This week I’m sharing a sobering but life-affirming message that I got this week from New Orleans.
(Over the years, I’ve learned more from this City than from any other in America, so I’m always on the look-out for another one of its smoke signals.)
For as long as I’ve visited New Orleans, it’s been contestng with its water-borne environment and, even harder, with its efforts at continuous renewal. You hear it in the music, taste it in the food, see it in its melting pot of faces. Honesty. Bravery. Resilience. I’d also call it Love.
It’s similar with a beloved, century-old house like mine. Like a massive clock with a thousand parts, there is always something to strengthen or abandon or repair to hold the mess-of-it-all together. But your love for your home enables the next thing that needs doing.
It also reminds me of the drudgery and joy of having a a body that keeps getting older, along with a wonderful dog who’s aging alongside. Someday neither of us will be here, although our timer bells are probably set differenly. We get through our drudgery and find our joys in no small measure from the urgency of those clocks and the love we find in spite of their wind-downs.
That’s true of relationships too, particularly the most difficult ones. You always keep a door open for repair and strengthening (even when you’re apart) so there’s love stored up for spending again before the time you have together runs out.
Finally, I’m thinking about the relationships that we have with our democratic ways of life, which we also say we love but whose survival we take for granted and rarely consider honestly. These too are complex, fragile, interconnected systems, always breaking down a little (yesterday) or a lot (today). Still, it’s through glimpsing these experiments in collective governance with practical, caring eyes that we can recognize their terrible fragility and mobilize our efforts to maintain, repair and evolve them before the inevitable comes.
This week, the message from New Orleans is about clear-eyed love for a place that’s slowly but truly dying, and the daily living such a realization requires.
t’s been said that the perspective Nathaniel Rich brings to his essays and books gestures towards a new kind of ecological writing—and I think his readers are right about that.
Different from most of the writing about the climate crisis, Rich’s words hits you in the face with the reality that (as he writes in “Second Nature”): “no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The natural world [as we’ve known it] is gone.”
Rich begins his rallying cries with the recognition that we’ve already changed the Earth in such fundamental ways that we can never return it to its prior state, however heroic our efforts or romantic our intentions. But that doesn’t mean that love is abandoned. Instead, it’s the same kind of love that we bring to our own lives, when we truly face the reality of our own deaths every day.
Most of us don’t say, “it’s useless to truly live because death will just take it from us.” Instead, we choose to live in spite of (and in some ways) because of the inevitability of our ends. Limited time makes each of the moments that we do have more worthy of filling them to the brim.
Rich’s new kind of ecological writing moves from this same acceptance to the quality of our actions in the meantime. It’s a more sober but less disappointing future because we’re clear-eyed about it from the start.
Instead of wanting to return to a world that we’ve lost forever, it pointedly asks us: “What world do we want in its place?”
Groceries will never again be as cheap as they were before the pandemic. Our politics will never heal itself because our politicians will rarely be better than we are. The world order that we imagined we had 30 years ago is dying because we failed (as a human race) to maintain “this clock with its thousand parts” in the ways that we might have, Yet in these many “deaths”—and in the one that’s on-going in New Orleans—we have the building blocks for life in the meantime, where we refuse to cower in the face of these inevitabilities.
(It’s why I named my post today “A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living.” In all likelihood, it’s the same title that Rich gave his essay when he first submitted it for publication. It’s the title the Times editors used in the print edition of their paper and the title they should have kept when they shared it with me, but I’m happy to give it another run.)
Rich begins his essay by noting that nowhere is safe from climate change but that New Orleans is “atop the list of unsafe places,” giving it a point-of-view that distinguishes it from almost everywhere else.
I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.
Imagine you’re living with a sword like that over your head when you turn on the weather forecast everyday. Well, the length of that imaginative leap may reveal the cloudiness of (and romanticism behind) your future vision about the State of Nature.
I would have thought Rich was exaggerating, but I was visiting New Orleans in 2016 when a storm was approaching, and the weather guy or gal was actually talking about the repairs that had or hadn’t been made to certain key storm drains in recent months–like everyone would know exactly what they were talking about and where these drains are located.
Rich quotes with favor Saul Bellow’s comment that:“no one made sober decent terms with death,” but goes on to note that cities can and that New Orleans has, before asking:
What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. (italics mine)
Rich references several of New Orlean’s forward-looking plans, but it was his disclosure that one of them (called the Coastal Master Plan) or “Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat” automaticallly renews, every 5 years, rendering it “a 50 year plan in perpetuity.” Rich says the most impressive part of it “is its honesty. For the authors of the plan freely acknowledge that, even in the best-case scenario, the plan will fail” but that their work will continue until it does.
Yet despite a future where New Orleans will literally be washed out to sea, its inhabitants are buying a “grace period” for themselves, which (through building and restoring marshland, levees and barrier islands) is “the difference between deliberate, gradual retreat over generations and a sudden one marked by chaos and excessive suffering.”
It’s also worth noting that these efforts are being taken despite the fact (as Rich acknowledged in an interview around “Second Nature”) that Louisiana is sinking, losing a football field of land every 100 minutes. He added: “Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Manhattan would vanish in less than two years.”
Unless you’re reading this from somewhere around St. Charles Avenue, you know that your city or town doesn’t live like this. “But,” says Rich, “one morning , not very long from now, they will.” It may be too many fires instead, too many 100-year storms, or at the other extreme, not enough rain to fill the local reservoirs. “On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.”
Rich agrees with Torbjorn Tornqvist, an ecology professor at Tulane, that the worst for New Orleans is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes, but that neither the timing of his City’s death nor its inevitability will disable its residents. In this regard, he mentions that Tornqvist said something to him about “value” and even “love” that he’ll never forget:
People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. But why don’t we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite, doesn’t mean that they’re worthless.
Rich concludes his essay with a call to arms that rises from his illusionless view about our degrading environment. At the same time, what he urges us to do seems applicable to nearly everything else that feels like a lost cause these days.
The knowledge of our own mortality does not condemn us to fatalism or nihilism. It does not mean that we give up on self-improvement, on reversing injustice, on re-examining our history, on celebrating our culture, on behaving with moral purpose, on setting a positive example for our children. If anything, we love best what we most fear losing. We cherish what we have because we know it won’t last forever. It might not even last beyond the next hurricane season. But for now we live.
I took this picture at the end of the St. Charles trolley line, where a massive, tree-topped levy (and commitment to the future) is temporarily holding the mighty Mississippi back from inundating this part of the City.
Those of us who have never lived in New Orleans have (by definition) spent far less time with the certainty that Nature can’t and won’t regenerate itself to the state where we remember it. Yet even when our daily experience of a degraded Nature “calls out to us,” how fervently and foolishly we cling to our hopes that “everything will turn out just fine” in the long run.
Our blindness may be this willful because our own ways of living continue to be at odds with Nature’s mechanisms and rhythms. A century and a half of our extraction (“Drill baby drill”), pollution and waste continues to throw Nature out of balance, disabling it from regaining the old equilibrium that we pine for and slowing down its “life-will-find-a-way” quest for a new one.
Nathaniel Rich reminds us that we need to face the reality of this death in order to do what we need to do in the days before The End finally comes—and that the death of Nature as we know it is not so different from all those other things that we cherish, like our own lives.
Recognizing Nature’s tragic limits liberates us to reappraise, in a radical way, the different kinds of environmental work that are waiting for us to do–work that New Orleans is already doing and living. Because as Einstein famously said in the course of Rich’s interview: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
This post was adapted from my December 8, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.
I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.
In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?
What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?
(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)
Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?
Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.
A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.
My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.
Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.
A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007
As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers. While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:
Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?
Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:
To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.
Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking.
Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.
The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied.
Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.
As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.
What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses. As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea.
For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera?
My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.
In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:
You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras.
To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation,
a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.
Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:
If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.
I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.
Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.”
Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”
Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.
We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community
—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity.
Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.
Here’s a gentleman I’d just purchased something from at the annual flea market.
So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week?
Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?
Yes, probably.
But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.
Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.
It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one.
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(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)
This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
