White Courtesy Telephone

Why I Return to New Orleans

This guest post was originally delivered as a sermon on November 14, 2010, by the  Reverend Dennis McCarty at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus, Indiana.  We publish it here with his permission.  The reading for the sermon is from an Associated Press article published on March 3, 2010, by Remy de la Mauviniere and Elaine Ganley.

To anyone who doesn’t actually live there, I suppose it does look like a recipe for disaster, to live in a city that’s below sea level. But it’s not that simple. For one thing—below sea level or not—this city is a major seaport. It has a population of a half-million people. Because it sits just a few miles upstream from the mouth of the largest river on the continent, it guards a very important waterway.

Even long ago, when people first began to live here, the land was barely above sea level. Centuries of human habitation, land development, and land reclamation have caused it to settle even more. Now, the lowest points of this city are twenty feet or more below sea level. In the past, storms blowing in off the sea, have caused major damage and loss of life. If the sea walls, water gates, and levees were to fail again, the death toll could be enormous. For that reason, I suppose it is natural that someone from an inland state would suggest that the citizens just leave this place to the elements and build somewhere else, on higher ground.

But again, it’s not all that simple. For one thing, there is no ground that’s much higher, not till you get many miles away. For another, more than a million people earn their livelihoods from the commerce, tourism, and manufacturing located in and around the city right where it is. And that’s not even counting the music, museums, educational centers, and festivals. So the people stay. They do the best they can. Oddly enough, they don’t seem worried by a situation we inlanders might see as nerve-wracking.

I’m not talking about New Orleans, though. Welcome to the Dutch city of Rotterdam, which for centuries has been the busiest, most successful seaport in the world. Nor is Rotterdam the only city besides New Orleans that lies below sea level. Twenty percent of the whole Netherlands—and twenty-one percent of the country’s population—live below sea level. Another thirty percent lie three feet or less above sea level. Any mildly healthy North Sea wave, looks down on more than half the country.

Philanthropic Market Alignment: Getting That Green, Green Feeling

Everything’s within the realm of plausibility as we gad about in our consumerist trance, sated with our latest purchases.  In a bid to corner the new “eco-tainment” market, Discovery is launching Planet Green, a channel that will forego a hard look at Man’s effect on the environment to present consumers with new product lines they can use to redecorate their homes in eco-friendly ways.  General Motors, maker of the nine-mile-per-gallon Hummer, is a lead advertiser and partner.

I believe that in contemporary parlance this is called “making philanthropic markets more efficient.”  It’s what happens when you attempt to align market demand with social benefit.  The alignment isn’t perfect in this case—is it ever?—but we can sweeten the deal by offering to save a square inch of Amazonian rainforest with each purchase of 100 gallons or more of gasoline.  With an Environmental Product® to which we can now dedicate our consumer dollars, we can make our other purchases with a clearer conscience.  And we can forego a fruitless search for the root causes of our present predicament since that too would likely end up being a waste of precious natural resources.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Plato’s Republic.  Far from electing philosopher kings, we’ve chained them deep inside the Cave along with the rest of us and made them watch the dance of shadows on the wall, now called the NBC Nightly News.  It’s not that we can’t turn our heads to see the puppetmasters, it’s that we simply choose not to: we might in that moment of aspiration miss the ad for an important new product that will change our lives.

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Disclaimer: Only recycled 1s and 0s were used in the machine code for this blog post.

Image source: Nunc Scio

Highway Robbery: Notes on the RS 2477 Land Grab

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I.  Enemies of the Motoring Public

As I drag my way out of a week in the Sierras and crawl up the nearest magazine rack, my vision obscured by hovering midges, I discover in the July/August issue of Mother Jones that I’ve been framed as an elitist enemy of the motoring public, a bugbear of the “non-hiking people.”*

A little known law, Revised Statute 2477, passed in 1866 to encourage development by granting rights-of-way on publicly owned lands, is being used by Washington-hating local officials and big industry lobbyists to stake road claims all over the western states.  Trails inside of wilderness areas and national parks are not exempt.

According to San Juan County (Utah) commissioner Lynn Stevens, who is championing an RS 2477 claim on a canyon leading to scenic Angel Arch, “These are cherished, beloved places among [local residents]. … It’s elitist to say if you can’t hike, you’re not entitled to have that beauty.”

The Bush administration is supporting many local claims, despite the fact that the feds are technically the defendants in these cases.

II.  The Big Gubmint Lockout

Last year, according to the Mother Jones article, the Blue Ribbon Coalition, “the voice of the American off-road rider,” sponsored an ad

featuring a trio of cigar-chomping gangsters aiming Tommy guns and wearing slouch hats labeled “Sierra Club” and “Wilderness Society.”  The headline read, “These guys wanna rub you out!  Their racket is to lock you out of YOUR public lands.”

This is a sobering reminder of the value-neutrality of the Third Sector, where one man’s tax deductible donation supports another man’s environmental nightmare.

WCT Technology Roundup II: Business Booms in Second Life, Darfur Goes Digital, and Manhattan Goes to Seed

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Business Booms in Second Life   The July/August 2007 issue of Technology Review has a feature article on the “Metaverse,” a proposed melding of Second Life (the virtual world created by Linden Labs) with Google Earth.  Users or their avatars will be able to move seamlessly between the two worlds, touring virtual real estate one minute and zooming down to catch the destruction in Darfur the next (see below).

You’ve read in these pages about the nonprofit presence in Second Life, but, not surprisingly, for-profit companies are also very well represented:

Dozens of companies, including IBM, Sony Ericsson, and American Apparel, have bought land in the virtual world, and most have already built storefronts or headquarters where their employees’ avatars can do business. ... In 2006, Starwood Hotels used Second Life as a virtual testing ground for a new chain of real-world hotels, called Aloft.  The company constructed a prototype where visitors could walk the grounds, swim in the pool, relax in the lobby, and inspect the guest rooms.  It’s incorporating suggestions from Second Lifers into the design of the first real Aloft hotel, set to open in Rancho Cucamonga, CA, in 2008.

An interesting idea from our colleagues in the for-profit world.

According to a recent article in Advertising Age, “Everyone from Starwood Hotels to American Apparel angled to score bragging rights on being the firsts in their respective industries (‘First hotel in Second Life!’ ‘First clothing brand in Second Life!’), until there came a point when it seemed to be news if a company wasn’t considering jumping into Second Life.”

Darfur Goes Digital   The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined forces with Google in a special mapping initiative called Crisis in Darfur.  This initiative enables Google Earth users to better visualize and understand the genocide in Darfur:

Witness the destruction for yourself. Using coordinates provided by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Google acquired high-resolution imagery over the region of Darfur and Eastern Chad. Now you can witness the destruction in Darfur via Google Earth. Zoom down and see what a burned village looks like from above, the vast tent cities of people displaced from their homes, and photographs on the ground of refugees struggling to survive. Read eyewitness testimony of atrocities in attacked villages.

“When it comes to responding to genocide, the world’s record is terrible,” says Museum director Sara J. Bloomfield.  “We hope this important initiative with Google will make it that much harder for the world to ignore those who need us the most.”

Manhattan Goes to Seed   The July 2007 issue of Scientific American interviews science writer Alan Weisman who has spent some time figuring out what would happen if all humans suddenly disappeared from the planet.  Without the constant intervention of human beings—street cleaners, road crews, pump operators, and others—our infrastructure would quickly crumble.  Water-logged foundations would corrode causing skyscrapers to fall, bringing other buildings down with them.  Rivers that once flowed through Manhattan would flow again, and the island would return to a state of nature in fairly short order.

Weisman’s thought experiment provides a new way for environmental activists to understand and communicate our impact on the environment.