Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2011 11:14 am Post subject: City of Nature and The Lost Year
Is there an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what's right and wrong? Why or Why not?
I believe that there is an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what is right and wrong. I think part of Environmental History is to better the future by looking back at what has happened in the past. By learning from the past and really studying the past people are better able to make choices about the environment and how people act within it and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.
For example in the reading The Lost Year by Baum part of it talked about the failure of the levees. How when Hurricane Katrina came the levees could not contain all the water and therefore they burst flooding many neighborhoods. After Katrina people went out to study why the levees could not stand up to a big storm and how to make them better. “A University of California at Berkeley study found that the Army Corps of Engineers—pressed by the contrary demands of “better, faster, and cheaper”—had over the years done such a bad job of building and managing New Orleans’s levees and floodwalls that, even with post-Katrina repairs, the city remained in as much peril as before.” After admitting that the levees had not been built well and therefore put the city in danger in case of another big storm the Army Corps of Engineers still decided to repair the existing levees. They could have done a much better job by looking back into history and learning about why the levees failed and looking at the environment in the city. For example where rivers came together and how the ground level in different part of the city. Based on that safer and stronger levees could have been built in more convenient and strategically located places than the ones before. That would have been a great use of using environmental history to make a city safer but they did not do that and instead ignored all the lessons that could have been learned and therefore put the city in danger again. Environmental History can be used to solve a problem even if the example from the past is not from the area the problem is in but still relates. For example: “The Netherlands’ complex of levees, fortified after a hurricane killed hundreds in 1953, is a respected flood-control model; done right, planners said, New Orleans could serve as another example of how to rebuild, smarter and better, a city flooded on an unprecedented scale.”
My question is once a city is built in an area that is environmentally unstable and dangerous like New Orleans, is it worth it to spend so much money to try to protect the city from flooding because the city will probably be flooded again because of where it is or is it just better to not try to act against nature and maybe have people move elsewhere?
I agree with Gigi, there is an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what is right and what is wrong. It is impossible for humans to look at nature objectively, (maybe with the exception of nature that existed before humans), humans can't look at the environment without thinking about either how they have influenced the environment or how the environment has influenced them. When environmental historians analyze the past, their ideas about the present shape how they tell the story of the past (sorry for the terrible wording there). Since their ideas about the present are incorporated into their description of the past, environmental history will dictate right and wrong (or at least right and wrong in the eyes of the environmental historian).
In "City of Nature" the author talks about New Orleans. New Orleans is in a terrible, disaster prone location. Kelman calls out the people who built/developed New Orleans, and describes the inevitability of a disaster like Katrina. So Kelman is retrospectively deciding what is/was right and wrong. Kelman even states "In retrospect, the idea was so stupid and yet so American" (I realize that this quote was not referring to the people who developed New Orleans, this relates to the first question)
So on a separate note, I have heard the levees being described as both a great strength and a fatal weakness, once water gets inside, it is really difficult to remove. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, there was a lot of controversy over whether the levees in the poorer districts of the city were either broken on purpose or were not as good as the levees in the richer neighborhoods. If anyone knows more about this or has an opinion on this, I'd love to hear more.
This might sound a little repetitive but I also agree with as Gigi and Mikaela said, “here is an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what is right and what is wrong.” The only thing I could had is that although it has a lot to do with what’s right and wrong in our world, it is not solely Environmental history, rather history in general. Native American History tells of oppression dealt by early American settlers. Environmental history tends to weave its way into other forms of history as well.
I liked the first reading, “City of Nature” the best because it pointed out how poorly an idea of building a city in that area was. Kelman basically just shit on this fact for the entire passage stating in what paragraph, “New Orleans has earned all the scorn being heaped upon it—the city is a misguided urban project, a fool's errand, a disaster waiting to happen.” I completely agree with Kelmans view that putting a city in such a unsuitable situations was stupid from the beginning and as we have pointed out, Environmental History should retrospectively dictate what is right and what is wrong. Hurricane Katrina showed the major flaws in New Orleans including but not limited to, the levee systems and coping with natural disasters.
In response to Mikaela’s need for more information about the levee systems in poorer and richer areas, I can say that from watching almost all of the HBO series When the Levees Broke, I can say that this was true that the levee systems were made poorly made in poorer areas. However, The Army Corps on Engineers did a half ass job on all of the levees systems. Most of this had to do with the environment as well. The places where the levees were implemented were poor soil areas, meaning that the levees had to be built much more deeply into the ground and in areas where the soil was stronger. Along with the poor terrain, as Gigi said, the Corp of Engineers used crappy and insufficient materials to build the levees of New Orleans and even admitted that the Levees had a snow balls chance in hell of withstanding Hurricane Katrina
In response to: Is there an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what's right and wrong? Why or Why not?
I believe this 1: because people love to see history the way they like it, and 2: because everything relates to nature in some way and the nature can effect people to think in a that was right or that was wrong beleife. The problem is right now most people don’t know about environmental history so they don’t think that environmental history dictates right and wrong. Most think their history does. As Mikaela said “environmental history will dictate right and wrong (or at least right and wrong in the eyes of the environmental historian).”
In response to: “My question is once a city is built in an area that is environmentally unstable and dangerous like New Orleans, is it worth it to spend so much money to try to protect the city from flooding because the city will probably be flooded again because of where it is or is it just better to not try to act against nature and maybe have people move elsewhere?”
This is a hard question for me because there would have been a lot of work put into building the city in the first place, so just bringing everyone out is a waste and having a ghost city is a little creepy. But it is also outrageous to wast money trying to protect it. My thought is that you should protect it till it over run, like Katrina over run New Orleans. After that clean but don’t rebuild, its not worth it.
My view of Environmental history has not changed that much from when I first thought of an explanation at the beginning of class. I was wondering if people have had a 180 turn around with their definitions?
I don’t think there is an expectation for Environmental History to dictate what is right and wrong, more so just to show what is closer to the actual truth. Since it is a school of revisionist History, the aim is to get as close as possible to what actually happened. There is no possible way to objectively know what is right and what is wrong, so I think it is unrealistic for there to be the expectation that Environmental History can dictate that.
To respond to Gigi’s question:
“My question is once a city is built in an area that is environmentally unstable and dangerous like New Orleans, is it worth it to spend so much money to try to protect the city from flooding because the city will probably be flooded again because of where it is or is it just better to not try to act against nature and maybe have people move elsewhere?”
I don’t think it is a question of whether or not it is worth it to try to protect the city. That would have been the question to ask when the city was founded. Nowadays New Orleans is a huge center for commerce and industry, and while hypothetically it would probably be better to have everyone move to a safer location, that just isn’t realistic.
The existence of a city like New Orleans proves that there is nothing more important than profit and money. New Orleans is dangerous by definition, but because it was in such a potentially profitable location it was worth constructing anyway.
This isn’t really an answerable question, but I was wondering if technology will ever advance to a point where it can actually face the forces of nature on an equal playing field? Will humans ever reach a state where they do not have to worry about their environment?
These readings (and this topic of Hurricane Katrina in general) brought up some perfect examples of how humans and the environment interact. Hurricane Katrina is almost like a case-study in how that interaction plays out, and how closely environmental history is intertwined with economic and political histories. Somewhat as a response to Gigi’s question, it is the combination of not only that New Orleans was built in an unstable place, but lots of other factors that led to the disaster. If the location of the city was the only problem, people would have moved out or probably never built a city there in the first place. However Kelman explains it in “City of Nature” by bringing up the topics of cities/habitats “situations” and its “site”. In New Orleans’ case, the situation is ideal, providing wealth and resources which is why it was settled there in the first place. However the site is horrible—a city shaped like a bowl, surrounded by water on all sides is obviously going to have some issues:
“New Orleans developed a divided relationship with the environment: Nature, as embodied by the Mississippi, promised a bright future. But it also brought water, wind and pathogens, elements of a fickle environment that in the past as now turned cruelly chaotic.”
This relationship that New Orleans has with nature is really interesting and a somewhat different relationship than what we’ve been looking at so far in the class. This is not Yellowstone or the great expanse of the west, but an environment that people are constantly in tandem with and depend on to survive but also responsible for one of the greatest disasters ever.
I also think New Orleans is even more interesting because of the economics and politics of what happened due to the actions of the environment. I once heard a comedian talking about Katrina and he said (somewhat jokingly/somewhat serious), “Lets be honest; if Katrina hit Greenwich, Connecticut you’d better believe the response from the government would be different.” (Greenwich is a ridiculously fancy town outside NYC that all the CEOs of New York hedgefunds and corporations live.) This statement is obviously true, it wouldn’t have taken FEMA several days to respond and a lot of things would have gone differently. However, the point is that this wouldn’t ever happen to a wealthier and whiter town because the issues of levees was deeply systemic. I don’t buy that this just happened randomly to the poorest part of New Orleans (or that the poorest part of New Orleans just happened to be located there). Both nature and people played a role. Like Zach said, I saw “When the Levees Broke” and there is a lot of anger that is understandable and Spike Lee does a better job of explaining it than I can.
I can talk forever about the politics of Katrina but my question is, does anybody think of any other examples where site vs situation played a role in either a natural disaster or city relationship to its environment? Do you think the site vs situation argument holds true for both Katrina and other events similar to it?
“My question is once a city is built in an area that is environmentally unstable and dangerous like New Orleans, is it worth it to spend so much money to try to protect the city from flooding because the city will probably be flooded again because of where it is or is it just better to not try to act against nature and maybe have people move elsewhere?”
I think a major part of the second article's point was that this is really only a question because of how impoverished and undesirable (for many politicians based on race and or socio-economic status) the culture and the people of a good portion of New Orleans were/are, most significantly in the 9th ward. Were this, say, san francisco---a categorically wealthier and far whiter city (who happens to also expirience some hurricane damage on their coast) this would be non-issue.
Also something I think we're confusing is the difference between NATURE + the environment dictating right vs wrong vs the discipline of environmental history and how theses thesises and analysises come to mold our ideas of justice. Many politicians and other people of elevated status spun Katrina into a positive by essentially stating, "shit, if this had to happen anywhere, good thing it happened here, right? No major loss--actually, an excellent rebuilding opportunity." In this sense, the same way people will attest acts of nature (well, acts of anything,) to "God's will," it offers some validation to the event and then, justification for subsequently feasible actions--like rebuilding an "embarrassing" community.
renewal is a natural idea but i think redemption is a cultural one.
New Orleans' history can definitely be looked at through the question "Is there an expectation that Environmental History will retrospectively dictate what's right and wrong? Why or Why not?"
It's pretty easy to leap from quotes like “New Orleans developed a divided relationship with the environment: Nature, as embodied by the Mississippi, promised a bright future. But it also brought water, wind and pathogens, elements of a fickle environment that in the past as now turned cruelly chaotic.” to the conclusion that building a city there was perhaps not the best idea. And then when you combine that with the very apparent fact that building the city below sea-level and river-level had disastrous effects, I think that there's a strong urge to say, "well clearly history has shown that building the city there was the wrong thing to do." But a statement like that just begs to bring up the whole, "where's the divide 'tween humans and nature" thing again. Because there is no environment on earth that is completely hospitable to humans without us having to modify it, and the other side of that coin is that there are few environments that we absolutely truly can't modify to make hospitable. You can say that having to build a levee system or carry water hundreds of miles across a desert just for a city to exist is indicative of the fact that there "shouldn't" be a city there, but some sort of modification and some sort of risk are both inherent in any settlement anywhere. So I think the "should" questions are better answered by something that's not entirely environmental history. I don't know. But i think the fact that we so willingly and easily jump from a factual environmental history of a place like New Orleans or Los Angeles to a value judgement about it indicates that we kind of expect the environmental history of the place to show us what that value judgment should be.
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