Hurricane Katrina and the Forgotten Coast of Mississippi

Abstract

so called pea-souper fogs in London in the early 1950s, and the other of ecosystem management in Florida's Everglades. In the final chapter, Whitehead considers the psychology of the Anthropocene and considers how patterns of human behavior in everyday life might be modified to become more environmentally sustainable. He explores how patterns of environmentally transforming behavior have been molded by Fordist economics, ideologies of religion and science, and finally the supposed rationality of economic pragmatism. From individuals to broader society, Whitehead then considers various ways that policy has been employed to bring about behavior change in individuals and across society at large.Through a series of empirically rich and comprehensively, theoretically tethered chapters, Whitehead's text demonstrates the way human activity has fundamentally transformed great swathes of the global environment. Rather than offer a pronouncement as to whether the Anthropocene title should be conferred on the current geological era, a task he his happy to leave to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, Whitehead's interest is instead in advocating the recognition of Anthropocene thinking around human and environment relations not just at the global scale, but also in various local settings where they play out. He does this well, though in this respect the argument is not particularly novel; for instance, it is now more than twenty years since Bruno Latour noted that in merely opening a newspaper one could see the various ways culture and nature are churned together in local, day-to-day, settings. Where Whitehead's work excels, however, is in its accessibility and its comprehensiveness. Written in plain but accurate language, undergraduate students may easily approach the text, and the carefully selected illustrative material, impressively rich in absorbing content, further hooks the already engaged reader.-OLIVER ZANETTI, Open University HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE FORGOTTEN COAST OF MISSISSIPPI.

Resilient communities? Experiences of risk and resilience in a time of austerity

“…Within the UK's emergency planning agenda, disasters and emergencies are treated as largely distinct from other aspects of policy, particularly welfare, despite the fairly widely accepted link between social protection and community resilience (Shaw et al 2009;Deen 2015). Previous research has shown that emergencies tend to catalyse or intensify downward social and economic trajectories (Cutter et al 2008;Cutter et al 2014) and that the poorest groups tend to recover more slowly from disasters (Béné 2013;Deen 2015), whilst a lack of resilience has been identified as a key dimension of the longitudinal experience of vulnerability (Emmel & Hughes 2010). These ideas challenge the notion that resilience "like a muscle which, when exercised, builds both strength and flexibility" (Wilding, 2011: 27), and supports the idea that coping strategies can undermine resilience in the long term (Harrison 2013;Sen 1983).…”

Assessing the Recovery Aftermaths of Selected Disasters in the Gulf of Mexico

“…Gulf Coast storms necessitated military involvement during the aftermath of the storm. Legislation for defense appropriations included approximately $29 billion toward federal financial resources for recovery efforts [19]. Additionally, among states that possessed their own state defense force (SDF), governors deployed their respective SDFs in conjunction with their National Guard forces thereby leveraging SDFs as force multipliers to better response effectiveness.…”

“…Hurricane Katrina formed as a tropical depression on August 23, 2005 [19]. The storm rapidly increased in magnitude and strength, and was classified as a Category 1 hurricane on August 25 [32].…”

The unconscious mind rulesin absentia

“…Notably, the rule of minds at the time of Katrina was decidedly conservative. All three divisions of the Federal Government were in Republican hands or the appointees thereof, which set about privatising relief efforts [18]. This led to allegations of profiteering and the exploitation of public resources [19].…”

“…Moreover, Irish et al [28] concluded that sea level rise was significantly more instrumental in terms of storm surge generation than climate-change induced storm intensification. Katrina's storm surge caused most of the initial damage to New Orleans [18]. In effect, Katrina was a category 3 or 4 hurricane with a category 5 storm surge.…”