Reflections on Distance and Katrina

Jim Igoe
U Colorado Health Sciences Center

When Katrina struck New Orleans I was teaching at the College of African Wildlife Management in Tanzania. My colleagues were astounded by the media images that portrayed the people of New Orleans in the same ways that they were used to seeing Africans affected by famine and war: helpless victims, far away and fundamentally different from the viewer, and responsible for their own condition. Their sentiments were echoed by media commentators who referred to New Orleans as “Third World,” no longer recognizable as part of the US. While seeing these images caused me a great deal of anxiety and despair, like most Americans I ultimately turned my attention to more immediate concerns.

Distancing From a Distance
Unlike most Americans, however, my more immediate concerns had to do with a research project that examined the impacts of neoliberal reforms on conservation in Africa. My experience during this research, followed by a retreat of the environmental leadership program on rebuilding New Orleans, gave me a unique perspective on the conditions that I witnessed when I visited the city. The parallels I saw between the experiences of my Tanzanian informants and the people I met in Louisiana are instructive for understanding how the current neoliberal world order shapes people’s lives and perceptions of their relationship to the environment.

The people I worked with in Tanzania had been displaced by networks of private enterprise, NGOs and government officials. The poor were shunted about to make room for these more profitable concerns. As one of my informants put it: “It’s like this isn’t my country. I’m not a citizen of anywhere. Wherever I go they say you can’t stay here.” The two New Orleanders I sat with on my flight to New Orleans described their experiences in very similar terms: “We were like refugees in our own country. Nobody cared and they still don’t care. As far as the government is concerned, we aren’t even citizens.”

From Tanzania to Louisiana and Back Again
Both the displacements I documented in Tanzania and the displacements of people in New Orleans were the latest in a series of such instances over a long span of history. In my research area of Tanzania, there are people who have long genealogies of descendents also displaced by commercial farms, urban sprawl and state-sponsored protected areas. Often these people did not give up their land willingly or with full understanding to whom their lands were being transferred or for what purposes.

This message stood in front of a house in New Orleans. From homemade street signs to expressions of disgust, this sort of self-expression abounds throughout the city, though it is given little media attention. Photo courtesy of Brad Guy, President, Building Reuse Materials Association and Senior Fellow, Environmental Leadership Program

The displacements of people in New Orleans were a media spectacle, which made them appear dramatic and abrupt. As Craig Colton demonstrates in his book Unnatural Metropolis, however, the displacements of poor New Orleanders have a long history. Like my informants in Tanzania, poor, and especially black, New Orleanders were gradually pushed into increasingly marginal areas, which ultimately proved uninhabitable. Well in advance of the storm, gentrification and big box retailers displaced many into the lower-lying areas that were flooded by Katrina.

There are many other parallels between the displacements of peoples in these two places and their links to neoliberalism and the environment. Among those I observed is the role of corporations. During Katrina, the white, working-class community of Chalmette was covered in a million gallon oil spill. This occurred as a direct result of Murphy Oil failing to follow its own emergency preparedness procedures. Many of these residents were persuaded without full informed consent into signing “inconvenience settlements,” stating that they held Murphy Oil blameless for any health problems that any household member might experience in the future in exchange for a one-time payment of $15–20 thousand. They were then relocated by FEMA to trailers across the street from Chalmette Refining LLC, a joint venture between Exxon Mobil and Venezuela’s national oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA. As those involved with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade project note, Chalmette Refining LLC had received over 1,000 citations for carcinogenic emissions violations prior to the placement of FEMA trailers.

Exxon Mobil is also sponsoring part of conservation interventions initiated by the African Wildlife Foundation. Like residents of St Bernard, local people targeted by this intervention are being encouraged by the African Wildlife Foundation and the Tanzanian government to enter into agreements and sign things that they do not fully understand. This process transforms these landscapes from peopled landscapes to those dominated by wildlife, which has made them attractive to private investors at the expense of locals. It also provides Exxon Mobil, and many other corporations that sponsor conservation interventions, with tax breaks and a valuable green public image enhancement.

The Sublime, the Abject and the Other
This connection between neoliberalism, environmentalism and displacement of people is deeper than it first appears. In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground, William Cronon argues that the Western obsession with protecting distant and exotic places undermines effective conservation. The sublimity of these landscapes allows people who visit or consume images of them to transcend their daily lives. Unfortunately, this transcendent experience draws people’s attention away from more proximate and mundane landscapes and the impacts of their more mundane activities on the environment.

The view from the front of a FEMA trailer in the trailer park created directly across the road from the Chalmette Refinery and the very smokestack that has been the subject of over 1,000 carcinogenic emissions violations. Photo courtesy of Morgan Innes, Communications and Technology Coordinator of Environmental Leadership Program

The subdivisions of Chalmette and the inner-city neighborhoods of New Orleans would certainly have qualified as proximate and mundane in the eyes of most Americans. In the aftermath of Katrina, however, they were radically transformed. If they were “Third World,” they were no longer proximate. They were not exotic, but neither were they mundane. Instead of being sublime, they became abject. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines that which is abject as abhorrent and outside society’s boundaries. However, the abject also threatens those boundaries and the social order they protect.

The conceptual “Third Worlding” of New Orleans allowed more fortunate Americans to distance themselves from the events unfolding on television, but it took troops with “shoot to kill orders” to maintain physical distance between the suddenly abject people of New Orleans and more affluent communities on the west bank of the Mississippi. The media portrayal of people in New Orleans as insatiable looters, instead of people trying to survive under nearly impossible circumstances, created a sense that these were people who deserved whatever they got, and unworthy of sympathetic help.
The abject and the sublime define the parameters of a neoliberal world order that appears as safe and predictable for the more fortunate, but only by concealing how what we do impacts other people and the environment. We live in a world where an environmentally destructive corporation can putatively save the world by supporting wilderness preservation in Africa. In this world it is possible to believe that people suffered and perished at the Superdome because they made poor choices, such as not leaving New Orleans when they had the chance to leave, not because they were poor people. Of course this perspective ignored that evacuation plans were premised on the idea that everyone would have access to a private car and someplace else to go.

A New World Order
In this new world order, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the restructuring of the Tanzanian economy operate according to the same logics and strategies, whereby the social contract between sovereign states and citizens is abandoned in favor of economic growth driven by private investment. New Orleans downsizes its teachers and many other public servants at a time when they are most needed. The Tanzanian government, in cooperation with transnational NGOs and investors, takes away land from locals and tells them that their only way out of poverty is to become junior partners in conservation-oriented business ventures on grossly unfavorable terms. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that residents of both Tanzania and New Orleans suspect they are no longer citizens vested with rights. Meanwhile, the abject creeps ever closer to the front doors of those of us fortunate enough to have been spared till now, while the sublime is infected by the likes of Exxon Mobil.

This message was spray painted on the side of a house in St Bernard District, the area affected by the Murphy’s oil spill. Even in this predominantly white suburban neighborhood people have spray painted on the sides of their house to express their disgust and despair. Graffiti on a neighboring house read “Damaged by Katrina, Ruined by Murphy’s Oil.” Photo courtesy of Morgan Innes, Communications and Technology Coordinator of Environmental Leadership Program

These transformations have obvious and significant implications for the ways in which we conceptualize human rights and social justice. Social scientists have an important role in this reconceptualization. A large part of this role is to better understand the nature of the order that I have briefly described here, as part of its nature is to conceal its nature. An equally crucial element of this role will hinge upon our effectiveness at communicating our insights and recommendations to the broader public and decision-makers. If anything positive is to come from the tragedies that followed in the aftermath of Katrina, it will be that we will not squander the opportunities they present us to learn and teach about the human and environmental costs of our everyday lives and to begin taking appropriate action.

Jim Igoe is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado at Denver.