The Fragility of Natural and Human Culture in New Orleans
David B. Schwartz3/30/08
“Culture,” the social philosopher Ivan Illich once said, “is that which holds the economy at bay.” A culture says that here in this place we do things in this particular way, we live in this particular way, which we hold above the measure of money alone. It is the unique, local way in which we “face illness, suffering, and death.” Here we eat in a certain way, live in a certain way, create in a certain way. “When a culture perishes,” Margaret Mead once wrote, it is a terrible loss for the world:
Human cultures are the most distinct creations of human beings, drawing as they do not only upon the special contributions of the singularly gifted, but upon the imagination, explicit and implicit, of every man, woman, and child who live within them, and through them, and who, each generation, remodel the traditions they have received from their cultural ancestors. But although human cultures are the most distinctive creations of the human, they are also the most fragile, for they live primarily in the habituated beings of living persons. Like a dance, for which the music and choreography have never been written down, a great part of human culture is lost to humanity when the group which has carried it, devotedly, in every word or gesture, is dispersed, or destroyed, or forsakes the traditional ways for ways which are new.*
One might think of the borders of a culture as a kind of levee holding back the sea of monetary economics which drives the modern world. Standing in New Orleans’ lower ninth ward I could see where the material and cultural levees failed in hurricane Katrina, and the scraped and barren ruins left in the wake of that breach. I stood where an enormous Mississippi barge, surfing a wall of water, scoured a living neighborhood from the face of the earth, taking a big part of a musical culture with it.
I was shown around the lower 9th by my old friend Richard Waller, a conservationist and volunteer with Common Ground, a visionary and unusual community organization operating out of a tiny house stuffed with 50 college students. They were stacked in bunkbeds, using one bathroom and a garden hose for a shower. The students and the organization’s leadership were there to try to do what they could for those who had called the lower 9th home. Richard’s own focus was not in house reconstruction, but in attempting to restore the wetlands whose slow death over decades had allowed the full force of wind and storm surge to strike unmoderated from the Gulf of Mexico.
“This neighborhood,” Richard gestured, “once had the highest percentage of home ownership by African-American people in the entire United States.” If one listened to mere reports on the news, one would assume that Katrina had washed away some kind of impoverished slum. But this was far from the case. This marginal, below sea-level land was once home to a unique culture whose art has spread throughout the world. These streets gave birth to the blues. It gave birth to jazz. It held the home of the legendary jazzman Fats Domino, who had to be pried away from his beloved piano by his family as the water rose. It’s a good thing, because when the levee broke his piano submerged under fifteen feet of water. It stayed for three weeks. The few remaining houses, scattered here and there across now open lots, still retained numbers spray-painted by national guard troops showing the number of bodies to be removed. There were 1600.
Why did art flourish here? What was so rich about this soil that such creativity emerged? One thing that was unusual about this neighborhood was what they did with their small homes. And they were small – tiny, in fact, by modern American standards. Most of these modest homes did not even have air-conditioning despite its near, humid subtropical climate. While almost everyone in an American suburb strives virtually ceaselessly to pay mortgages, car loans, and increasing improvements, something which requires two incomes to support even with effort, people in the lower 9th part of the “Big Easy” took quite a different approach. With many houses handed down and paid for, often only part-time jobs – even as musicians – were needed. They chose the luxury of time over productivity. With only part-time effort required to secure an acceptable roof over their heads, they could sit on their porches, drink some beer on a hot afternoon, play music, and sing. We are told by anthropologists that “primitive” tribes, including some still existing today, spent and spend much less time securing food and shelter than people in modern societies. In the modern world, work without end is taken to an extreme. Yet right in America, in a Southern city which was home to a community of free slaves even during the civil war, a certain traditional way of living persisted even into the beginning of the 21st century. Persisted, that is, until the levee broke.
Why did the levee break? In a phrase, the war against culture and the war against nature are the same thing. Richard took me out to the edge of the wetlands bordering New Orleans. Walking through piles of rusted steel from depots supplying offshore oil derricks, we came to the indistinct boundary between land and water. “They say down here that when God was trying to decide whether to make this part of the world land or sea, he finally decided upon - neither,” Richard said. You could see where the hurricane had torn up vast swatches of wetland grass, leaving reflective pools of open water that presented no resistance to winds and storm-surges. It was this grass that Richard and his teams of student volunteers were replanting from grasses sprouted in children’s blue wading pools. It seemed an inspiring effort, against overwhelming need.
But what was of greatest importance in that wind-swept place was not what you could see, but what you couldn’t. What was not there to be seen were the endless cypress and hardwood forests that within recent memory covered the spot where we were standing, as far to the north as one could see.
The previous day Richard showed my son and I through such an intact cypress swamp. Tall cypress trees with their characteristic “knees” emerged from the ground that was neither solid nor liquid, in the way that cypresses are particularly adapted to flourish in. Around their roots, a rich and complex ecosystem flourished, too: tall grasses, wild irises in bloom, seemingly somnolent alligators, and more snakes – mostly venomous brown cottonmouths, than I had ever seen anywhere. The boggy land practically squirmed with them. Although the swamp had been hit by Katrina too, here miles of established wetland vegetation had helped to muffled the blow.
It was only as long ago as when Richard and I were in high school that the Army Corps of Engineers had carved a canal through a swamp just like this to make barge traffic from the Mississippi to the Gulf more efficient – and profitable. It was called, by it’s acronym, “Mr. Go.” This immense and destructive undertaking had never turned out to be useful – it was now being decommissioned - but one thing that it did accomplish was to let the salty water of the Gulf up into the freshwater swamp. This breaching of an invisible biological levee caused the death of the forests, and the grasses, and the ecosystem itself. When the hurricane swept through this wasteland, the man-made levees failed. When they did, the culture of the lower ninth ward went under.
While much is made about how governmental systems failed in the emergency, the failure of technology is hardly a surprise. Louisiana is, too, hardly Holland, where an efficient system sticks its technological thumb in the first trickle of a leak. Here there was a pumping station that, unmaintained, failed to start when remotely signaled. We admired the massive concrete construction of a watertight door made to swing shut over a railroad cut in case of flood. Also remotely activated, it was disabled by rusty chains and padlocks. It was like chaining shut an emergency exit. You would have to wade out there with a key to get the thing closed in a hurricane.
Cypress swamps need no activation. They just need to be there. To claim that global warming spawned a killer hurricane is just a fragment of the story. All aspects of nature manifest boundaries that define inside from outside. They may be a cell wall, or a saline differential or a cultural boundary of language, of art, of ways of living. They are all levees that hold the economy at bay, to use Illich’s terms. For it is the unlimited workings of a freemarket economy that is the sea that ultimately covers them all. It starts with the death of a wetlands, proceeds to the collapse of man-made levees, and ends with the death of a culture. Standing in the remains of the lower 9th ward, where concrete steps punctuating blank grassy fields are all that remain of a community, you can walk the lonely streets and strain to hear a single blues note.
When the levee broke in the lower 9th, the storm had passed. It was a bright, blue-skied day. Everyone but the meteorologists, whose accurate warnings were ignored by politicians and the news media, breathed a sign of relief. When the levee gave way, it was like the proverbial Flood.
The legendary urbanologist Jane Jacobs published a book describing how cities really worked at about the same time that the “Mr. Go” canal was dredged. Called The Death and Life of American Cities, its original title was this: Why the Planners Are Wrong. While planners like New York’s Robert Moses sat in high towers marking neighborhoods for demolition and replacement by public works, Jane Jacobs pushed her small children in a stroller through streets and parks, noticing the cultural ecology of people as carefully as Richard observes the ecology of botanical nature. In New Orleans, you can see in dramatic form why human planning always fails to equal the intelligence of the natural world, a world that encompasses cells and people alike.
When Ivan Illich first encountered the word “planning,” which emerged in the language for the first time as the canal’s dredging operations, he was puzzled at his meaning. He went to visit his old friend theologian Jacques Maritan. Did he have any idea what that word meant? As Illich told the story, Maritan sat back in his study and reflected a bit. Then he responded. “I believe,” he replied carefully, “that it is a new word for the sin of presumption.” A more common word for presumption is hubris; the sin that is inexorably followed by nemesis. It is believing, as Illich used to observe, that man can do what God cannot.
Pulling out of Common Ground’s makeshift nursery with a load of idealistic college students and sprigs of seagrass, Richard heads out for a day of wading in the mud planting single stalks of grass against an ocean. He is cheered by these students, who are flocking to New Orleans to help. He’s one of the few “greybeards” among them. He’s been through this kind of thing before. He believes that it is particularly good that they are here, because New Orleans shows them first-hand what the world that they are going to be living in will increasingly look like. New Orleans, he speculates, is merely the first American city to fall to global warming. They can get a good look at what they are going to have to deal with as adults.
Pushing a CD into the dashboard player, he punches up his favorite current song, Bob Dylan’s 1983“Blind Willie McTell.” Dylan looks out the window of his New Orleans hotel and sings homage to the man he considers the finest blues singer of them all, a man who drew upon the traditions of the Delta. Dylan’s song comes out of the pickup’s tinny speakers:
Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
There’s no money in singing the blues. And there is no money in restoring wetlands. But that doesn’t stop these people. Cautioning his volunteers against alligators, snakebite, and sunburn, Richard wades out with his crew to plant the grass he has grown from seed divisions.
* Mead, Margaret, Foreword, in Zborowski and Herzog, Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl, New York, Schocken, 1973, p. 11.
Common Ground is a nonprofit community organization founded by Malik Rahim. It welcomes volunteers and contributions http://www.commongroundrelief.org/
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