State of Disaster - by Craig E Colten (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Efforts to restore and protect portions of its coastal marshes, nearly always without regard for the people displaced by these efforts. With a huge budget and noble intentions, an entire state agency is dedicated to the grand enterprise of restoring the coast. Yet it has deliberately neglected the coastal populations who live and work on the state's soggy margins and who are already migrating landward without assistance. The state's plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices relatively small numbers of coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries despite floods, hurricanes, oil spills, and other disasters. This book provides a detailed, historical, and geographic examination of the numerous, disconnected adaptations to coastal hazards, exploring the consequences of such activity for the environment and the region's residents. The science-based modeling of coastal futures foregrounds biophysical processes in great detail, while largely ignoring the processes that underlie social and cultural adjustments to changing environmental conditions. The separation of biophysical and cultural processes contributes to plans that inadequately factor people into the equation, although it is these very people who will bear the brunt of restoration and protection projects. The book considers human adaptations and transitions at the temporal scale suited to those processes, not within the short fifty-year time span of the master plan. State of Disaster examines in turn the numerous disjointed environmental management regimes that contributed to creating the current crisis; the cartographic visualizations of land loss used to activate public policy directed at saving the coast (while neglecting people); the two main phases of public input into planning (early public hearings and more recent stakeholder engagement) and how they both failed to give voice to the citizens most impacted by various management regimes; and the resilience and adaptive capacity of those living through repeated waves of hazards. This long-term examination of how people dealt with dramatic environmental changes and threats will reveal the human side of the story neglected by the abundant science-oriented scholarship on the region. By focusing on the social-cultural processes, it will re-situate the discussion from one of deterministic models to an appreciation of the complexities in historical contingency in an evolving nature-society situation. While the state's coastal master plan is not a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, it is investing in projects that will protect some and neglect others. It will spend billions on schemes with limited life spans, all the while neglecting to consider how to factor in the needs and traditions of the people most affected"--

Book Synopsis

State of Disaster: A Historical Geography of Louisiana's Land Loss Crisis explores Louisiana's protracted efforts to restore and protect its coastal marshes, nearly always with minimal regard for the people displaced by those efforts. As Craig E. Colten shows, the state's coastal restoration plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices the coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries.

This historical geography examines in turn the adaptive capacity of those living through repeated waves of calamity; the numerous disjointed environmental management regimes that contributed to the current crisis; the cartographic visualizations of land loss used to activate public coastal policy; and the phases of public input that nevertheless failed to give voice to the citizens most impacted by various environmental management strategies. In closing, Colten situates Louisiana's experience within broader discussions of climate change and recovery from repeated crises.

Review Quotes

Colten reminds us that Louisiana's coast is a human place, diverse in tradition and ways of living, working, and adapting to environmental change. He warns that any plan for coastal restoration is doomed, if it privileges science, engineering, and economics over social sciences, geography, history, and other fields of expertise on the human condition, and indeed, over the people themselves.-- "Christopher Morris, author of "The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples""

Meticulously researched and sensitively argued, State of Disaster paints a lesson for all who may confront subsiding lands, rising seas, and disappearing coastal heritage. In our age of accelerating global change, the contested and dynamic Mississippi Delta becomes an evocative case study for finding better ways to manage the planet's irreplaceable cultural and natural treasures.-- "Marcus Hall, author of "Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration""

Craig Colten speaks as a long-time resident of Louisiana who is also a dispassionate observer of a special place that is under threat. He is a guide for the rest of us, pointing toward the kind of place-focused environmental and social restoration that could help many coastal regions. Colten is a master of what we know about Louisiana's coast. But he argues that science is not enough. At a time when the state is preparing another round of interventions to shape the coast, Colten argues for humility and for making expertise serve public needs. Knowledge and values must come from the people who know and use the coast. This is important for social justice, but also for the success of any restoration effort, because the ways people learn from and use the coast in the future is vital to the region's fate.-- "Karen O'Neill, Associate Professor, Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University"

Steeped in the literature on hazards and resilience, and deeply familiar with the perilous place that is coastal Louisiana, Colten masterfully explains how policy makers responded to successive disasters with piecemeal, disarticulated efforts at remediation and environmental management that, collectively, failed to recognize and address the cultural impacts of, and economic inequities produced by, these initiatives.-- "Graeme Wynn, professor emeritus of geography, University of British Columbia"

About the Author

Craig E. Colten is the former Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography at Louisiana State University. He is the author of An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature and Southern Waters: The Limits to Abundance.