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Tomgram: Bill McKibben on Planet New Orleans

TomDispatch.com by Tom Engelhardt

Tomgram: Bill McKibben on Planet New Orleans

Last week, I took a six-hour drive south to New York City on a day when New Orleans had just gone under water and the President was stumbling to address the nation. The headlines on the morning paper I tossed in the front seat next to me read: "New Orleans Is Inundated As 2 Levees Fail; Much of Gulf Coast Is Crippled; Toll Rises."

I began my day by pulling into a local gas station where I found myself paying $2.67 a gallon for regular unleaded -- in two pit stops that day, I would pour over fifty bucks into the tank of my recently purchased 2003 Subaru Outback. Regretting that I didn't have a Prius, I still felt like a low-level lottery winner, like the last customer to stumble upon a bargain that would never again exist. (Twenty-four hours later, my wife would report that the same station had the same gas for $2.93 -- up 22 cents and rising like mercury on a hot day.)

There's nothing like six hours alone in a car to focus the brain -- especially a brain beginning to think that, not so many years down the road, being alone in a car, eating energy all by yourself might be considered the ultimate luxury. While distant New Orleans was being transformed into the city of our nightmares, I glided past a settled world at 65 miles an hour (except for the normal bottlenecks at Providence and New Haven). All of it, the rest-stops, McDonalds, billboard ads, urban skylines, lakes dotted with ducks and swans, water tanks, roadside multiplexes, and even the road kill, still held the calm of stability and the known. And yet in New Orleans that known was already long gone, swept away in a day or two with everything that makes our civilization click -- telephones, televisions, computers, water, electricity, gas, jobs, family photos, food, clothes -- you name it, gone in the roaring flicker of a single great storm and the human-made catastrophe that foll! owed. (If global warming fears are correct, of course, even that storm was, in part, human-made.) What Todd Gitlin has called "the torrent" (of images) that is the essence of our civilization had been wiped away in a wide swathe of the southeastern United States by a literal torrent.

Have you ever felt you were in two moments at once? It was surprisingly eerie, really. There I was, watching a world I knew well go by, no different than ever, and I felt as if I were slipping effortlessly through some future Pompeii, a landscape that will sooner or later be under water (or the equivalent) and so unimaginable to our children's children.

I'm 61 years old. My friend's 88 year-old mother was evacuated from New Orleans to Houston as Katrina approached, 16 hours-plus bumper-to-bumper, city-to-city -- and she had it easy; at least she had a car to get out and the financial means as well as the support system to remain out. Her daughter and I had just been talking about the possibility that she might never return to the world she had known all her life. She's a remarkable woman and a trooper. I wondered how I might react. Not well, I fear. It's hard indeed, if you're not there (perhaps even if you are), imagining this world, your world, underwater.

All the obvious phrases were wandering through my brain -- "fiddling while Rome burns...," "après moi, le deluge..." -- and what I was thinking as well was that, if we don't begin to prepare soon for what we know is coming, if we don't do something to mitigate it, we or our children or their children are going to end up abandoning lives as precipitously, and in at least as much chaos, as the inhabitants of New Orleans.

Between the ever more horrific news reports and the stumbling, slurring comments of our Great Leader who was promising that ice (yes, ice by the ton) was on the way, I happened to be listening to Cole Porter songs on the car CD (one of the many modern technologies I can barely handle and yet that, like the computer, the cell phone, the vcr, and the car, are inextricably wound into and bound up with my life). Porter's fabulous lyrics -- those oysters down in Oyster Bay just kept doing it again and again as I hit the repeat button -- left me nostalgic for what was truly lovely in the world we might, one of these unexpected days or weeks or years, simply be leaving behind. What a world of horror and wonder, all bound together and so unbearably easy (as anyone who has lived through an urban blackout knows) to unravel.

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posted by Annamarie at 7:33 PM