Anthonares

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This picture shows a levee breached in the northern section of the city, adjacent to one of its navigation canals. Water is streaming into the city because it is, on average, below sea level. New Orleans is below sea level because it was built on the Mississippi Delta that is constantly sinking (subsiding) into the sea. The annual floods replenish those delta lands, but damage the city itself, so we built levees to keep them out. Those levees prevent any new mud and silt from building up New Orleans, so, short of jacking up the buildings a bit each year, New Orleans WILL eventually sink lower than any engineering marvel could save it.

I visited New Orleans back in late May, and found it to be an absolutely gorgeous city. Its food and traditions are what makes it great. Those are both signs of a vital, living community of people. Yet, New Orleans is a gorgeous, irreplaceable city that should not be. How many more years can we keep the waters back? Will it be a city-sized hole surrounding by 100-foot levees before we finally throw up our hands and say “Nature won this round!” We need a NEW New Orleans, built further back, higher up, and on more solid ground. The Old New Orleans (just Orleans) should be left to be reclaimed by the mud of the Mississippi. Its people will be starting afresh anyway, so why not put them somewhere where they can start a permanent life, rather than one made temporary by the next big hurricane to come through? But, of course it won’t be moved. And we will spend billions of dollars to rebuild it tomorrow, and billions more in the future to maintain something so completely mis-placed. But eventually, perhaps when sea level rises a few meters, New Orleans will return to the muddy waters from which we have carved its temporary existence.