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This book presents an account of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty five thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. The author takes us through life-and-death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way, the narrative presents episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The heroes of this saga are the local people and local officials. The book addresses the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s long struggle to remove a record-setting volume of debris and get on with the rebuilding of homes, schools, jobs, and public infrastructure. Along the way readers are offered insights into the politics of recovery funding and the bureaucratic bungling and hubris that afflicted the storm response, and which complicated and delayed the work of recovery. Still, there are ample accounts of things done well, and one chapter gives us a feel for the psychological, spiritual, and material impact of the eight hundred thousand people from across the nation who gave of themselves as volunteers in the Mississippi recovery effort.

A vital and volatile part of the New Orleans landscape and lifestyle, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin actually contains three major bodies of water—Lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maurepas. These make up the Pontchartrain estuary. This book provides a thorough examination of the historical and environmental research on the basin, with emphasis on its environmental degradation and the efforts to restore and protect this estuarine system. It also explores the current biological condition of the lakes. The book begins with the geological formation of the lakes and the relationship between Native Americans and the water they referred to as Okwa’ta, the “wide water.” From the historical period, it describes the forays of French explorer Pierre Le Moyne D’Iberville in 1699 and traces the environmental history of the basin through the development of the New Orleans metropolitan area. Using the lakes for transportation and then recreation, the surrounding population burgeoned, and this growth resulted in severe water pollution and other environmental problems. In the 1980s the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation led a concerted drive to restore the lakes, an ongoing effort that has proved significant.

What is it like to lose your front porch to the ocean? To watch saltwater destroy your favorite fishing holes? To see playgrounds and churches subside and succumb to brackish and rising water? The residents of coastal Louisiana know. For them hurricanes are but exclamation points in an incessant loss of coastal land now estimated to occur at a rate of at least twenty-four square miles per year. In this book, coastal Louisianans communicate the significance of place and environment. During interviews taken just before the 2005 hurricanes, they send out a plea to alleviate the damage. They speak with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of losing not just property and familiar surroundings, but their identity as well. People along Louisiana's southeastern coast hold a deep attachment to place, and this shows in the urgency of the narratives collected here. The meanings that residents attribute to coastal land loss reflect a tenuous and uprooted sense of self. The process of coastal land loss and all of its social components, from the familial to the political, impacts these residents' concepts of history and the future. The book includes updates for many of the subjects' narratives to reveal what has happened in the wake of the back-to-back disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

This book chronicles the brave and creative acts through which Gulf Coast people rescued their neighbors during the chaotic aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Ordinary citizens joined in with whatever resources they had. Unlike many of the official responders, vernacular rescuers found ways around paralysis produced by a breakdown in communications and infrastructure, and were able to dispel unfounded fears produced by erroneous or questionable reporting. The essays, personal narratives, media reports, and field studies presented here all have to do with effective and often ingenious answers that emerged from the people themselves. Their solutions are remarkably different from the hamstrung government response, and their perspectives are a tonic to sensationalized media coverage. The first part of the collection deals with Gulf Coast rescuers from outside stricken communities: those who, safe in their own homes and neighborhoods, marshaled their resources to help their fellow citizens. It includes some analysis and scholarly approaches, but also includes direct responses and first-hand field reports. The second part features the words of hurricane survivors displaced from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities to Houston, Texas. In many cases, the “victims” themselves were the first responders, rescuing family, friends, and strangers. All of the stories reveal a shared history of close-knit community bonds and survival skills sharpened by hard times. The book is about what went right in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita—in spite of all that went so wrong.

This book provides a window onto the passion and significance of thirty-eight committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. It comprises oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments, and hard-won wisdom. Additionally, interviews with eight men, all leaders who worked with or against the women, provide more insight into this rich—and also gendered—history. The book sheds light on Louisiana and America’s social and political history, as well as on the national environmental movement in which women often emerged to speak for human rights, decent health care, and environmental protection. By illuminating a crucial period in Louisiana history, the women tell how “environmentalism” emerged within a state already struggling with the dual challenges of adjusting to the civil rights movement and the growing oil boom. The author, an environmental activist herself since 1982, worked with a team of interviewers, especially those trained at Louisiana State University’s T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History. Together they interviewed forty women pioneers of the state environmental movement. The author’s work also was aided by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In this compilation, she allows the women’s voices to provide a clear picture of how their smallest actions impacted their communities, their families, and their way of life. Some experiences were frightening, some were demeaning, and many women were deeply affected by the individual persecution, ridicule, and scorn their activities brought.