Katrina: the failures of success.

The fifth hurricane of the 2005 season, dubbed Katrina, roared ashore August 29 on the southeast Louisiana coast and brushed aside the corrupted defenses protecting New Orleans, leaving nearly 2,000 dead, a prostrate city, and many shattered illusions amid the wreckage. Katrina was far from the worst storm to strike the United States, let alone the worst storm ever--and very far from the worst natural disaster (a 1931 flood in China that killed 3.7 million). Yet Katrina is a legend. Why?

For one thing, media coverage was global and vivid, yielding many horrifying images of devastation, death, and dereliction. Then there was the spectacle of the world's only hyperpower revealed as helpless by its inept response to the catastrophe, directed by a failed horse-show organizer.

Surely the legend also owes something to the fact that Katrina was an unnatural disaster made more likely by Faustian bargains--all of which seemed like good ideas at the time. First, New Orleans became a major port because the unruly Mississippi River was reengineered to become a marine superhighway for barge traffic servicing the U.S. heartland. That decades-long enterprise succeeded brilliantly, driving down shipping costs and enabling the cheap export of huge volumes of agricultural commodities and cheap import of manufacturing inputs. But it also destroyed the natural soil deposition processes that nourished the storm-protective wetlands and kept southern Louisiana from sinking further below sea level.

Second, centuries of fossil fuel use fed industrialization and the immense wealth of the U.S. economy, but have also warmed the Earth and made extreme weather events more pronounced. Yet despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of climate change, the Bush administration has denied its significance and has obstructed efforts to address it. Third, the administration's contempt for government, expressed in its relentless drive to cut taxes, was nowhere more evident than during the Katrina crisis. The once effective Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had been shuffled off to a bureaucratic backwater when the Homeland Security Department was set up. Thus compromised, FEMA's response almost seemed designed to prove that the actions of a deliberately castrated and lobotomized government were truly the best any government could manage--and so hadn't it made sense all along to shrink the beast until it was small and feeble enough to "drag it into the bathtub and drown it," as one right-wing political strategist put it? Katrina violently exposed these multiple failures of success and reminded us--again--that we can never do just one thing.

This special issue explores these and other lessons in more detail. We begin with geographer Craig Colten, who describes the backstory of New Orleans' long struggle with the natural forces besetting it (p. 8). Former New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter John McQuaid gives a riveting account of the storm's gestation and impact (p. 13). Worldwatch researchers Michael Renner and Zoe Chafe discuss the human security aspects of Katrina and other natural disasters (p. 18), while Julian Cheatle, a London-based journalist, reviews the economic damage Katrina inflicted (p. 23). Former Worldwatcher John Young then explains the new scientific understanding of sea-level rise and what it portends (p. 26).

Following a "Talking Pictures" interlude, five essayists explore what New Orleans' experience of Katrina suggests to them. George Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, asserts that "global biophysics ... is setting new rules" that are dangerous to ignore (p. 34). Poet Andrei Codrescu says there's something essential about New Orleans that demands its reconstruction (p. 36), while science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson notes that government will have to take the lead in doing so (p. 38) and civil-rights activist Eric Mann argues that the event must be used to redress the deadly injustices Katrina exploited (p. 40). Author Mike Tidwell (p. 44) concludes this special issue with a warning that unless we act soon, Katrina will be followed by endless sequels. As always, please let us know what you think.

For more information related to topics raised in this special issue, visit www.worldwatch.org/ww/katrina/.