Contrary to popular perceptions, half of New Orleans is at or above sea level. Elevated areas, while not immune to flooding, constitute a valuable natural resource for which residential use, whenever practical, should be prioritized.• It is well known that New Orleans' population declined by 143,000 during 1960-2000, as residents departed for suburban parishes. Few realize that, within the remaining population, 121,000 New Orleanians migrated internally from higher historic neighborhoods to low-lying subdivisions, many of which flooded after Katrina. • If New Orleanians lived today at circa-1960 population densities and distributions, over 300,000 people could reside above sea level-far more than the 223,000 people living throughout the entire city today. 1 • Despite its value, above-sea-level New Orleans is replete with open parcels and other underutilized space.Nearly 2,000 such lots have been identified in this study, covering 1.21 square miles (three times the size of the French Quarter). If blighted and adjudicated properties were included, this figure would be even higher.• If these open parcels were residentially developed at earlier population densities, between 9,000 and 20,000 additional people could be settled on high ground, possibly many more. This effort would help put people out of harm's way while "mending tears" in the historical urban fabric.• Policies aimed at fully utilizing above-sea-level New Orleans for residential living are recommended.
This article investigates media coverage of 19th and early 20th century river activism and its effect on federal policy to control the Mississippi River. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' "levees-only" policy-which joined disparate navigation and flood control interests-is largely blamed for the Great Flood of 1927, called the largest peacetime disaster in American history. River activists organized annual conventions, and later, professional lobbies organized media campaigns up and down the Mississippi River to sway public opinion and pressure Congress to fund flood control and river navigation projects. Annual river conventions drew thousands of delegates such as plantation owners, shippers, bankers, chambers of commerce, governors, congressmen, mayors and cabinet members with interests on the Mississippi River. Public pressure on Congress successfully captured millions of federal dollars to protect property, drain swamps for development, subsidize local levee districts and influence river policy.
This article builds on the concept of Energy Sacrifice Zones, which has been used as a heuristic for areas negatively impacted by environmental degradation and/or pollution that harms nearby residents for broader economic gains elsewhere. Environmental justice scholars have since the 1980s identified urban “fence-line” communities as Sacrifice Zones, such as those along the industrialized Mississippi River corridor downstream of Baton Rouge, La., where public health and property values are impacted by plant emissions. More recent scholarship has identified analogous dispossession in coastal Louisiana, where indigenous and communities of color suffer environmental degradation and land loss from oil industry practices. Coastal oil and gas operations have left behind thousands of miles of pipelines, canals and subsiding oil fields that have accelerated marsh desiccation and land loss. This article argues that both inland and coastal areas of Louisiana are being sacrificed by the fossil fuel industry on a continuum of harm along pipelines from wellheads to inland plants. Oil wells, refineries, and petrochemical plants exist as nodes along a single line of production and manufactured demand for petroleum-based products, which also litter waterways and oceans. Such a continuum establishes a single Sacrifice Zone that conjoins multiple sites. Harmed communities need not be adjacent to one another to be considered logically contiguous and, therefore, subject to consideration of collective harm as long as they are linked by the material infrastructure that connects fossil fuel extraction, production and distribution. This zone of harm, once established, could be used to inform decision makers with more accurate and complex pictures of social and public health costs of industrial emissions and practices, particularly when considering proposals for plant expansions or new facilities. They may also be used to determine legal culpability in restitution claims by communities bearing the burden of the carbon economy.
This article applies discussions of biopolitics and rationalities by governments to "make live" and "let die" as a heuristic for the speculative sorting of bodies and their antibodies as the United States and individual states lurch toward post-COVID life. It considers how governments rationalize the elimination of certain populations in the name of improving the vitality of the dominant group. Sociologist Michel Foucault, who popularized the idea among academics in the late 1970s, called biopolitics the application of "life-producing techniques." Biopolitics operates under the prerogative of whom to "make live" and whom to "let die." Its applications in the last century have rationalized the elimination of perceived outgroups to improve the vitality of the nation-state. This article theorizes that the prerogative to "make live" and "let die" functions as a tacit rationale for negotiating pandemic life. As a cultural agent, COVID has brought into stark relief the burdens of suffering that U.S. society places on marginalized communities, particularly African Americans and Latinx populations; as well as incarcerated and otherwise detained individuals left exposed to virus spread.
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