New Orleans is a wounded city that is still far from recovered

The word that hit home was “wounded”. With the breeze from the Mississippi blowing at his back and threatening to prise off his chimney-pot hat, Archbishop Demetrios of America chose that word, not any other, not “battered”, say, or “devastated”, to describe New Orleans. The city was last month host to the Eighth Symposium on religion, science and the environment convened by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s 250m Orthodox Christians.

We had gathered here – a bunch of local and international scientists, clerics, journalists, many of us neither Orthodox nor orthodox – to discuss whether religion, in partnership with science, can help save the planet (more on that next week). We found we had come not just to any old conference venue but to one of the world’s most vulnerable conurbations, a wounded city that is still far from recovered, on the banks of a notoriously abused river.

Wounded is not a neutral word, like damaged or degraded. It is a fleshly word, a word that invites you to share the pain of the wounded entity. Damage or degradation can be assessed and repaired but a wound can only be healed. And a wound is usually something that is inflicted deliberately by another person or persons.

The more time I spent in New Orleans, the most carnal and sensual and slow-paced city in North America, the more apt I found the archbishop’s word. And understanding the nature of the Big Easy’s wounding helped me to understand the wounding of the world, the fact that as Aldo Leopold put it, to be aware is “to walk in a world of wounds”.

You might think, as I did, that New Orleans had been hit by a purely or overwhelmingly natural disaster when Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. But when Ivor van Heerden, former deputy director of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, escorted us round some of the worst affected areas, he laid before us the evidence that this was a human and political disaster, not a natural one – the state of affairs that led to the disaster was thoroughly unnatural.

The wounding of the city was intimately connected with the abuse and denaturing of its river. In the 1950s, Heidegger remarked that the Rhine had ceased to be a river and had become “a water-power supplier”. The Mississippi, long ago, stopped being a river and became a navigation system.

By being turned into a navigation system, the Mississippi lost its fluvial function of depositing sediments and building up land around its mouth. Combined with the cutting of waterways for oil and gas installations, this channelling has left the rich Louisiana delta-land degraded and depleted and the city vulnerable to the sea. More than 2,300 square miles of the barrier islands and cypress-rich wetlands, which are the best and natural defence against storm surges, have already been lost. That also means lost livelihoods and communities – and lost habitats for innumerable bird and animal species.

What comes first, environment, economy or society – that is, nature, money or people? In our world, the world of business as usual, it seems money comes first; not just first, but first, second and third. The agency charged with looking after the Mississippi and protecting New Orleans, the US Army Corps of Engineers, has to balance the interests of navigation (money), flood defence (people) and environmental restoration (nature).

How is the balance struck? According to Chris Macaluso, the newly appointed head of Louisiana’s Office of Coastal Protection, the balance works out at 96 per cent navigation, 3 per cent flood protection and 1 per cent environmental restoration. When the deputy head of the Corps of Engineers came to speak to our conference, he delivered a 20-minute talk without mentioning the word Katrina. You cannot get much more disembodied, or disconnected, than that. His boss, Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, later admitted that he could not protect the city of New Orleans.

I began to feel that the archbishop had told only half the story. New Orleans, and the coastal wetland that protects it, have been not just wounded but abandoned. I remembered that this was a rather special city in the cultural history of the world. Maybe it is not quite true that, as Ernie K-Doe, the New Orleans-born rhythm and blues singer, said, “all music came from New Orleans”, but jazz came to fruition here.

Recovering from the sombre presentations and field trips, we set off to the French Quarter and beyond, and found the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street. The young band, it seemed, were playing for the love of it, and the young dancers twirling with a grace and beauty that made you smile, and go on smiling. Maybe, given time, that smile could become as broad and deep as the Mississippi.

What happened in New Orleans, I thought to myself, is a microcosm of what is happening in the wider world. We had become too disembodied in our thinking, we had forgotten that “the river is within us, the sea is all about us”. New Orleans must be healed, because the carnal city can help heal a wounded world.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres