debitage: part of the core tool and scraper tradition

debitage

2.9.05

Replumbing Louisiana, Part 2

August Pollak (via Pandagon) has some harsh words for people (like myself, in the previous post) who have questioned New Orleans' location. He points out that there are significant geographical reasons for the city's location (i.e., it's the mouth of a major river), then says:

Granted, this is arguably the most devestating disaster to ever occur on U.S. soil, but to me saying that we should leave NOLA to rot because of the hurricane is like saying we should relocate the city of Los Angeles because of the earthquakes, or that we should never build anything where the World Trade Center once stood. You make it sound like a hurricane destroys the city on a weekly basis- "oh no, not again. Honey, we should really move up the street!" If we were to declare that any city or area damaged by the elements was an unlivable wasteland, half of Florida and California would be a John Carpenter movie right now.

If the argument -- and I gather from Pollak's piece that some people see it this way -- is simply that New Orleans is such a mess that we might as well just give up, that argument is wrong. Even if we move the city, the mess in old New Orleans still has to be cleaned up.

But in terms of my own rationale for contemplating moving the city, there's a key difference between New Orleans and the other disaster-prone cities that Pollak mentions. LA gets hit by earthquakes from time to time, but in between quakes it remains quite liveable. Once the rubble was cleared, the World Trade Center site was a perfectly good piece of real estate. The site of New Orleans, however, is not so resilient. Major deltas are geomorphologically unstable -- the city is literally built on shifting sand. By building levees to protect the area from flooding, we've opened the area to erosion of coastal marshes and land subsidence (downtown New Orleans wasn't four feet below sea level when it was originally built). And the problem of the Atchafalaya continues to loom over the region. The forces of geomorphology and hydrology will steadily undermine New Orleans regardless of how well we prepare for hurricane events.

Pollak is right that there's no justification for blaming the individual people of New Orleans for locating where they did. We also can't blame the oil and shipping companies that drew them there. As Pollak outlined, there are good reasons to have put a city just where New Orleans is. But on the other hand, we can't ignore the fact that the Mississippi river is inevitably making that location less and less suitable for a city. What's to blame is not human stupidity, but a structural mismatch between an economy that demands a permanent port infrastructure at the mouth of a major river near a large oil-producing region, and a geomorphology unsuitable in the long run for building permanent infrastructure.

To just propose moving the whole city is pretty simplistic. But it gets the facts of nature on the table and makes us think about the larger picture. It makes us realize that the ground New Orleans is built on is unstable, and that somehow we have to address that fact.

Stentor Danielson, 09:48, ,

1.9.05

Replumbing Louisiana

I wonder if Hurricane Katrina might not be just the opportunity we need to reroute the Mississippi River.

Major rivers carry huge loads of sediment, which settle out of them as they reach level coastal areas. This deposition leads, over long periods of time, to shifts and branches in the river's course. In the case of the Mississippi, the river wants to jump out of its current channel into the Atchafalaya River, which would send it to a point further west on the Louisiana coast than its current mouth. We had invested so much in building up New Orleans and other cities along the original lower stretch of the Mississippi that it would be catastrophic if the river ever crossed into the Atchafalaya. So the Army Corps of Engineers has built massive engineering structures to keep the Mississippi in the course where the first European settlers found it.

But like most of the Corps' major hydrological projects, holding the Mississippi in its channel can't last forever. Eventually the shifting sediments of the river valley, perhaps triggered by a major storm that passes a bit further west than Katrina, will undermine our best dams and levees. The people currently living along the Atchafalaya will be wiped out, while the rebuilt New Orleans will be left stranded.

Right now, though, southern Louisiana is already in shambles. New Orleans will not regain its former size an importance for many years, if ever. Katrina has already destroyed so much of what a jump into the Atchafalaya has destroyed that deliberately breaching the dam will add little to the recovery costs. And it will save us from a long, expensive, and futile battle to keep the river where it is.

Of course, this is politically unfeasible. In the wake of a disaster, there is a strong impulse to erase the disaster, to put everything back just like it was. A fully rebuilt New Orelans, including the Mississippi, would be a psychologically satisfying statement of "ha, mother nature can't keep us down" -- while ironically setting us up for a rough answering blow in the longer term. And while we might reluctantly accept a permanent change in the landscape wrought by nature, a direct human decision to do so will face stiff opposition. Finally, the Atchafalaya valley is not quite so wiped out as New Orleans, and thus would face significant added hardship (though they'll face it eventually regardless) -- the very eastward turn that kept Katrina from rerouting the Mississippi herself also spared the Atchafalaya valley from her worst damage.

Stentor Danielson, 16:42, ,

Looting

Even after accounting for media sensationalism, I was quite surprised at the extent of the looting that has been reported in New Orleans. My surprise came because in the case of the natural disaster with which I'm most familiar -- wildfire -- fears of looting are typically quite overblown.

There's a certain sense to why people, particularly wealthier people, who have been evacuated from the urban-wildland interface due to a fire would fear looting. Their property has just been potentially taken away from them, and not simply by a blameless act of nature. If there is suspicion that the fire was a result of arson or human carelessness, great anger focuses on the person responsible. More immediately, the firefighters who ordered the evacuation become, in a sense, agents of property loss. (This is not entirely irrational. A good proportion of the homes lost in a fire are not burned by the main raging wall of fire as it sweeps through. Rather, they're ignited by sparks or bits of smouldering material left behind by the main fire -- which could be easily swatted out had someone remained in the house.) It's easy enough, then, to fear the further breakdown in property rights represented by looting.

So why is it, then, that there isn't actually much looting after a fire, whereas there is quite a bit after Hurricane Katrina? The most obvious explanation seems to be spatial. Wildfires hit exurban and rural areas, where houses are very spread out, whereas the hurricane hit a densely settled city. It's simply easier for anyone in New Orleans to move around, find places to loot, and make off with the goods. The very stretches of woods that drew people to fire-prone areas also protect them from looting.

Another explanation is economic. I don't mean in the sense that the people of New Orleans were poorer, and hence more inclined to stealing, than the average resident of a fire-prone area -- rich people are no saints, and there are increasing numbers of poor people being pushed into exurbia by gentrification. What I mean is the economic recovery time. The defining feature of exurbia (what makes it different from rural areas) is that it's a residential zone. Your house may burn down, but your office in downtown LA is just fine. New Orleans, on the other hand, was a mixed residential and commerical area. Thus people are looking at several months of not just homelessness but also joblessness. They lack the economic infrastructure to survive the recovery period. Thus a good amount of the New Orleans looting is people taking basic necessities like food.

Stentor Danielson, 08:17, ,

29.8.05

Rambling About Orgasms

Elizabeth Lloyd has an interesting post up responding to feminists who criticize her theory that the female orgasm is a byproduct (or "bonus," as she would like to rephrase it) of evolution, rather than having been directly selected for. Her point is that it's wrong to say that if something is not an adaptation, it's of less worth.

I think too many Americans believe in the common-descent model of biologic history that comes out of evolutionary theory, but interpret it as a sort of "nature creationism." They concur with evolutionists on the basic facts of where organisms come from, but their metaphysical infrastructure is still modeled on creationism. They still hold to the basic idea (noted in my discussion in the previous post about the deontological argument against masturbation) that there is an origin process that confers moral legitimacy on its products, and that the reason something exists tells us what we ought to do with it. They just substitute "nature" for "God" as the designer. (Many also adopt the converse philosophy of adaptationism, usually by saying orgasms are so much fun that they must have evolved. Nature creationism says "if something was directly selected for in evolution, it is valuable." Adaptationism says "if something is valuable, it must have been directly selected for in evolution.")

One might take a more favorable reading of the feminist case against Lloyd. Here the feminist critics are not themselves nature creationists, but they fear the consequences if all the other nature creationists in society believed Lloyd's theory, since they would use it to deny women's sexual pleasure. There are three different ways one could criticize this formulation. One, raised by Amanda Marcotte, is that the rest of society is going to belittle the female orgasm anyway, so giving them one more post hoc rationalization for it isn't going to make a difference in the actual acceptance of the orgasm. Another is the basic (perhaps a bit simplistic, but useful as a rule of thumb) liberal reaction against political restrictions on science. Third, I think criticizing research because of how it will be used by a sexist society is an unsustainable solution. Denying a theory that sexists will exploit may improve things in the short run. But the real problems -- sexism and nature creationism -- remain. You can only suppress the little forest fires for so long.

All of this is not to say that Lloyd's theory is necessarily correct, just that nature creationist rebuttals miss the mark. Much of Lloyd's argument rests on the great variability in women's ability to orgasm -- such that 14% of women never orgasm no matter what they do, and for many of the rest it's not reliable. Viking Grrl points out that a plausible case could be made that much of that variability has a social cause, coming from men who don't care about their partner's pleasure, messages that tell women that enjoying sex is bad, and/or a lack of good information on what kind of techniques work (since "standard" intercourse doesn't do it for many women). Lloyd, in comments to Marcotte's post, points out that women who don't orgasm still have the same amount of sex as women who do, thus showing that (at least in the culture where those statistics were gathered), the obvious sort of selective pressure on female orgasms -- the "they make women have more sex" hypothesis -- is not occurring. One explanation for Lloyd's observation, congenial to the "intercourse and orgasm aren't everything" school of thought, is that non-orgasmic pleasure is enough to get people to have sex. An alternative is that the patriarchy (the very force Viking Grrl blames for many women's lack of orgasms) also deprives women of some of the choice about whether to have sex. The latter explanation raises an interesting possibility. If orgasms really do have a major influence on women's desire for sex, then increasing sexual equality will allow women to exercise that preference, and hence women who orgasm more easily will have more sex -- thus creating the selective pressure on female orgasms that Lloyd says is absent today. Of course, this is complicated by the fact that increasing sexual equality will also lead to increased availability of birth control, and it seems much less plausible that women who have more orgasms would be any more likely to want to bear and raise children.

Stentor Danielson, 10:16, ,