16 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
the past [and future] costs of New Orleans?, October 6, 2005
This review is from: An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Hardcover)
Colten wrote this book in 2004. Or perhaps even earlier. Now, in October 2005, going through its pages, one is struck by how prescient are so much of his musings. Even the title takes on deeper meaning after the recent hurricanes.
In all the current to-do about rebuilding New Orleans, many people could do far worse than to read his history of the town. Colten shows the decades (or centuries) of effort that went into protecting it from nature. Perhaps it is a tribute to those efforts that indeed, they did protect New Orleans for so long. Until 2005.
The book also gives valuable perspective on whether we should indeed rebuild much of New Orleans. The early, emotive response by many evacuees has been to completely rebuild. Yet at what cost? After some $200 billion or more, are we just recreating a target-rich environment for future storms? Colten's narrative points out the key need for a port in that location. But, culture aside, that need is not the same as a need for 500 000 inhabitants, many of whom might service the tourist sector.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful, if dry, February 28, 2010
Colten's "An Unnatural Metropolis" provides a wide ranging view of the environmental issues that New Orleans faces. Whereas we often tend to view civilization and the environment as two separate entities, one having negligible effects in the other's sphere of influence, Colten clearly establishes the crucial impacts of the lower Mississippi delta and the Crescent City on one another. The strength of his work is not only in helping us perceive the myriad of problems, past, present, and future that besiege New Orleans, but also in showing their complexity and interconnectedness.
Laying out a brief overview of the city's physical geography, to include the telling point that its poor site was acknowledged but built upon for strategic reasons anyway, Colten then explains how he is approaching the telling of this history. He does not seek to exclude political and economic factors, but informs us that his emphasis will be on the environment in and around New Orleans. To his thinking this was the prime factor in many of the issues encountered from the city's foundation to modern times.
In the colonial years of the 18th century the prime activities of city pioneers, according to Colten, consisted of extending and raising levees along the riverfront (maintained by individual property owners) and figuring out how to drain the city whenever these levees were breached. As these issues were mitigated to some degree and the city's population increased in the subsequent years following a shift from European administration to that of the United States, other issues rose to the forefront. Sewage, refuse clogging open gutters, acquisition of potable drinking water, and backflow from Lake Pontchartrain through the Carondelet and New canals were some of the other problems to tackle in the 19th century. Eventually, wider ranging problems of expanding levees away from the river to protect new housing that sprung up on tenuously reclaimed land, industrial pollution in the Mississippi River, limited space for garbage disposal, and destruction of the surrounding wetlands would come to bear.
It was elucidating to learn how protection of the city evolved from private citizens, to the city government, and eventually the Federal government, with its matching increase of effectiveness and rising expectations. Also the sheer magnitude of waste dumped directly into the river, both by New Orleans itself and then by manufacturing firms upriver in the 20th century is astounding. The section on the clash between Progressive Era and Jim Crow values and how ultimately environmental inequities and social inequities were entwined was insightful.
The work itself was rather dry at times. It did not address the sizable effect of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet on the surrounding wetlands. And while Colten clearly stated he would not delve deeply into related political and economic issues, the work itself could have been more readable and comprehensive by talking about such local topics as steamboats, the bulk shipping industry, the shrimping industry, or the oil industry.
Where "An Unnatural Metropolis" clearly exceeds another scholarly work on a similar subject, "Catastrophe in the Making", is in its integration of multiple environmental factors to provide a broad understanding of the issues arrayed against the Crescent City. Limited solutions are offered and are not centered on combating a single source, whereas "Catastrophe in the Making" implies that by simply curbing the power of a cabalistic "Growth Machine" and filling in the MRGO, the city will avoid future disasters. Admittedly Colten's book did not have the advantage of hindsight to analyze the Katrina catastrophe, but it also did not have to contend with the distorting, emotionally charged aftermath of Katrina either. Which is likely why his work helps provide a clear understanding of that tragic event.
The book is really three and a half stars for the high quality content, the craftsmanship ultimately dragging this one down.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"An Un-natural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans from Nature"., July 18, 2010
A very good book: the kin of my French-Canadian ancestors to 1702 old up-river Mobile removed to New Orleans, and later ancestors removed to New Orleans beginning 1805 (when lawyer David Copp, Jr., was murdered in a gambling house). Tradition, from an engineering perspective (floods) and sanitation considerations said New Orleans should never have been built there; economics said otherwise. The engineering perspective is historically confirmed in detail by this book; it also details how the "solutions" keep adding to the problems. The book does not advocate this; but decades ago I'm told London, England, designated a miles-wide "greenbelt" around it, to stop outwards growth. Within the greenbelt it also stopped upwards growth (N.O. has been sinking a long time) by limiting construction. As I understand it; within the greenbelt you can combine and divide structures, stack and unstack it; as long as you own or purchase the surface area building square feet you use. But that's not the American-Way; expand, expand, and let the some other than I, taxpayer, pay for the resulting problems. You don't need to be technical to understand this book.
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