I hope everyone is safe, and staying dry. I'm typing this from my evacuation-vacation in Seattle, safe with my family.
We're all on pins and needles as we watch the storm batter our coast and communities. Instead of just being glued to cnn/weather channel, GRN friend and collaborator Walter Williams put his nervous energy to work and cut a new film which captures our coastal crisis, and hopes to help inform the teachable moment that Gustav is presenting to the nation.
Take care,
Aaron
Here's Walter's blog and film:
No one understands the stress New Orleanians live under. No one else in this country has to stare down total annihilation not only every year, but often several times a year, while trying to rebuild their lives. We’ve been in the bull’s eye for seven days now and it’s time for us all to leave home.
Can anyone out there really relate to this? An entire major city having to flee from their homes, not knowing if they’ll see them again…not knowing if they’ll see their family and friends again…not knowing if they’ll see the city they love again… From my talking to people around the country, they evidently can’t.
And the shame is that this did not have to happen. They would not have built the oldest Cathedral, a US Mint, the biggest federal building on the beachfront facing utter destruction every year. That’s because we were 80 miles from the coast and never worried about flooding from the gulf. Now our protection has been eaten away and we sit here living under a strain that few could endure.
And the people proven to be responsible for fifty percent of our land loss continue to deny their culpability. They’ve known about this dirty little secret for decades, have the money to rectify it, but thumb their noses at us, because the state and federal government refuse to take them to task. That’s because they appear to all be one in the same. As far as I’m concerned, they all have Katrina blood on their hands and unfortunately may have more coming this week, by refusing to fix what they broke.
We have one of the largest land building machines in the world, the Mississippi River, to build new land to regain our protection. It’s not rocket science, it’s mud and gravity. They’ve tried to convince us that levees are the problem. We didn’t even need levees just forty years ago when Betsy slammed directly into us, because we used to have the state of Delaware between us and the sea. There were no seawalls on the 17th Street canal or the others, yet they didn’t overtop. Something has changed drastically in the last forty years, coincidentally the height of oil and gas activity in southern Louisiana.
I hope we survive this one and the one following close behind, but regardless, Americans should not be forced to live like this particularly when there is a viable solution. Please watch the video I cut together today about this, before high-tailing it. It’s called “Blood and Oil” and is on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iSAYxPWVM
I’m really tired and pissed.
Safety to all on the road and I hope to see you all soon. Maybe we just need to click our heels.
Peace,
Walter
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