The book Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Solnit and Snedeker it not an atlas of roads, but a journey through the sights, smells, and heritage of the great city of New Orleans through maps and essays. Within it are the essays “When They Set the Sea on Fire” by Antonia Juhasz about the BP oil spill in the Gulf. As well as “No Sweetness is Light” by Shirley Thompson about the sugarcane industry in New Orleans. The two essays compare greatly in the concepts of deception, greed, and the cause of sickness. The artifice in these essays bring so much false hope and suffering to the people of New Orleans. Deception is when a person makes another believe something that is not true to gain advantage on the other. The deception in these essays are catastrophic to the people of New Orleans. In “When They Set the Sea on Fire” Juhasz tells about “the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) determined that the gulf seafood was safe to …show more content…
eat” (Juhasz 52). After the oil had spilled into to ocean and contaminated the life there. When the FDA said this they actually only made a calculation on males who weighed around 176 pounds, and only who had eaten about four shrimp a week. In this area seafood is a majority of the diet for them. The folks in and around New Orleans were blind to these facts, putting them at great risks. It is absolutely sickening to see this dishonesty. Sugar can also be very deceptive in its appearance. It is any person that is trying to loose weights worst nightmare. It is thousands of empty calories. As a matter of fact, Thompson nails it when she claims “When I pursue Heaven in a substance like sugar, I almost always land, exhausted and spent, on the vestibule of Hell” (Thompson 70). This response is very explicit, but in retrospect it is true. The substance of sugar is very much comparable in portrayal of taste as Heaven is depicted in society. It is a sense of Safety and comfort in the world when you think about them. While sugar seems great, in a way, it is also doing the so called “work of the devil.” It gives away this false energy, or false hope, in giving you something that was never actually there. These two essays deal with deception in an abundance of ways. “When They Set the Sea on Fire” talks about the oil industry and how much of the real information is concealed from the public. While in “No Sweetness is Light” they talk about the false sense of energy given by sugar. At first glance all these two essays seem to have in common is deception of some kind, but at a closer look it becomes clearer. They are both viewed as a “greater evil.” This evil affects people across the globe, but more importantly it affects the citizens of New Orleans. The people who call this great city their home. They are all alike in dealing with the everyday struggles of deception whether it be through the false energy that sugar gives you to crash and burn shortly after or the thoughts of not being able to trust their government. Deception is what brings them together. “Known simply as “the sugar,” diabetes has long been associated with a culture of sweetness. Like the perfect metaphor for so many things, sugar, though we love it, is also toxic” (Thompson 71). Over ten percent of New Orleanians are diagnosed with one of the few forms of diabetes. This statistic leaves the city’s people on edge when speaking of it. Folks are left hospitalized with the disease as they obtain treatment to filter their blood. The disease slowly eats away organs without the proper medical attention due to the overwhelming amount of glucose in the body. This malady is very much alive and strong in New Orleans. Sickness and disease is also profuse in the same way when talking about the oil industry. “Of the top ten worst refinery incidents in the state in 2010, eight took place at refineries within twenty-five miles of New Orleans, releasing hundreds of thousands of pollutants into the air and water” (Juhasz 53). With these pollutants comes many sick people and animals in the area. The women who are pregnant are at a large risk because contaminates can harm the development of a fetus. Cancer causing agents are a huge part of the toxins as well. Why do these companies continue to drill for oil? It has become necessary for survival in the United States. The country was created around it and New Orleanians must deal with the constant backlash. The diseases and sicknesses talked about in these to essays are horrible!
Both of which almost seem uncontrollable. They might be different where sugar is meant to be ingested while toxic chemicals aren’t. The two problems are not all that different in the end. Both have to do with what society has built them up to be. A necessity. Just about anything that is affordable food wise in a grocery store is packed full of sugar. The general public has become obsessed with the sweetness that is sugar. It of course is a necessity to survive, but at the rate everyone uses it, it becomes extremely harmful to people. Oil is the exact same way. We rebuilt this country specifically for gas and oil driven machines creating a necessity of the stuff! New Orleans went from a peaceful land to a land full of factories and cars that destroy substantial amounts of the city and its inhabitants every day. People are blinded to what is happening around them due to society’s norms and false truths. All because of the greediness of big
businesses. “While the Gulf struggles to recover, the oil industry has hardly missed a beat” (Juhasz 53). The greed aspect is clearly seen in this quote. The Gulf is full of harmful chemicals that have destroyed the lives of people and animals alike. These major businesses do not do enough to allow life to recover and revive itself. They are so much about the money that they actually built more rigs and furthered the pollution. The oil industry brings in much of the city’s revenue, but at what cost? The deterioration of land, wildlife, and even the people who live amongst it. In the early sugarcane industry, greed was similarly strong throughout. Thompson shows this by proclaiming “in their careful cost/benefit analyses, planters, counting on a seemingly endless supply, had determined that Africans should be worked to death” (Thompson 71). They decided that the money and its overall advantage of having sugar was better and more important than the lives who actually tend the fields. In a more simple way of saying, the profit was so good they let their most important people die and suffer for it. It is sad that even today, large companies still follow in suit. The times of today aren’t any different than back in the days of slavery except for the titles people were given. Back in the day cheap laborers were called slaves, today they are known as the lower and middle class citizens. These two essays indulge in the amount of ravenousness for money and power that has, and always will reign supreme. Today people are dying in a sense due to the lack of caring by businesses for their primary workers just as they did back on the plantations. These corporations are the first to say they will help with any and all problems, but they are the last to do anything to make a difference if at all. It is sickening to think in this way, but it is not the sweet, but bitter truth in today’s society. This extravagant city faces artifice in the cruelest of ways. The people that call it there safe haven and their way of life do not have it easy by any means. The city of New Orleans is a strong city, but at the same time it is weak, rundown, and about to fall apart beneath their feet. This place called New Orleans, in the state of Louisiana is an artifice all of its own. It full of society reinforcing the falsehoods of the world, but it is also full of people who push passed the false truths to keep this great city alive.
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
Niman, Michael I. "KATRINA's AMERICA: Failure, Racism, And Profiteering." Humanist 65.6 (2005): 11. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
A storm such as Katrina undoubtedly ruined homes and lives with its destructive path. Chris Rose touches upon these instances of brokenness to elicit sympathy from his audience. Throughout the novel, mental illness rears its ugly head. Tales such as “Despair” reveal heart-wrenching stories emerging from a cycle of loss. This particular article is concerned with the pull of New Orleans, its whisper in your ear when you’ve departed that drags you home. Not home as a house, because everything physical associated with home has been swept away by the storm and is now gone. Rather, it is concerned with home as a feeling, that concept that there is none other than New Orleans. Even when there is nothing reminiscent of what you once knew, a true New Orleanian will seek a fresh start atop the foundation of rubbish. This is a foreign concept for those not native to New Orleans, and a New Orleanian girl married to a man from Atlanta found her relationship split as a result of flooding waters. She was adamant about staying, and he returned to where he was from. When he came back to New Orleans for her to try and make it work, they shared grim feelings and alcohol, the result of which was the emergence of a pact reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet. This couple decided they would kill themselves because they could see no light amongst the garbage and rot, and failure was draining them of any sense of optimism. She realized the fault in this agreement,
“Water is the driving force of all nature.” Leonardo Da Vinci simply stated that everything we experience in the natural world could be thought of as a result of water. This idea carries over to society as well. In man’s attempt to control nature, he must control water. This problem seems evident in the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. As New Orleans grew, the water management infrastructure led to racial segregation and a disproportionate exposure to risk being distributed to people of color. Campanella’s article “An Ethnic Geography of New Orleans” provides specific details attributing the city’s water management as the source of these problems related to racial inequality.
In Jeannette Wall’s book The Glass Castle, the narrator and author Jeanette has had various terrifying encounters with chaos and destruction. She was burned cooking hot dogs when she was young, frozen in the winter, and starved when her family was low on money. Each time, she has pulled through and survived. In The Glass Castle, fire is a symbol representing chaos, destruction and fear. Jeanette has fought many battles involving neglect, starvation, and poverty but she has always pulled through these destructive experiences just like when she was a child burned from the hot dogs.
In the late summer of 2005, a terrible tragedy occurred that changed the lives of many in the south-east region of the United States. A Category 3, named storm, named Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August and led to the death of 1,836 and millions of dollars’ worth of damage (Waple 2005). The majority of the damage occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana. Waple writes in her article that winds “gusted over 100 mph in New Orleans, just west of the eye” (Waple 2005). Not only was the majority of the damage due to the direct catastrophes of the storm but also city’s levees could no longer hold thus breaking and releasing great masses of water. Approximately, 80% of the city was submerged at sea level. Despite the vast amount of damage and danger all throughout the city, officials claimed that there was work being done to restore the city of New Orleans as a whole but many parts, and even the people, of the city were overlooked while areas of the city with higher economic value, and more tourist traffic, were prioritized along with those individuals.
Most of the destructions from the events of August 29th 2005, when Katrina Hit the City Of New Orleans, were not only caused by the storm itself; but also, by failure of the engineering of the levee system protecting the entire infrastructure of the city. The years of poor decision making and avoidance of the levee system led to one of the most catastrophic events in the history of the United States. Throughout our research, we have identified three key players in charge of the levee system design, construction and maintenance. These three organizations are the Unites States Corps of Engineers, the New Orleans Levee District and the Louisiana Department of Transportation. The consequences of the hurricane showed the organizations negligence in the design, construction and maintenance of the protective walls. Later independent sresearch showed that more than 50 levees and food walls failed during the passage of the hurricane. This failure caused the flooding of most of New Orleans and all of ST. Bernard Parish. The Unites States Corps of Engineers had been in charge of the of the levee system and flood walls construction since the 1936 flood act. According to the law, the Louisiana Department of Transportation is in charge to inspect the overall design and engineering practices implemented in the construction of the system. Once the levee systems were finished, they were handed over to the New Orleans Levee District for regular maintenance and periodically inspections. The uncoordinated actions of these three agencies resulted in the complete failure of a system that was supposed to protect the people of New Orleans. The evidence is clear that this catastrophic event did not happened by chance. The uncoordinated response of these...
The main “conflict”, or revolt, results from this documentary, which aired nationally in major theaters and on TV broadcasts to educate America about what was really happening during Hurricane Katrina as the need for change was made public. With the levee systems failing, flooding 80 percent of New Orleans, to the overwhelming lack of control in relief efforts taken after the storm had passed shows how very little effort was given into the protection of lower class residents.
According to Hurricane Katrina At Issue Disasters, economic damages from Hurricane Katrina have been estimated at more than $200 billion… More than a million people were displaced by the storm… An estimated 120,000 homes were abandoned and will probably be destroyed in Louisiana alone (At * Issue). For this perspective, “Hurricane Katrina change the Gulf Coast landscape and face of its culture when it hit in 2005” (Rushton). A disaster like Katrina is something the victims are always going to remember, for the ones the lost everything including their love ones. Katrina became a nightmare for all the people that were surround in the contaminated waters in the city of New Orleans. People were waiting to be rescue for days,
Media Coverage on Hurricane Katrina News of the devastating hurricane Katrina and its economic, political, social, and humanitarian consequences dominated global headlines in an unprecedented manner when this natural catastrophe struck the region of New Orleans in mid August 2005 (Katrinacoverage.com). As a tradition, large-scale disasters like Katrina, inevitably, bring out a combination of the best and the worst news media instincts. As such, during the height of Hurricane Katrina’s rage, many journalists for once seized their gag reflex and refused to swallow shallow and misleading excuses and explanations from public officials. Nevertheless, the media’s eagerness to report thinly substantiated rumors may have played a key role in bringing about cultural wreckage that may take the American society years to clean up. To begin with, anybody privy to the events in New Orleans that ensued after Hurricane Katrina struck knows that horrible things that had nothing to do with natural causes happened: there were murders, gunfire directed at a rescue helicopter, assaults and, courtesy of New Orleans’ city police department, a myriad other crimes that most probably went unreported (Katrinacoverage.com).
The population of New Orleans was steadily decreasing, between the years of 2000 and 2005, 30,000 (6%) of the population left New Orleans in search for better lives (4). The declining population shows us that before Hurricane Katrina residence were already considering leaving the city, some push factors leading them away from the city include poverty and unemployment (5). Accord to the U.S 2005 Census Bureau around 23% of the residence lived in poverty, this can be a result of the nearly 12% unemployment rate (5). With an unemployment rate double the national standard and nearly one forth the population living in poverty, the city of New Orleans had many push factors against it resolution in a decline population prier to Hurricane Katrina. At the time of the storm nearly 400,000 residents were displaced from their homes too near by safe areas or other states. The population reming in the city as decreased to a few thousand (6). A month after the disaster when the levee breaches were repaired and the flood water was pumped out of the city, residence were allowed to return to what was left of their homes. The first reliable estimate of the New Orleans population after Hurricane Katrina was an ‘American Community survey’. The survey projected that by the start of 2006 around one third or 158,000 of the population returned. By the middle of f2006 the city
In 2005 Hurricane Katrina completely changed the lives of the many affected New Orleans citizens. It had a death toll of 1,833 and its overall destruction path caused the demolition of more than 800,000 buildings. The media coverage for the hurricane was very suspicious and made the situation seem worse. This led to many false beliefs about what had happened during this tragic event. Dave Eggers an acclaimed author took the lack of knowledge about the hurricane as a chance to write a book to educate people. He ended up writing the book “Zeitoun” which was a powerful narrative nonfiction account about the Zeitoun family. The Zeitoun’s were a lovable family and the book makes readers develop a special connection to the family.
Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre depicts the passionate love Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester have for each other, and as Bertha Mason stands in the way of the happiness of Brontë's heroine, the reader sees Mason as little more than a villainous demon and a raving lunatic. Jean Rhys' serves as Mason's defendant, as the author's 1966 novella Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Jane Eyre, seeks to explore and explain Bertha's (or Antoinette Cosway's) descent into madness. Rhys rejects the notion that Antoinette has been born into a family of lunatics and is therefore destined to become one herself. Instead, Rhys suggests that the Cosways are sane people thrown into madness as a result of oppression. Parallels are drawn between Jane and Antoinette in an attempt to win the latter the reader's sympathy and understanding. Just as they did in Jane Eyre, readers of Wide Sargasso Sea bear witness to a young woman's struggle to escape and overcome her repressive surroundings. Brontë makes heavy use of the motif of fire in her novel and Rhys does the same in Wide Sargasso Sea. In Rhys' novella, fire represents defiance in the face of oppression and the destructive nature of this resistance.
Fink, Sheri. "Hurricane Katrina: after the flood." The Gaurdian. N.p., 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Edwidge Danticat, published a short-story collection Krik? Krak! (1995), which examines the themes of family, hope, freedom and poverty. These stories demonstrate that suffering can be experienced in different and unique ways. “Children of the Sea” is the first short story offered in her collection, the story is a series of letters between two nameless narrators who are in love. The first narrator, a male, is in the Youth Federation in Port-au-Prince, is escaping in a boat to Miami. He writes about Célianne, a young pregnant teenager in his boat, who was raped by a macoute. She gives birth in the boat, and days after, her baby dies; she throws the baby and herself into the sea. The second narrator, who is writing her story, knowing