Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Governing the
environment
Since Hurricane Katrina, the world's view of
America has changed. The disaster has
exposed some shocking truths about the
place: bitterness of its sharp racial divide,
the abandonment of the dispossessed, the
weakness of critical infrastructure. But
the most astonishing and most shaming
revelation has been of its government's
failure to bring succor to its people at their
time of greatest need. (
Economist
, 2005a:
11).
7.1 INTRODUCTION:
PROTECTING PEOPLE
FROM NATURE OR
PROTECTING NATURE
FROM PEOPLE?
According to the US National Hurricane Centre,
Tropical Depression 12 formed over the southeast
Bahamas on 23 August 2005 (Knabb et al, 2005).
Six days later, Tropical Depression 12 made its
final landfall near to the mouth of the Peale River
close to the Louisiana/Mississippi state border. By
this point it was no longer a tropical depression, but
a category 3 hurricane going by the name of Katrina
(Knabb et al, 2005). According to official estimates,
Hurricane Katrina was one of the five most deadly
hurricanes to strike the US, and the most costly in
terms of the overall damage that it caused (Knabb
et al, 2005: 1). The total cost of the damage has been
estimated at $108 billion and 1833 deaths have been
directly attributed to the effects of Katrina (largely
concentrated in Louisiana, where there were 1577
fatalities) (Knabb et al, 2005: 11-13). While the
events surrounding Hurricane Katrina have a
number of significant implications for those study-
ing socio-environmental relations, I would like
here to briefly focus on one aspect of the disaster:
what it tells us about the relationship between
nation states and environmental government.
In the immediate aftermath of Katrina
The
Economist
stated:
The crucial point to note here is that the direct
impacts of the hurricane were far less severe than
had been previously feared. Katrina had been
downgraded from a category 5 to a category 3
hurricane by the time it left the Gulf of Mexico
and entered Louisiana. Furthermore, the centre
of Katrina's strongest winds and heaviest rains
missed the heavily populated areas in and
around the city of New Orleans (passing to the east
of the conurbation). The problems that Katrina
generated were to these ends, as much a product
of human (in)action as they 'were acts of nature'.
The floods that followed Katrina were a result of
the failure of the levee system that had been
designed to protect the urban populations in New
Orleans from the water held in Lake Pontchartrain
and the Mississippi River. It was the Army Corps
of Engineers who had originally built the 350
miles of levees that surrounded New Orleans
