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See
a full report with many links at Food First: Hurricane Katrina:
An Unacceptable Failure to Value Human Life.
And read Jordan Flaherty's excellent
"Notes
from Inside New Orleans"
How to help? see
our page with organizations seeking support for their work
Ecologists
comment: from Worldwatch Institute:
UNNATURAL
DISASTER: THE LESSONS OF KATRINA
Health
problems abound months after Katrina roared ashore
November 29, 2005. By Seth Borenstein and Chris Adams Knight Ridder
Newspapers
BILOXI, Miss. - Three months after Hurricane Katrina raked the Gulf
Coast, a major health crisis is emerging as residents struggle with
the fouled air, moldy houses and the numbing stress the killer storm
left behind...
http://www.katrinanomore.com/
"the
first web site in America dedicated exclusively to raising awareness
about the connection between hurricane Katrina and global warming."
With articles and analysis on the ecological problems that made
the Katrina event a disaster: Read author Mike Tidwell’s most recent
essay
that explains how climate change could soon turn every coastal city
in America into another New Orleans unless we make a rapid switch
to clean, renewable energy.
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Women's
views and actions
Bioremediation
in New Orleans Nov. 23, 2005 By Starhawk
I’m just back from another week in New Orleans. This time three of us,
myself, Juniper and Scotty, had a special mission—to set up a small
bioremediation demonstration as a beginning seed for a long term project.
Over Thanksgiving Week, Common Ground has sponsored the Road Trip for
Relief, an effort to bring hundreds of volunteers into the Ninth Ward,
one of the areas most devastated by Hurricane Katrina...
Two
Months Later, Katrina Survivors are Losing the Battle to Return Home
By
Medea Benjamin; Code Pink
" Two months after Katrina, the residents of New Orleans most traumatized
by the hurricane and its aftermath are now traumatized in their battle
to return home. And many of the city's poor, black "Katrina survivors"
are losing this second battle..."
A CODEPINK volunteer delegation will be spending the Thanksgiving week
working in New Orleans' 9th Ward, in solidarity with local folks, the
common Ground Collective and other volunteers from around the country.
Information
here
What
To Take From the Flood
By
Kristin Van Tassel, AlterNet, November 10, 2005,
" The New Orleans disaster startled us into several lessons. Now
we're talking about the need for coordinated, effective disaster plans
everywhere. We're seeing the harms that follow when the ecological integrity
of a place is disrupted. We're openly discussing the specter of systemic
racial discrimination that continues to haunt us..."
Another
Case of Government for Some
By Makani Themba-Nixon, AlterNet Posted on September 6, 2005, Printed
on November 11, 2005
Katrina:
The Movement
By Makani Themba-Nixon, AlterNet Posted on October 27, 2005, Printed
on November 11, 2005
" All around the country, a storm is gathering. The aftermath of
Katrina is gaining power and energy in churches, barbershops and rec
rooms, on campuses and online. A growing number of advocates are finding
common cause in preventing the next "perfect storm" of racism, government
neglect and divestment. And they are already chalking up some victories..."
Disaster
Profiteering: Purging the Poor in the New New Orleans
Democracy
Now speaks
with writer and author Naomi Klein about what some are calling the real
looting of New Orleans. In this week's cover story in The Nation magazine,
Klein reports on how the city's poorest evacuees are being kept out
of thousands of perfectly livable empty homes.
Wal-Mart
to the Rescue!
Liza
Featherstone, Wal-Mart
Nation | posted September 13, 2005
"...When
Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast, most of us were stunned
by the poverty of government response at all levels--from the failure
to rescue grandmothers stranded on their rooftops to the babies and
diabetics languishing without food and water at designated emergency
"shelters." Thank goodness, then, for Wal-Mart, which immediately sent
1,900 truckloads of water and other emergency supplies to the afflicted.
The company has also contributed $17 million to the hurricane relief
effort, and more than $3 million in merchandise..."
Deja
Vu All Over Again
By
Arianna Huffington, AlterNet. September 19, 2005
..."The feeling that the Katrina relief effort is going to be Iraq
all over again is unavoidable when you look at the list of the companies
already being awarded clean up and reconstruction contracts. It's that
old gang from Baghdad: Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and the Shaw Group
(which has a tasteful notice on its website saying "Hurricane Recovery
Projects -- Apply Here!"). Together again. A veritable moveable feast
of crony capitalism..."
An
Ill Wind That Can Blow Texas Some Good
By
Molly Ivins, 19 September 2005
" Thanks to some well-connected cronies, Texas is standing right
in the path of some beneficial fallout from Hurricane Katrina..."
A
Pagan Response to Katrina Sept.
14, 2005 By Starhawk
"...Global warming increases the intensity of storms. Turn up the
fire under a pot of water, and the bubbles will be bigger, faster and
stronger. Hurricanes draw their energy from the heat in seawater. The
Gulf of Mexico is abnormally warm—and hurricanes have doubled in average
intensity in the last decade and a half. Hurricane Katrina was a natural
phenomenon, but Katrina’s progression from a Category Two up to a Category
Five as she crossed the gulf was a human-caused phenomenon, a function
of our choices and decisions, our failure to steer a different course..."
from
The
Black Commentator columnist Margaret Kimberley:
New
Orleans and the Demise of the Democrats
"... The degree of Democratic callousness
in the New Orleans tragedy may be shocking at first, but it is actually
consistent with the direction the party has taken for the past two
decades. The Democrats are dying a slow political death. Their inaction
and acquiescence in New Orleans is just the latest symptom presented
by a terminal patient..."
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Grace Lee Boggs: Where
do we go from here Chaos or Community?*
"Those marginalized by race and class oppression have always suffered
the most from natural disasters. But the Auschwitz-like hell that hundreds
of thousands of black, poor and elderly New Orleanians were forced to
endure because of the racism, classism and sheer incompetence of governmental
bodies on all levels tells us that it is now up to “we the people” to
develop programs “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure
domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general
welfare and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”
...
Welcome
to the 'Third World,' America
By Sarita
Sarvate, Pacific News Service. Posted September 12, 2005.
"...Ironically, America's response to the predicament and suffering
of Katrina's victims has been eerily reminiscent of that of a Third
World country..."
What
Would Martin Luther King, Jr. Say Now? WLOE correspondent Elayne Clift writes from Thailand:
"...how on earth do you begin to explain why healthy personnel
from the posh and private Tulane University were evacuated from rooftops
while the poor, black patients at Mercy Hospital watched and waited
for rescue from the roof of their sanctuary? What would happen if there
was a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant, they ask? Would the
poor black people be abandoned?"
George Bush
Investigates! By Molly Ivins, AlterNet. Posted September 9,
2005.
"...Exactly why the right-wing Republicans chose to make FEMA a
political football was never clear -- unless you subscribe to the theory
that they particularly dislike any government agency that helps people,
since that makes government popular and they are bent on making government
unpopular..."
From writer-activist Starhawk: Casualties
of War: Camp Casey and New Orleans
"...The petrochemical industry and the developers have long ruled
in the Gulf, with free reign to destroy the wetlands that are nature's
buffer against storms. A huge proportion of the Louisiana National Guard,
which is supposed to take charge during natural disasters, was in Iraq.
The rest were apparently in Florida, moving military equipment out of
the path of the storm. The funds for flood control and reinforcing the
levees had been systematically cut by the Bush administration in order
to fund our attacks on Baghdad and Fallujah.
Hurricanes are fueled by the warmth of the ocean, and the Gulf is abnormally
hot due to global warming, which Bush and his allies will not admit
is happening. Global warming may not have caused Hurricane Katrina,
but it undoubtedly amplified its power and fury.
New Orleans, like Casey Sheehan, is a casualty of war..."
The One That's Left
Behind by Dorothy Gaines, Pacific News Service/Alternet, with discussion
"...People are talking about this as a race issue now. I can't
say it's a race issue -- you do have whites mixed in with it. It's a
class issue. It's a poor issue.
Upper-class people can leave. They've got money in the bank, they've
got credit cards, they can go stay in a hotel until the storm is over.
If you don't have money -- whether poor white, poor black, poor Hispanic,
whatever -- you stay. You get what's left over, which is nothing..."
and also Laura Barcella's How to Help.
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ecology menu
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