What do we remember about Katrina?

Immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi, devastating New Orleans, there was a sudden uptick of interest in the relationship between race and urban poverty. An all too brief, but worthy, debate over whether at heart, the loss of thousands of homes, failed evacuation, and governmental unresponsiveness was a race issue or a class issue. Adolph Reed's excellent piece in The Nation, soon after Katrina, made some of the best points during the immediate, post-disaster reaction:

"Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for reconstructing the city."

More telling, however, than the struggle to determine the relationship between race and class in the whole affair, is how rapidly this political debate was eclipsed by an altogether different debate. Within a few weeks, once the immediate images of poor blacks struggling to find shelter faded off the front pages, and once the main papers had pushed inside the stories about how those who had evacuated could not return, or did not want to because there were no jobs or money for reconstruction, and because the city government was organizing reconstruction in a way that kept the poor and jobless out. Once these stories disappeared, it became socially acceptable to replace these issues, which raised awkward questions that most in the mainstream just didn't want to face, with a more familiar hobbyhorse: global warming.

Katrina factored heavily in Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, in which he claimed we would see more Katrina's in the future. In fact, even before his movie hit the theaters, and only a few weeks after the hurricane had hit New Orleans, Gore was already giving speeches about how the real lesson of Katrina is that we should "deal with the underlying causes of global warming." The lesson, then, was not underdevelopment and poverty in the most developed country on earth, it was not about social inequality and the long slow decline of so many American cities after the fiscal crisis of state and city governments in the 1970s - a decline that halted so many kinds of public investment. The lesson wasn't even really that a bit better investment in reinforcing the levees would have done the trick. No, that would have been too specific and appropriate to the tragedy. Instead, the most lasting interpretation of Katrina has been that it's a lesson in the perils of industrial development, and the rapidity with which we must move away from universalizing that goal to all areas and people - within and across nations.

This despite the fact that even Gore admitted that Katrina itself could not be blamed on global warming, as the effects of actually man-made warming are still too faint to be detected in extreme weather events like hurricanes. In fact, the science is even more ambiguous than that. Over at a new blog I discovered, there is a discussion of a recent scientific paper in the Journal of Climate, which warns against concluding that just because there have been a few stronger, landfalling hurricanes in the 1990s, that this will increase with global warming: "Although it would be inappropriate for us to suggest that there is no linkage between global warming and hurricanes, it’s similar inappropriate to summarily dismiss the role of natural cycles in hurricane behavior."

Really, I don't want to quibble over the science at that level, because it's not the most crucial point. What bothers me more is the way in which the global warming argument replaced the inequality discussion, and was used to draw exactly the opposite conclusions one might if one's major concern were poverty and underdevelopment. It would be better to remember what happened after Katrina as a social disaster, rather than a natural disaster. Social disasters demand political responses, rather than produce "moral imperatives." These are political responses that require us to think about the kinds of conflicts of interest, long-standing problems of social organization and inequality, which tend to get washed away in the blind panic about "moral imperatives to face global warming." Moreover, it is just more accurate to understand Katrina as a social disaster. Had New Orleans been richer, with a larger budget, and more politically engaged public, much of what happened could have been avoided, both because long-term problems (like strengthening levees) would not have been as severe, and short-term response would have been more effective. Indeed, asking so many cities in the third world not partake of the industrialization process that allows them to build dams and levees in the first place, only leaves them as or more vulnerable to hurricanes, no matter what their natural cause. If anything, concluding that Katrina teaches us the dangers of industrialization only threatens to repeat the tragedy, rather than help us go beyond it.