Nature Bats Last: Some Recent Works on Technology and Urban Disaster

Since the destruction in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina last August/September, I have pondered the strained links among cities, technologies, and catastrophes. In this I am probably like millions of other people. The only difference is that a few years ago I wrote a history of New Orleans's relationship with the Mississippi. So, when Katrina made landfall, some people wanted to hear my thoughts. Despite being wrong—repeatedly—I became an instapundit, writing about the disaster in the press and talking about it on television. It was jarring, having my ideas become so public so quickly.

More unsettling, though, was my publisher's request to produce a new "post-Katrina" preface to my book. Ideally, she said, it should be in the sort of journalistic prose style that I use for my more popular writing. With New Orleans still under water, I quickly said yes, not really thinking through the implications. What resulted was an odd document, a hybrid between a short-form magazine essay and an introduction to a scholar's book. I did my best. But I now realize that I came up wanting in important ways. What I created, I think, was far more a historical document, a chronicle of my views of unfolding news, than good history. I was stricken by the reports coming out of New Orleans. I could not step back. Worse still, I was too naive to realize how caught up I was in the moment. I should have done what historians do when they don't have ready answers for hard questions: read history.

In the aftermath of that experience, Technology and Culture kindly offered me the chance to write a review essay about the literature on urban disasters. What follows is my effort to do that. I have not tried to be comprehensive. Instead, I have chosen five books that I think might help readers understand Katrina: John McPhee's Control of Nature, Craig Colten's Unnatural Metropolis, Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear, Philip Fradkin's The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906, and Lawrence Vale and Thomas Campanella's Resilient City.¹ Writing this essay has certainly allowed me to organize my own thinking on the subject. Unfortunately, I cannot go back and rewrite the preface to my book, which will have to stand on its own merits. What I can do is suggest how these books, read in concert, suggest precedents for the Katrina debacle, even for the leveling of great cities. Each documents an overreliance on technology, a belief in artifice's ability to tame nature. This deep faith, no matter how misplaced, has permeated American history. And the consequences have been severe, with the bill yet again coming due in New Orleans. On the one hand, I find these authors' insights somewhat hopeful; I am sustained by the idea that history can help us to grapple with seemingly incomprehensible events. But I cannot help but wonder how it is that we seem to have learned so little from our past.

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New Orleans used to be a sort of American Amsterdam: romantic, architecturally alluring, and entirely dependent on flood-control technologies for its survival. Much of the city, as we learned during Hurricane Katrina, lies below sea level. A ring of artificial levees, likely now the nation's most notorious public works, is the only thing keeping the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain from flowing downhill into it. This technological fix, even when it works, brings its own problems to a place that has a high water table and no natural drainage. Because of the levees' growth through the years, it has become ever harder to get water out of New Orleans once it finds its way in. Every drop of rain must be pumped over the embankments. And so the city relies on even more technology: hundreds of miles of drainage canals and a network of huge pumps...