Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina

SECTION 1

Coping with Disaster

Amy Koritz

WHEN I RETURNED TO NEW ORLEANS in January 2006, Richard Campanella was one of the first people I found at my university who was actively engaged in studying and supporting recovery efforts. As a geographer who is fascinated with the intersection of physical and cultural space, Rich had been cruising the city on his bicycle, counting business openings and documenting other signs of recovery. He had also been following the public controversy over whether or not the city of New Orleans should reduce its footprint, consolidating the smaller population it now had on higher ground. His scientific training gave him an acute appreciation for the discouraging data on soil subsidence and wetlands loss that made all of South Louisiana more vulnerable to hurricanes. At the same time, he knew from his study of the history of New Orleans how deeply attached its people are to this place. His thinking about how to adjudicate the competing imperatives of science and home led finally to an op-ed piece in the local paper. This column both challenged the data being used by those, such as the geologist Timothy M. Kusky, who argued that New Orleans was too vulnerable to natural disaster to justify rebuilding at all and acknowledged the often irrational nature of the stance that argued for rebuilding all of New Orleans exactly where it was before the storm.¹ Coming from a discipline itself torn between the hard sciences and the softer end of the social sciences, he used all the tools available to him as a geographer to try to gain an understanding of the complexity of the civic engagement after Katrina. He also knew that these tools alone were not enough.

Richard Campanella inhabits the creative margins of the university. His primary appointment is in an interdisciplinary research center focused on the environment, where disciplinary turf is not defended quite so vigorously as elsewhere. Both Pat Evans and Sarah Lewis likewise occupy ancillary locations within the complex bureaucracy of higher education. Sarah is a graduate student. Engaged in an apprenticeship by turns inspiring and disillusioning, she hopes to one day join the ranks of tenure-line professors and thereby move into serving the central educational mission of higher education. Pat Evans's background and current position are altogether different. She has never held an academic appointment, does not hold a terminal degree in any discipline, and has taken a career path that violates all professional decorum. Pat has managed political campaigns, produced documentary films, worked in government agencies, and participated in efforts to mediate ethnic strife in Cyprus and the Baltic. She eventually returned to New Orleans and founded the International Project for Non-profit Leadership. Although it is housed in the University of New Orleans, this program's focus is on building the capacities of nonprofit and community-based organizations.

A native New Orleanian with family roots in the city that go back generations, Pat felt personally the horrible loss of memories, histories, places, and people that afflicted New Orleans. I first met her at a meeting of Unified Non-profits, a sort of support group for people working in the nonprofit sector that emerged after the storm to provide a place to exchange information, leads on jobs, funding, or space and to share the pain of caring for too many needs with too few resources. Pat and I were often the only people from higher education in the room. But this is not to suggest that those in the local universities were disengaged. Many were, like us, trying to use the tools we had to get the work done that we saw before us. One of these was Michael Mizell-Nelson. Trained as a historian, he felt an imperative to document and preserve the massive dislocations unfolding before him. In establishing the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, a collaboration with the Center for History and New Media, Michael attempted to provide a location to house the vast array of stories, images, and experiences that make up Katrina's legacy in New Orleans. He had earlier written and produced a documentary film on the history of the streetcar lines in the city and was familiar with the use of digital technologies in archiving and distributing historical information for public use. My memory of reconnecting with him following the storm consists of several informal, almost random conversations, episodes in the struggle many of us back in the city faced in finding the place in its recovery that would allow our skills to best serve the needs of our communities. The difficulty of achieving this match was often extraordinary. Some of this frustration emerges in Michael's essay as he describes the problems he and his colleagues faced in locating funding for their work while managing the financial, physical, and emotional challenges of putting their lives back together in a ruined city.

In some ways, those academics whose area of research focused on New Orleans prior to the storm benefited from the disaster. What previously looked like a local and parochial interest suddenly took on national importance. For many local professors, however, the work they pursued post-Katrina was really a mode of coping with tragedy. We fell back on what we knew how to do as the vehicle for our response to a community in crisis. Sometimes this work became therapeutic, enabling us to deal constructively with our own sense of loss and lack of control over our environment. Scholarly and creative productivity merged with personal and social needs to engage, get out of ourselves, and contribute something that made sense to us. Rebecca Mark's long poem/prose composition detailing the evacuation of her family blends the poet's commitment to emotional truth with the historian's need to bear witness. One section of a series of “Katrina Poems” written in 2005 and 2006, this piece details the confusing, stressful reality of having to remake one's life on an almost daily basis as the storm and its aftermath unfolded. The trajectory of her family's movement—east, north, west, then east and north again—was replicated in many variations by thousands of the displaced. It is hard to recover the deep uncertainty that afflicted this population in the weeks and months immediately following the levee breaches. Rebecca's piece reminds us that civic engagement is the work of individuals with families, relatives, homes, pets—the complicated personal webs that each of us inhabits.

The essays in this section reflect modes of coping with disaster that vary with the personalities, professional skills, intellectual interests, and personal circumstances of the contributors. They embody the diversity of languages and experiences the authors brought with them to that disaster and therefore also a multiplicity of ways of making sense of worlds being remade by it before their eyes. The scope and meaning of civic engagement in the wake of Katrina encompasses all of these perspectives. It includes the clearheaded scholarship of Rich Campanella. It embraces the impassioned mixture of professional imperatives with personal outrage and loss conveyed by Sarah Lewis, Pat Evans, and by Michael Mizell-Nelson. It also acknowledges the need to bear creative witness to the individual experience of dislocation found in Rebecca Mark's contribution. These selections embody most closely the tension between the scholarly protocols of analytic distance and the passionate immediacy of circumstance that often motivates civic engagement.

NOTE

1. An expanded version of this piece appeared as Richard Campanella, “Geography, Philosophy, and the Build/No-Build Line.” Technology in Society 29, no. 2 (April 2007): 169–72.