by Naomi Klein
HURRICANE KATRINA: AN UNNATURAL DISASTER
I went to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, after the Hurricane Katrina storm struck the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005. A day before Katrina made landfall in Louisiana it was a Category 5 hurricane and the strongest storm ever measured in the Gulf of Mexico at that time. Fortunately, it weakened the next day. Katrina reached the coast of Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane. Still, it devastated portions of the state’s coastline with wind, rain, and high seas, and it unleashed floods in New Orleans, a metropolitan area with a population of 1.3 million.
A couple of weeks later I went with a team to New Orleans to document how the still partly flooded city was coping after the storm. Everyone was supposed to be off the streets by six o’clock in the evening, but as the curfew drew close, we found ourselves driving in circles, unable to find our way. The traffic lights were out, and half the street signs had been blown over or twisted sideways by the wind. Water and debris made it impossible to drive along many roads.
Events such as Hurricane Katrina are often called natural disasters because they involve some event in the natural world: a storm, an earthquake, a flood. But just as with climate change, there was nothing natural about the disaster we witnessed in New Orleans. Although Katrina had started as a devastating hurricane, it had lost most of its strength by the time it reached the city. It should never have devastated the city as it did.
Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into an obstacle course of downed electrical wires and debris.
What went wrong? The answer once again lies with human decisions.
A Weakened City:
When Katrina arrived, New Orleans’s flood defenses failed. The city was surrounded by a series of levees between it and the nearby Mississippi River and two large lakes. The levees, which are long structures similar to dams, were supposed to protect the city from high water in storms like Katrina. But in spite of many warnings over a period of years, the levees had fallen into disrepair, and the government agencies responsible for them had left them that way. Why? Because the neighborhoods most at risk if the levees failed were those that housed poor Black people, who had little political power.
So when Katrina hit and the floodwaters poured over and through the broken levees, the sharp divide between the haves and have-nots of New Orleans suddenly appeared in the world news. People with money drove out of town, checked into hotels, and called their insurance companies. The 120,000 people in New Orleans who did not have cars counted on the government to get them out of the flooded city. While they waited for aid that did not come, they made desperate HELP signals on their roofs and used refrigerator doors as rafts. In too many cases, the help did not come, and more than a thousand people lost their lives.
Images of the city’s distress shocked the world. Many people had grown used to the fact that health care and good schools were not distributed equally in the richest nation on Earth, but disaster responses were supposed to be different. People took it for granted that the government—at least in a rich country—would help all people during a disaster. New Orleans showed that that was not the case. The city’s poorest residents, who were overwhelmingly African American, were largely left to fend for themselves.
People helped each other as best they could. They rescued each other in canoes and rowboats. They emptied their refrigerators and fed each other. And when food and water ran out, they took supplies from stores. The media painted these desperate Black citizens as “looters” who would soon invade and disrupt the dry parts of the city, which were mostly inhabited by white people. Police checkpoints were set up to trap the Black citizens in the flooded zone. Police officers at one point shot some Black residents on sight, then later falsely claimed that these unarmed people had fired on an officer. White vigilantes came into the city with guns, proudly declaring, “You loot, we shoot.”
I saw firsthand how jumpy the police, soldiers, and private security contractors still were when I arrived. Many of them had arrived in New Orleans fresh from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. They seemed to be under orders to treat the city’s residents as if they were enemies, not people in need of their help. Even the National Guard, when they finally arrived to get people out of the city, were often needlessly aggressive. They pointed machine guns at people who were boarding buses. They separated many children from their parents.
The levees of New Orleans had been neglected at least in part because most of the residents they were supposed to protect were poor people of color. But the failure to keep the levees in good shape was also part of a larger pattern across the country. The nation’s infrastructure—that is, public structures built and maintained by the government, such as roads, bridges, water systems, and levees—was being neglected. The neglect grew out of the way the US government had come to treat its responsibility to the public.
“Shrink the Government”:
Not everyone agrees on what the government’s role should be, or how far it should reach into the lives of citizens. For decades, many of the world’s economic and political decisions have been defined by three interrelated principles that aim to reduce the role of government. Together these principles are sometimes called neoliberalism.
The first principle is deregulation—or undoing the rules and regulations that limit what privately owned banks and industries can do to make profits. The second is privatization, which means turning over to for-profit companies services that were once paid for and operated by the government, including schools and highways. The third principle is a goal of low taxes, especially for corporations and the wealthy. And without the money collected from taxes, governments have less money to spend on things like infrastructure, which is part of the reason the levees of New Orleans had been neglected.
These principles are all based on the idea that businesses should be as free as possible so that they can grow, sell more products, earn more profits, and create more jobs. They’re also based on the idea that government should be run more like a business, and be less involved in guaranteeing that people’s basic needs are met.
Long before Hurricane Katrina, this “shrink the government” view had been in direct conflict with the idea of the “public good”—the belief that there is value in doing things that support and benefit all members of society, even when there isn’t a profit to be made. The “shrink the government” outlook was an attempt to undo the belief that all of us have the same rights to a decent life, one that includes such things as parks, good public education, and a well-maintained infrastructure. Support in government for the public good had weakened, which helps explain why the levees of New Orleans were so close to the breaking point when Hurricane Katrina landed.
But the physical infrastructure was not the only thing that failed because of this outlook. So did the human systems of disaster response.
All levels of government in the United States have agencies whose job is to help people get out of harm’s way when a disaster is coming, and to provide shelter, medical care, and other relief afterward. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) oversees these efforts on a national level. After Katrina, FEMA badly failed the people who were stranded in flooded New Orleans.
It took five days for them just to get food and water to twenty-three thousand people who had taken emergency shelter in a sports arena called the Superdome. Reports of the miserable conditions under the dome shocked the world. One reason for FEMA’s failures in New Orleans was that many of the agency’s officials had little or no experience with disaster management. They had received their jobs because of their political loyalty. Also, as part of the move to run government more like a business, those people who did have years of experience in the agency had been replaced by newcomers with less seniority and experience.
Another reason for FEMA’s failures was that the agency had not stockpiled enough emergency supplies. The same thing would happen across the nation in 2020, when the need for personal protective equipment to battle the
coronavirus crisis in hospitals was met with empty shelves, showing the shortcomings of both the federal government’s preparations and a health-care and hospital system based on making the biggest possible profits. In such a system, an empty hospital bed or a well-stocked supply warehouse is regarded as a business failure, because it represents money that is not being made or money that has been spent. The bed and supplies would be sensible preparations for disaster, but because the system is under pressure to make money rather than spend it, such preparations do not get made, and people will suffer when that disaster comes.
In New Orleans in 2005, local leaders such as the mayor also contributed to this problem by delaying orders for citizens to evacuate the city and by failing to arrange for food, water, and medical supplies in emergency shelters. The failure of both federal and local officials to spend effort and money on preparing to care for the public good in the event of a severe storm made the problem much worse.
For a few weeks, the flooded streets of New Orleans called attention to these economic policies that had made Katrina worse than it had to be—an unnatural disaster on the heels of a climate one. But as much as I had been shocked by what I’d seen during the flood, what happened next shocked me even more.
THE POOR SUFFER FIRST AND WORST
After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, corporations and their representatives jumped at the chance to take advantage of the tragedy.
Families had fled or been bused out of New Orleans and ended up all over the country. A leading economist of the “smaller government” school called the scattering of the city’s schoolchildren “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.” His idea of reform was privatization. He called for the public schools to be reopened as private schools. In this case, some of the schools might no longer be free or might have different educational standards than public schools.
One Republican congressman from Louisiana said afterward, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans” and gave God credit for destroying these poor neighborhoods. But the destruction of some neighborhoods had been done purposefully, and not by the hurricane. In the months after the storm, with New Orleans’s poor and Black residents conveniently out of the way, officials did not work on helping people return to their homes. Instead, thousands of the public housing units where the displaced residents had lived were destroyed—but not always because of storm damage. Many of these buildings stood on high ground and had suffered little or not at all from Katrina. They were “cleaned up” not by the storm but by wrecking crews. Condos and town houses replaced them. These new homes were far too expensive for most of the people who had lived in those neighborhoods before the storm, but they enriched the real estate developers who had built them.
With the city still reeling, plans such as this took shape on a wish list of things corporations wanted. These things were supposedly meant to rebuild the city. But instead of aiding the people who had been harmed by the disaster, or repairing the infrastructure to protect them in the future, corporations pushed for changes that would weaken labor laws, environmental regulations, and public schools. What did they strengthen? The oil and gas industry, the real estate industry, and other business interests. That is because corporations and companies exist primarily to make profits. From a business point of view, even a disaster can become a moneymaking opportunity.
This approach to “recovery” from Katrina brought more examples of injustice. Many of the private companies and contractors that swarmed the city seeking to profit from the disaster took large payments of government money but delivered poor service, or sometimes no service, in return. This was possible because there was almost no government oversight of how money was spent or where it went. (When you keep shrinking the government, that’s what happens.)
One company received $5.2 million to build a base camp for emergency workers, a vitally important task. But the camp was never completed. The company that had received that government contract turned out to be a religious group. Its director admitted, “About the closest thing I have done to this is just organize a youth camp with my church.”
After the tragedy, the government could have done things that would have helped rebuild the city and also helped local people put their lives back together. It could have required its contractors to hire local people at decent wages. But officials did not do that. Instead, the local people had to watch as contractors brought in underpaid workers, including many immigrants, to do work that made fortunes for the contractors. Even worse, after the work was done, many of these immigrant workers then faced being deported from the country.
New Orleans’s poor people were already at a social and economic disadvantage before Katrina destroyed their homes, jobs, and communities. Then the storm made their circumstances much worse. The right kind of help during the disaster relief and rebuilding could have done something to correct these inequalities. The opposite happened instead. Then, a few months after the storm, Congress decided to cut $40 billion from the federal budget, to make up for the billions of dollars it had given to private companies in the form of contracts and tax breaks. What did Congress cut to save money? Student loans, food stamps, and health-care benefits for the poor, among other programs.
The fact that the poorest citizens in the country paid more than once for the big contractor bonanza after Hurricane Katrina is a major example of climate injustice. They had already paid a high cost when disaster had affected their communities more than other parts of the city. Then they paid again when relief turned into handouts to corporations. And, finally, they paid again when the few programs that directly helped unemployed and working poor people across the nation were gutted to pay for those handouts.
Katrina showed how our current economic system views disasters and other extreme events such as wars. This is “disaster capitalism”—when the rich and powerful take advantage of painful shocks to widen existing inequalities instead of correcting them. The rich and powerful see these tragedies as chances to seize control and change things in ways that favor banks, industry, and powerful politicians, not ordinary people.
Disasters are opportunities for change because they disrupt normal life. In a state of emergency, ordinary laws and practices may be suspended. People feel desperate and confused. They may be so concerned with survival or recovery that they cannot focus on the large questions of what is being done, and who is benefiting.
In the era of climate change, as natural disasters become more frequent, this deeply unjust pattern continues to repeat itself after storms, floods, and fires. The pattern can also be clearly seen across all the harm caused by climate change. All too often it is the disadvantaged—the poor, people of color, and Indigenous Peoples—who are hurt first and worst.
This is why the movement to stop climate change must be a movement for social and economic justice as well. And it is why we must learn to turn disasters into opportunities to make positive changes for everyone, not just a few. We must shift away from using each crisis to help the business interests, which often contribute most to climate change, because this response to disasters creates a dangerous feedback loop. Our efforts and our government’s spending should instead go directly toward helping the people who have been harmed, rekindling the once powerful belief in the public good.
“Why Not Try to Help?”
At the age of twenty-one, Elizabeth Wanjiru Wathuti created a movement to help fight climate change and economic injustice in Kenya, in eastern Africa. Her tools to accomplish this are shovels and trees—and the young people she inspires.
“I’m passionate about the environment because I was lucky enough to be able to connect with nature when I was young, and as long as I can remember I was angered by environmental injustices whenever I saw them, like people cutting down trees and polluting our rivers,” she told the environmental group Greenpeace. “So I thought to myself, why not try to help other young people be more conscious of the environment?”
Wathuti grew
up in a forested region of Kenya. She planted a tree there when she was seven. That was her first piece of climate activism, but it would not be her last. She drew inspiration from another Kenyan woman, Wangari Maathai (1940–2011), who launched the Green Belt Movement to teach Kenyan women about the benefits of planting trees to protect the environments of their homes, schools, and churches. The Green Belt Movement led to similar movements in other countries, and Maathai helped women plant some twenty million trees across Africa. She eventually received a Nobel Peace Prize for this work. Now Wathuti is carrying on the tree-planting tradition, with a focus on helping children become environmental activists.
In 2016, Wathuti founded the Green Generation Initiative to help children appreciate and plant trees. In three years, her organization planted more than thirty thousand trees. Wathuti happily reported in 2019 that more than 99 percent of those trees have survived.
With her team of forty young volunteers, Wathuti’s Green Generation Initiative has worked with more than twenty thousand schoolchildren. Her success shows the power kids like you can have when given a way to take positive action. An act as simple as planting a tree can grow into a revolutionary movement.
“I envision a world where we can all live in harmony with nature without harming the planet,” Wathuti says. “A world where everybody is mindful of how they will leave the planet for future generations, and a world where people and planet are put before profit.”
NEW ENERGY FOR THE NORTHERN CHEYENNE
Five years after I saw the impact of Katrina in New Orleans, I witnessed a different response to climate change and injustice on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeastern Montana. When I first visited the reservation, the community was under a cloud. The cloud was not a weather problem, though, but a conflict over coal.