by the Mississippi, organized by
Global Green--a US branch of Mikhail Gorbachev's Green Cross International--but
orchestrated by the movie star Brad Pitt. Pitt, who with his partner, Angelina
Jolie, and kids temporarily relocated to New Orleans after Katrina to film
a movie, has reportedly been interested in architecture for a while. He helped
organize and underwrote a competition to design sustainable housing for New
Orleans. Originally, the project was to have generated houses across New Orleans,
but after Pitt met Pam Dashiell and the HCNA, he decided all the resources
should go into the Lower Ninth. Members of the neighborhood group got involved
in the competition to design an eighteen-unit apartment building, several single-family
homes and a community center that will include daycare facilities. The Home
Depot Foundation put up major money for construction, and ground was broken
this summer on the former industrial land Global Green purchased.
The Lower Ninth also drew in the Sharp Solar Energy Systems Group, which initially
decided to put minimal solar systems on five New Orleans roofs, and finally
ended up putting far more extensive systems on ten rooftops in the Holy Cross
area, including a system on the roof of NENA. Again the HCNA was a partner
in developing the program. One argument for solar and related hyperlocal programs
is that after the next disaster, those who aren't on the grid won't be hamstrung
by its failure. Another is that if New Orleans is a major victim of climate
change, it should be a major player in carbon-neutral energy sources and green
building. Malek-Wiley also emphasizes less glamorous environmental steps being
taken in the neighborhood, including installing heat-reflective insulation
in attics and getting the city to recycle some of the cleared-away debris and
not just dump it all in leaking landfills on the Vietnamese community's side
of Bayou Bienvenue.
Restored local wetlands, green housing, solar roofs--these are only small
pieces of the large puzzle of restoring one tiny area of the Gulf Coast. The
Army Corps of Engineers is rebuilding New Orleans's levees to withstand a Katrina-level
event, not a Category 5 hurricane. The ocean is rising. The wetlands farther
out to sea are eroding. The city as a whole is in trouble. Like depopulated
cities such as Detroit, it faces real problems about a shrunken tax base for
the same-size footprint. New Orleans had been in steady economic decline since
the 1960s, and nothing much suggests that's about to turn around now. Regeneration
of this one neighborhood, like so many others, could be undermined or sabotaged
by these larger forces. But the Gulf Coast will also be rebuilt one piece at
a time, and this piece doesn't lack the powerful tools of will, vision or love.
Reprinted with permission from the September 10, 2007 issue of The
Nation magazine. Portions of each week’s Nation magazine
can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
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