Donald Worster's Levees Analysis

Donald Worster introduces a framework for analyzing environmental history along the three dimensions of culture, social organization, and nature, which can be used to investigate how the ‘levees only’ approach to managing the waters of the Mississippi River set the scene for the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, Louisiana (4-5). The ‘levees only’ approach grew from and promoted certain cultural, social, and natural conditions in New Orleans, and each of these elements critically interacted to contribute to the human and environmental destruction unleashed by Katrina. Cultural, social, and natural elements of Worster’s framework individually shaped the essential preconditions of the Katrina disaster. Culturally, New Orleans’s

Yet, these forces did not act in isolation but rather vitally interacted with one another to make New Orleans particularly helpless to Hurricane Katrina. Culture, society, and nature all interacted in the formation of policy: an obstinate ideology of human control over nature, plus a lack of concern for wetland preservation, fueled the federal decision on a ‘levees only’ approach to water resource management. Even after the great flood of 1927, the Army Corp of Engineers ignored proposals to utilize wetlands for flood control. Instead, they continued to build towering levees, which caused water levels to rise in the Mississippi (Kelman). The illusion of human control over the Mississippi River signifies an instrumental interaction between culture and nature (Spreyer 5). Rather than working with nature through multi-tiered flood control with spillways and reservoirs, levees disallowed the river to naturally flood, deteriorated the natural ecosystem, and ultimately weakened the city’s defenses against the hurricane (Kelman). Culture and society further interacted, as beliefs in man’s power over nature and racial discrimination promoted levee expansion and racial segregation, creating a city of racially differentiated risk (Spreyer 4). As a result, inundation mostly impacted the lower land neighborhoods that housed poor people of color. Society and nature interfaced in the application of levees that contained nature’s forces. Ultimately, nature won out: the hurricane overpowered the levees and breached the Industrial Canal, disproportionally flooding the mostly black, low-elevation neighborhoods of New Orleans (Campanella