Disaster histories are usually written for entertainment, not diagnosis. They tend to begin in a calm, tranquil moment. Suddenly, there is a disruption: water from a tsunami breaches the nuclear power plant; Patient Zero leaves the market; the levee breaks. When political leaders arrive on the scene, they attribute the damage to an “Act of God,” “Mother Nature,” an unforeseeable error. Horowitz argues that Hurricane Katrina obliterated this narrative. “The more I have thought about Katrina,” he writes, “the more uncomfortable I have become with the idea of ‘disaster’ altogether.” Disaster, Horowitz believes, is a political category—“at best an interpretive fiction, or at worst, an ideological script”—one that’s usually invoked to defend or maintain the status quo. His book asks a necessary question: What happens to the story of this one moment in time if we stretch it forward and back, looking for causes and consequences that reach beyond the storm?
New Orleans has always been a rich, divided, violent, and beautiful city. Set in a deep depression between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, it is surrounded by water on three sides, including Lake Pontchartrain. It’s a hotspot for hurricanes and tropical storms, and climate change makes it hotter still. So, too, does the steady erosion of its marshes and wetlands, natural resources that are capable of absorbing storm surges, unless development destroys them.
Starting in the eighteenth century, fishermen and trappers of European origin laid claim to the area’s rich coastal and riverfront territories, attracted by its unique ecology, which nourished shrimp, oysters, muskrats, and other aquatic life, and by its unparalleled access to other markets along the river and the sea. New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States during the antebellum period, a place where human beings were trafficked citywide, from public plazas to private homes, hotels, and commercial arcades. It was, and remains, the capital of Creole culture, a place where people, languages, and customs mix promiscuously, and sometimes violently—where norms change with the tides.
The oil industry arrived in the early twentieth century, and when it came it transformed the land, the sea, and the marshes, swamps, and bayous that were a little of both. Big business, and the people it attracted, required infrastructure—roads, rail lines, and bridges, as well as deeper, wider shipping channels and larger ports. For decades, Louisiana residents watched federal agencies, local officials, and industry leaders attempt to tame nature with expensive, highly engineered water management systems. Each new project arrived with a promise of increased ecological security and prosperity, but also set up those in low-lying areas for the next collapse.