Southern Bookman

New Orleans, environs threatened by environmental catastrophe

New Orleans again stands on the edge of environmental apocalypse.

The city hammered by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is now threatened by a new storm gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico. Thunderstorms Wednesday brought massive flooding to the low-lying city, including the French Quarter, which escaped Katrina's flooding.

The tropical storm that will be called Barry is expected to develop into a weak hurricane by the weekend. Hurricane warnings have been issued for the entire Gulf Coast. Barry's threat comes early in the hurricane season. There have only been three July hurricanes historically, all in the last 40 years, according to media reports.

The arrival of Barry comes as the Mississippi River stands at unusually high levels for this time of year. Heavy spring rainfall has raised the river's level to 16 feet at the Carrollton Avenue gauge, according to media reports.

Barry, if hits Louisiana, could bring up to 18 inches of rainfall, swelling the New Orleans river level to 20 feet or more, according to reports. That will put severe pressure on the levees that protect the city, as reported in a New Republic article.

A Corps of Engineers official expressed confidcnce that New Orleans' levees would hold, according to a wire story. But The Times-Picayune Advocate reported that water might overlap levees in the city's lower Ninth Ward, Algiers and St. Bernard Parish.

The threat from Barry comes after an environmentally ominous spring in which Mississippi River towns farther north suffered catastrophic flooding. The turgid Mississippi brought an increase of pollution washing downriver, threatening Louisiana's fisheries, as detailed in a Huffiington Post article.

The opening of the Bonnet Carre Spillway an unprecedented two times caused a heavy infusion of fresh water pouring into Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico.

The nutrient-rich chemical, hazardous and human waste carried by the heavy volume of river water led to a profusion of algae in the gulf, forcing the closure of Mississippi beaches. Scientists are also reporting an ominous rise in dolphin deaths, and an expected widening of the dead zone that develops each summer in the gulf.

With Barry gaining strength in the gulf, officials in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans have ordered a mandatory evacuation, while New Orleans officials are waiting to see what happens.

The evacuation of Plaquemines brought to mind a notorious historical catastrophe. As the momentous 1927 Mississippi River flood rushed toward the gulf, the levees were dynamited south of New Orleans to ease pressure on the city, as memorably recounted in John M. Barry's definitive book on the flood.

While New Orleans was spared, Plaquemines suffered devastating flooding. The memory of that event, evoked in Randy Newman's anthem "Louisiana 1927," persisted in rumors during Hurricane Katrina that the federal government intentionally blew up the levees around New Orleans so that poor people's neighborhoods would be destroyed to save rich white homes.But affluent Lakeshore neighborhoods also were inundated.

Plaquemines, one of the south Louisiana parishes losing land to the Gulf of Mexico at alarming rates, now hopes to avoid an echo of the 1927 debacle. And New Orleans prays it won't suffer a catastrophe like Katrina.

But even if New Orleans avoids devastation, the long-term threats of climate change and human pollution remain. Extreme weather will become a normal event.

 

Australian "coal hugger" takes unexpected victory

The global battle against climate change suffered another blow with the unexpected re-election of Australian prime minister Scott Morrison, a conservative notorious for his anti-environmental policies.

Goodbye, Great Barrier Reef. Like the Amazon rain forest, threatened by Brazil's hard-right president, you're going down.

Morrison's election had the Wall Street Journal's editorial page chortling Monday. Australian native Rupert Murdoch's newspaper seemed giddy over Morrison's unexpected win over the Labor Party. Polls had consistently predicted a victory for Labor and its anti-climate change policies. A WSJ news story called Morrison a "coal-hugger."

Like Brazil, Australia is a sensitive flashpoint for the world's environment. Its Great Barrier Reef shelters a multitude of oceanic species. The reef's slow death is a barometer of the rapidly intensifying effects of global warming.

Media reports claimed that Australian voters were worried that Labor's green intitiatives would hurt the economy. Voters don't appear to understand the economic devastation of extreme weather, drought, loss of wildlife habitat and other climate change disasters.

The Australian election is another sign that the world is refusing to heed a rising chorus of climate change alarms.

Widespread species extinctions threaten human existence, report warns

The dinosaurs were killed off by a meteor. Now, we are the meteor rapidly destroying life on Earth.

Human activity at its present rate will bring the extinction of a million plant and animal species, according to a U.N. report.

The extinctions are the largest in human history, the report found. Human life depends on the threatened ecosystems, the report warned.

While climate change exacerbates the loss of life, the primary causes come from human activity like deforestation, poaching, and overfishing.

Natural habitat is being lost at accelerating rates. In Thailand, rain forests are being turned into palm-oil plantations, devastating wildlife habitats. The death of coral reefs threatens marine diversity.

The report had a ray of hope. "Through transformative change, nature can still be conserved, restored and used sustainably," concluded Sir Robert Wilson, who led the research for the Intergovernmental Seience-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Such a transformative change will also be required to reduce carbon emissions and lessen the devastation of global warming.

Those sounding the alarm about climate change and widespread species extinctions keep saying that humanity has time to take action. Instead, the world accelerates faster and faster toward disaster.

 

Black hole mission a model for effort required to fight climate change

That black hole image was great.

Now, scientists need to get busy to find a solution to global warming.

As the Event Horizon mission revealed the dark orb's photo from 55 million light years away,  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that Alaska's March temperatures averaged 20 degrees higher than normal.

A high of 42 degees Farenheit, 30 degrees above the usual, was recorded on March 30 in Kotzebue, according to The New York Times.

Alaska's spring heat wave was the result of the Bering Sea losing its ice and the jet stream shifting to the south, the Times said, adding that the Arctic is experiencing more extreme temperature increases than any other region. That will bring more melting, and an escalating chain of climate change reactions.

If urgent action is not taken soon, climate change will reach its own event horizon, or point of no return.

The black hole image from the Messier 87 galaxy in the Virgo constellation emerged from a global network of telescopes, according to media reports. A young graduate student, Katie Bouman,  played a leading role in a team developing an algorithm to link the telescope data.

Such a concentrated global effort will be required to prevent the worst devastation from climate change.

But the Trump administration's climate change denial, support of fossil fuel industries and budget cuts to agencies like NOAA threaten humanity's future.

A sustained political, economic and scientific mobilization against climate change is needed or else our world will turn as desolate as a black hole swirling in space.

 

 

Elizabeth Kolbert investigates disappearance of Louisiana's coast

Louisiana loses a staggering amount of land to the Gulf of Mexico each hour. The disappearance of the state's coast is one of the world's most alarming environmental disasters.

Elizabeth Kolbert in a pessimistic article in the current New Yorker finds that control of the Mississippi River is the main cause of the state's rapid land loss.

Flood control and the need to keep the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans and Baton Rouge mean that the river no longer spreads sediment to build up the state's delta, as it did for thousands of years. The oil industry's cutting of canals through swamps and marshland worsened the crisis.

Kolbert reports on likely futile attempts to counter the land loss through engineering efforts to artificially boost sediment in places like Plaquemines Parish, where seawater now covers large areas where homes and businesses once stood.

Along with Kolbert's reporting, two maps shock with the realization that much of southern Louisiana is gone forever, and that New Orleans, already sinking, will be threatened by the gulf in not too many years. One map shows the old familiar boot-shaped Louisiana. The other shows the state today, with shredded slivers of land remaining in places like Plaquemines and Terrebonne Parish.

Kolbert's Louisiana reporting updates that done by legendary New Yorker writer John McPhee, who in a 1987 article examined control of the Mississippi. In homage to McPhee, Kolbert visits a central focus of his writing, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Old River Control Structure 80 miles north of Baton Rouge.

The corps keeps 70 percent of the Mississippi's water flowing toward New Orleans and Baton Rouge. As Kolbert details, following McPhee, the Mississippi, seeking a shorter distance to the gulf, wants to shift west into the Atchafalya River's channel. If the Mississippi made its break, Louisiana's two major ports would be left dry.

While two engineering projects are under way to restore land in Plaquemines, the states' relentless loss of land won't stop unless river control is ended. New Orleans' economy would be devastated, but the city already seems doomed to sink into the sea.

Kolbert stands among the most pessimistic environmental writers, seeing human's alteration of nature as irreversible. She takes a broad view, citing the term "global change," rather than just changes in the climate.

With overpopulation, humans now outstrip the body weight of other vertebrates combined, she says. Along with rising species extinctions, she cites threats from humans' dominance of the globe: atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication (the spread of chemicals to waterways, causing algae blooms, etc.). "These are just some of the byproducts of our species' success," she says.

So much for the joys of baseball's opening day.

While GOP loons like Sen. Mike Lee mock the Green New Deal with claims such as that it would remove airplanes, that's the kind of decisive action needed if humans are to escape the worst of "global change." We might not be able to afford air transportation any longer.

Alas, Kolbert takes a dark view of humanity's prospects.

"At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us - nearly eight billion - and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."

Impracticable or nor, it's time for massive action.

 

 

Happy birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I remember my first visit to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore. It was one of those San Francisco nights, cool and breezy, a festive crowd packing the North Beach sidewalks.

The lighted sign City Lights thrilled me. I'd made a quest to come to one of the nation's literary shrines. After joyful moments browsing the shelves, I purchased Jackson Bate's biography of John Keats.

Ferlinghetti, pacifist sage, poet and novelist, bookseller and publisher, turned 100 on Sunday. His birthday has inspired an outpouring of appreciative articles, including an engaging Paris Review interview.

The San Francisco he came to in the 1950s has all but vanished, except for his space on Columbus Avenue on North Beach. He published Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and defeated obscenity charges. He was there along with Jack Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth and others when Ginsberg read "Howl" at a place on Fillmore that is now something else, maybe a bank, or a hardware store.

While Ferlinghetti is associated with the beats, his career has encompassed broader vistas. Educated in France, he acclaims French writers like Baudelaire, Appollinaire and Rimbaud. Notable collections he's published include Frank O'Hara's New York-colored "Lunch Poems."

Now, San Francisco is packed with Silicon Valley millionaires. The old charming landscape rising from the bay is overrun with towering skyscrapers, built on bad foundations.

In Washington, the neocons and chickenhawks are back in charge. Unlike them, the pacifist Ferlinghetti served in the military, a veteran of D-Day.

Ferlinghetti's blind now, and no longer makes many public appearances. But his mind remains sharp, furnished with memories of all that he's seen and shared with the world. He still speaks out against the real estate developers, the forces of gentrification, those crushing the city's creative spirit.

A huge crowd of well-wishers packed City Lights for a birthday celebration Sunday. They filled the Columbus Avenue sidewalk, and flowed into Jack Kerouac Alley next to the magical, book-crammed landmark.

Ferlinghetti's "A Coney Island of the Mind" is one of the best-selling poetry books in history. His poems display a playfulness of language, an affirmation of the spirit, that arise within a man who saw the carnage on the Normandy beaches.

He moved to San Francisco when he was a young man, seeing the city as America's last frontier.

Those who turned out to honor Ferlinghetti Sunday give hope that it's not yet gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gwinnett shows its colors, rejects MARTA expansion

Gwinnett civic leaders thought Tuesday night's MARTA election would be close, but county voters once again soundly rejected the transit system's expansion into Georgia's second-most populated county.

“I was surprised,” Gwinnett Commission Chair Charlotte Nash said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I thought it would be closer. I thought that if it failed it would be closer to 50-50.”

Like the Georgia Democratic Party, MARTA supporters in Gwinnett counted on younger, more diverse voters. But once again, the millennials' turnout fell behind that of older residents determined to fight off another progressive invasion.

The conservative opposition proved better organized and more strategic than the county's business and political community. According to reports, robocalls claimed that MARTA was planning to build hundreds of apartments, which presumably would be filled with young socialistic Democratic voters. Older county residents' anti-tax attitudes also made a difference, according to statements made to the AJC by those who voted "no."

With such sophisticated opposition, transit supporters might wonder whether the Koch brothers were involved, as they were in defeating transit elections in Nashville. The Gwinnett referendum added to a disturbing trend of voters ignoring the ravages of climate change. Voters in environmental Democratic presidential candidate Jay Inslee's Washington state rejected a carbon tax proposal, even after devastating fires in California.

Long a bastion of suburbanites who associate Atlanta and MARTA with blacks and crime, Gwinnett has now rejected MARTA expansion three times, the last before Tuesday night in 1990. The county's population has tripled since then, with an influx of younger Democratic voters who have shaken the GOP's longtime control of the county.

But as with statewide Democratic candidates, MARTA will wait for a promised golden future. According to political observers, the county will vote again on transit in 2020.

Georgia's Democratic Party, as led by defeated gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, still receiving national media acclaim, place their hopes on younger ethnic voters moving into the state. But the rush of new residents to metro Atlanta has slowed, according to a recent AJC article. And young voters don't participate in elections as older generations do.

Young voters consider the voting process too cumbersome, beginning with registration. Standing in line, showing an i.d., and making election decisions is too difficult when they can be posting photos on Instagram. Perhaps the tide will turn if smartphone voting is ever allowed. Grim Republicans like Mitch McConnell and the GOP-packed courts will only shake their heads at that.  A big negative is that such a system likely would be even more vulnerable to Russian manipulation.

Gwinnett's threatened GOP leaders moved the MARTA referendum from the November general election ballot to Tuesday's stand-alone vote to suppress turnout. A total of 91,921 voters participated, a 17 percent turnout. The referendum lost by 7,951 votes, according to media reports.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your SUVs. The county's 900,000 residents will continue to use their cars and trucks to go to work, to shop, to have fun. They rejected a 1-cent sales tax for MARTA so that they can sit in traffic.

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin stood before a small but appreciative audience at Emory University's Woodruff Library, shining in his own radiance.

White-haired and benevolent, the aged poet remained boyishly handsome. His humor and joy as he read his poems revealed a man who had achieved wholeness, or holiness. His serenity reflected an abiding love for nature and humanity.

Yet, his earthiness and recollections of life in London and Paris as a young poet showed he was not a mystic who had shunned life's pleasures. His poems, a bit inert for me on the page, rose in intensity as he read, transfixing  his listeners.

A Zen Buddhist, Merwin wrote poems that captured brief moments of beauty and encounters with nature. In his long and creative life, he sought to regain our lost harmony with the world. While I didn't have a deep connection with his poems, I prized their simple language that ranged from philosophical rhetoric to revelation.

Merwin, who died last week at age 91, was one of the last links to the golden age of American poetry after World War II. W.H. Auden selected him for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1953, and Merwin fondly remembered his friendship with the young Sylvia Plath. After living in Europe for a few years, Merwin joined Boston's vibrant poetry scene that included Robert Lowell, Peter Davison, Richard Wilbur and others.

Later, he moved to the Hawaiian island of Maui and replenished exhausted land that had once been a pineapple plantation, planting varieties of palm trees from around the world. While he cultivated his small section of paradise along with his wife, he spoke out against climate change and environmental devastation, while publishing a steady stream of poems.

Later in his career, he didn't use punctuation, believing that interfered with the flow of his language. I was skeptical about that, recalling how Shakespeare and others enhanced their work through punctuation, but accepted Merwin's stance as one of the quirks of an original mind.

Along with the Emory reading, I encountered Merwin once in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, overlooking an urban wasteland of fast-food restaurants, service stations, chain stores and traffic-clogged streets.

As that unfolded below, I came upon a public TV documentary on Merwin and his ecological work in Hawaii. Merwin's calm voice coming from the color TV affirmed that his way of life would prevail.

 

Spring arrives on Valentine's day

On Valentine's morning, birds flocked outside my window.

English poets Geoffrey Chaucer, Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare wrote in their love poems that birds began mating on Valentine's Day. Even in that colder time, when winter seemed to last forever, birds arrived in mid-February, chirping songs of spring.

Now, with climate change, trees bloom several weeks earlier than 20 or 30 years ago. Trees in flower already line Atlanta's streets. Buds have broken out on our tulip tree that once bloomed the first week of March.

Covering the Georgia Legislature a few years ago, I never heard climate change mentioned. The legislators were busy killing a tax exemption for electric cars.

Nor is any climate change action being taken this session. Climate change denial prevails at the gold-plated Georgia Capitol. Savannah and Georgia's barrier islands will sink as seas rise, but not even a study committee has been formed.

Valentine's Day used to give relief from winter. Now, it marks the arrival of spring.

 

 

 

Green New Deal stirs conservative opposition

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey's "Green New Deal" has kicked over the conversatives' hornet nest.

The Wall Street Journal's editorial page Tuesday morning took aim at the Democratic progressives' plan, claiming that it is a pretext for governmental control of the economy. That echoed the loathsome columnist Ross Douthat, whose hold on New York Times op-ed space is a mystery.

New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait was correct in criticizing the plan as too expansive. It was a mistake to tie climate change policy to broader economic aims like universal Medicare. The Democratic Party needs a more targeted plan to battle climate change.

But the conservatives seem to believe that the country and world's carbon dependency can continue. Recent studies have concluded that the world has about 10 years to take action to prevent climate change's worst outcomes. To stop a catastrophic rise in temperatures, the world must make fundamental economic changes, shifting to renewable energy.

Economists like The New York Times' Paul Krugman say that the shift can be done without major economic disruptions, which sounds too optimistic. But the Wall Street Journal and Douthat want the world to keep speeding toward disaster.