Louisiana's Oysters, America's Wetlands, and the Storms of 2005

When Katrina made landfall near Empire, Louisiana's "oyster capital," it devastated the public and private oyster grounds of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes. Rita followed with similar damage in parishes to the west of the Mississippi River. These storms thus struck at a core of Louisiana's maritime heritage. Much attention has focused on the physical and social destruction these events have caused in New Orleans and on the failures of the public response efforts. Social scientists are in a position to assess such damages and to critique this collective failure of response. In this article, I seek to contribute to a parallel assessment of the potential of the oyster industry to recover from the storms of 2005, after a decade of substantial diminishment in political and economic power and public support.     

Predictors of Business Return in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

We analyzed the business reopening process in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which hit the region on August 29, 2005, to better understand what the major predictors were and how their impacts changed through time. A telephone survey of businesses in New Orleans was conducted in October 2007, 26 months after Hurricane Katrina. The data were analyzed using a modified spatial probit regression model to evaluate the importance of each predictor variable through time. The results suggest that the two most important reopening predictors throughout all time periods were the flood depth at the business location and business size as represented by its wages in a logarithmic form. Flood depth was a significant negative predictor and had the largest marginal effects on the reopening probabilities. Smaller businesses had lower reopening probabilities than larger ones. However, the nonlinear response of business size to the reopening probability suggests that recovery aid would be most effective for smaller businesses than for larger ones. The spatial spillovers effect was a significant positive predictor but only for the first nine months. The findings show clearly that flood protection is the overarching issue for New Orleans. A flood protection plan that reduces the vulnerability and length of flooding would be the first and foremost step to mitigate the negative effects from climate-related hazards and enable speedy recovery. The findings cast doubt on the current coastal protection efforts and add to the current debate of whether coastal Louisiana will be sustainable or too costly to protect from further land loss and flooding given the threat of sea-level rise. Finally, a plan to help small businesses to return would also be an effective strategy for recovery, and the temporal window of opportunity that generates the greatest impacts would be the first 6∼9 months after the disaster.     

Harnessing Catastrophe to Promote Resource Recovery and Eco-industrial Development

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, causing widespread damage to industry, housing, and infrastructure. The area of New Orleans East was particularly devastated, including a cluster of industries, such as a major food-processing plant, manufacturing facilities, and bulk material and gas processors. Although this area was well suited for resource recovery and eco-industrial linkages, little progress has been made in implementation. This article explores New Orleans as a case study in the application of industrial ecology to disaster management. Hurricane Katrina's damage to New Orleans resulted in a significant increase in the amount of waste flowing into New Orleans East, which precipitated a massive expenditure of federal funds toward debris management. Those circumstances created an unprecedented opportunity to capitalize a resource recovery program and to establish eco-industrial relationships, both of which would have resulted in new jobs and environmental improvement. Yet straightforward opportunities for resource recovery and eco-industrial linkage were overlooked or dismissed, in spite of antilandfill activism from the environmental community and formal recommendations for recycling from scientists and other professionals. We describe the specific resource recovery and eco-industrial opportunities that were available to New Orleans East, especially those that were magnified by Hurricane Katrina, and analyze the barriers that prevented their actualization. We also provide recommendations for overcoming barriers to resource recovery and eco-industrial progress with the goal that future postcatastrophe scenarios may benefit from more effective use of relief and recovery funding.     

Taphonomy in the light of intrinsic shell properties and life habits: Marine bivalves from the Eemian of northern Russia

A taphonomic analysis of the bivalvesArctica islandica (Arcticidae),Astarte borealis (Astartidae),Mytilus edulis (Mytilidae), andSpisula elliptica (Mactridae) from shallow-marine last interglacial Sediments exposed along the Pyoza river, Arkhangelsk region, shows that they differ in preservation, probably because of differences in shell shape, shell structures, and life habits. The Shells indicate that the temporal sequence of taphonomic processes was as follows: (1) pre-mortem bioerosion and dissolution; (2) post-mortem bioerosion; (3) abrasion, disarticulation, and fragmentation; and (4) dissolution. A new graphic Illustration, the taphonomic constituent diagram (TCD), is proposed to illustrate the sequences of taphonomic processes. It is inspired by the ichnofabric constituent diagram used in ichnology and integrates the shell surface coverage of different taphonomic features by graphically plotting them against relative time. The taphonomic constituent diagram may display differences in the Chronologie order of paleoenvironmental processes. Also, the diagram enables a combination of both microscopic and macroscopic taphonomic features, and eases comparative studies of fossil assemblages.      

Why Katrina's Victims Aren't Refugees: Musings on a "Dirty" Word

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a controversy emerged in the U.S. public sphere over the use of the word refugee to characterize the displaced residents of New Orleans. In this article, I explore the significance of the concept of "the refugee" for U.S. citizens, and I discuss what the failure to find an appropriate term to describe stranded New Orleanians reveals about the experience of poverty. I argue that the conceptual void uncovered by the crisis reflects the larger social void in which poor New Orleanians have long been confined and I examine the role of public discourse in defining and helping justify the inequalities uncovered by Katrina.     

Ready or Not …? Teen Sexuality and the Troubling Discourse of Readiness

In this article, I explore how talk about being "ready" or "not ready" for sex shapes teen and adult understandings of sexuality. I argue that this "discourse of readiness" poses serious threats to teens' identity development, sexual decision making, and educators efforts to help them through these processes. To illustrate, I draw from my nine-month ethnography, examining how participants used readiness discourses to make sense of their sexualities. I suggest implications for educators, policy makers, and researchers in anthropology and education.     

Taphonomic field experiments and the role of the Shelf and Slope Experimental Taphonomy Initiative

Fossilization of organism remains is the result of biological, physical, and chemical processes at work in the environment of deposition. The pathways taken by the remains of organisms through death, decay, burial, and diagenesis (known as taphonomic pathways) affect the fossil record of life in important ways, from complete removal and recycling of remains to preservation of hard parts and sometimes to exceptional preservation of soft tissues. Our understanding of taphonomic processes informs our interpretations of the fossil record and helps in the reconstruction of ancient environments. Research into taphonomic pathways in modern environments provides important insight into the fossilization process. In 1993, a group of paleontologists formed the Shelf and Slope Experimental Taphonomy Initiative (SSETI) and began a long-term comparative study of taphofacies and differential decay of taxonomic groups by placing experimental arrays containing bivalves, gastropods, decapod crustaceans, sea urchins, and wood species at multiple marine shelf and slope sites in the Bahamas and Gulf of Mexico. The goal of SSETI is to observe taphonomic processes over a period of decades to better understand taphonomic pathways for these various groups of taxa in a wide variety of depositional environments beyond the shallow near shore region. This special volume brings together eight studies that are the result of the SSETI program. The focus of this contribution is to first review the body of published work concerned with the fossilization process through the experimental manipulation of the remains of organisms in modern marine environments. We also present the methods of the SSETI project and its contributions to our understanding of taphonomic processes in relation to carbonate and wood recycling and preservation.     

Life-in-Death: Raising Dead Sons in New Orleans

The social and religious work of African-American women in New Orleans who mourn and memorialise the dead attends primarily to sons and grandsons, the young black men who are most frequently the victims of homicide. Based on ethnographic and historical research in two Christian congregations, this article examines the forms of relatedness that women have developed to support and advocate for each other, the displaced, and the deceased. Tracing more broadly the development of vulnerability and violence at the urban margins, I argue that this work unfolds in a continued context of social death, predicated on dominant and still racist determinations of human value. I thus examine the transformative potential of African-American religious women’s relational practices, highlighting in particular their assertion of black social and spiritual value, in the kingdom of God if not yet in the inclusive, just, and sustainable city and world they envision.     

Parastrongylus (=Angiostrongylus) cantonensis now endemic in Louisiana wildlife

Parastrongylus (=Angiostrongylus) cantonensis, a lung worm of rats, was first reported in the United States in 1987, with a probable introduction by infected rats from ships docking in New Orleans, Louisiana, during the mid-1980s. Since then, it has been reported in nonhuman primates and a boy from New Orleans, and in a horse from Picayune, Mississippi, a distance of 87 km from New Orleans. Parastrongylus cantonensis infection is herein reported in a lemur (Varencia variegata rubra) from New Iberia, Louisiana, a distance of 222 km from New Orleans, and in a wood rat (Neotomafloridanus) and in 4 opossums (Didelphis virginiana) from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a distance of 124 km from New Orleans. The potential of a great variety of gastropods serving as intermediate hosts in Louisiana may pose a threat to wildlife as well as to domesticated animals in the areas where infected Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus) are present.     

Tilling sand: contradictions of “Social Economy” in a Chinese movement for alternative rural development

New Rural Reconstruction is an ongoing alternative development movement in China, with ties to transnational movements for “social economy,” “fair trade,” and “food sovereignty.” It consists of a diverse network of organizations and projects loosely united by the goals of reversing the rural-to-urban flow of resources and (re)constructing sustainable, self-sufficient communities based on cooperation among peasant households, supported by agroecological skill-sharing and alternative marketing. This article examines four peasant organizations in this movement, focusing on their efforts to negotiate the contradictions between their ideals and their relation to capitalism. I argue that, under present conditions, “success” at reversing the flow of resources through commercial means tends to require further integration into capitalist processes, both increasing vulnerability to global economic forces and undermining “alternative” ideals such as equality, sustainability, and participatory democracy. I thus engage critically with the interdisciplinary literature on “social economy” and cooperatives, considering how cooperative experiments might move beyond the limits of alternativism to play a role in the transformation of their socioeconomic context.     

Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans

In this article, we consider how long-term patterns of resistance to structural violence inform citizens' responses to displacement before and after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simone's (2004) conceptualization of people as infrastructure, we recenter the discussion about the rebuilding of New Orleans around displaced residents, taking the place-making practices of members of a social club as a lens through which to examine the predicament of the city as a whole. Members have been generating alternative ways of thinking about and dwelling together in a restructuring city. Their perspectives are articulated through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and the embodied practices of club members and their followers as they make claims to the city through massive, participatory street processions known as second lines. These distinctive ways of thinking and being in the city—the subaltern mainstream of the second-line tradition—are now being deployed by exiled New Orleanians reconsidering their relationship to home.     

Emplacement and Millennial Expectations in an Era of Development and Globalization: Heaven and the Appeal of Christianity for the Ipili

Non-Western Christianity engages with capitalist development and ideas of modernization from multiple and competing perspectives. In this article, I argue that as researchers we can weave together disparate theoretical strands attempting to explain the appeal of Christianity—particularly its Pentecostal and charismatic forms—by examining indigenous notions of "salvation" that have often been overlooked in the literature. To illustrate, I examine millennial Christianity among the Ipili of Papua New Guinea, demonstrating how their understandings of "heaven" and their desire for the Second Coming articulate with a concern regarding how social relations are spatialized through engagement with capitalist mining development, evangelical Christianity, and traditional spirits responsible for maintaining the world's integrity.     

Declaration of Taking Twice: The Fazendeville Community of the Lower Ninth Ward

The Fazendeville Village was a residential community founded during the Reconstruction era in 1867 on the land where the Battle of New Orleans (1815) was fought during the War of 1812 in what is now Chalmette, LA. The entire community was displaced and their homes were razed in 1964 to provide more land for the National Historical Park to commemorate the battle. Most of the residents moved to the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans and now, 42 years later, they are displaced again and their homes (those that are still standing) will be razed because of the devastation of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the floods. Previous research has proven that vernacular networks affect the exodus, return, recovery, and rebuilding of certain communities after traumatic situations. In this study, I suggest that in the Fazendeville community during past trauma, the maintenance of cultural livelihood was caused by communality, spirituality, and traditionality. In addition, I propose that these are also the vernacular networks that are catalyst for community renewal and empowerment—after hurricanes, floods, and historic displacement by the federal government. My ultimate goal is to transform ethnographies into a praxis capable of making the community present and not marginalized or excluded from history and the strategic plan for rebuilding New Orleans.     

Rodent-Borne <Emphasis Type="Italic">Bartonella</Emphasis> Infection Varies According to Host Species Within and Among Cities

It is becoming increasingly likely that rodents will drive future disease epidemics with the continued expansion of cities worldwide. Though transmission risk is a growing concern, relatively little is known about pathogens carried by urban rats. Here, we assess whether the diversity and prevalence of Bartonella bacteria differ according to the (co)occurrence of rat hosts across New Orleans, LA (NO), where both Norway (Rattus norvegicus) and roof rats (Rattus rattus) are found, relative to New York City (NYC) which only harbors Norway rats. We detected human pathogenic Bartonella species in both NYC and New Orleans rodents. We found that Norway rats in New Orleans harbored a more diverse assemblage of Bartonella than Norway rats in NYC and that Norway rats harbored a more diverse and distinct assemblage of Bartonella compared to roof rats in New Orleans. Additionally, Norway rats were more likely to be infected with Bartonella than roof rats in New Orleans. Flea infestation appears to be an important predictor of Bartonella infection in Norway rats across both cities. These findings illustrate that pathogen infections can be heterogeneous in urban rodents and indicate that further study of host species interactions could clarify variation in spillover risk across cities.     

In the shadow of industry: a study of culturization in Papua New Guinea

The activities of extractive industry have recently been framed by a language of corporate social responsibility that relies on a system of legibility and objectification. This process reifies ‘cultural units’, abstracting them from the rules of kinship, migration, and exchange that ensure social and economic security. I refer to this process and the ideology of ‘development’ that accompanies it as culturization and examine it in the context of oil extraction in Papua New Guinea's Kutubu region. Drawing on debates on the indigenization and politicization of ‘culture’, I present culturization as a process that relies on rules of inheritance and property to impose a structure of difference in contexts of extractive industry that ignores the intricacies of sociality that ultimately give life meaning. The aim of the paper is to both illustrate the consequences of this process and consider cognate ideas of ‘culture’ vis‐à‐vis ‘sociality’ to emphasize their mutual theoretical importance to contemporary anthropological inquiry.     

Generation of the benthic foraminiferal assemblage: Theory and preliminary data

The production of benthic foraminiferal communities is filtered through taphonomic (mainly destructive) processes within the sediments to generate the fossil assemblage. Both the production and the taphonomy depend on bottom water oxygen content and flux of organic carbon to the seabed. An examination of the relationships of processes generating the fossil assemblage to oxygen and organic carbon supply is made using pore water geochemical measurements to estimate carbon flux for locations in the Gulf of Mexico and the central California margin. The locations are plotted in a three dimensional field with bottom water oxygen content, organic carbon flux, and sediment depth as the axes. Then the response of foraminiferal standing stock, taphonomic processes and the developing fossil assemblage to the field is investigated. Variation in the vertical stratification of foraminiferal standing stock and test production, species' stratification, taphonomic process intensity and stratification, and sediment bioturbation lead to marked differences in the way the fossil assemblage is generated across the oxygen content-organic carbon flux field. The result is that the oxygen-carbon flux field has a significant impact on the fossil assemblage through the interaction of biological and biogeochemical processes in the sediments. A model of this interaction is investigated to show how its elements change across the oxygen-carbon flux field and how these affect the generation of the fossil assemblage.     

Distinction between fill channels and abrasion furrows on ammonoid internal moulds

Ammonoid sedimentary internal moulds can display grooves on the external or ventral region that have been formed by diverse taphonomic processes. In particular, draft-filling spiral channels and abrasion annular furrows are taphonomic structures useful as palaeoenvironmental indicators of turbulent waters and conditions of low rate of sedimentation, although they can show some common morphological properties that may lead to erroneous identifications. However, the morphological features, formation processes and palaeogeographic conditions in which the structures of these two types have been developed are very different. In consequence, it is important to keep in mind the distinctive characters of these taphonomic structures before using their occurrence in the palaeoenvironmental or palaeogeographic interpretations.     

Multilocus population genetic analysis of the Southwest Pacific malaria vector Anopheles punctulatus

The population structure and history of the cryptic malaria vector species, Anopheles punctulatus (Doenitz), was investigated throughout Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands with the aim of detailing genetic subdivisions and the potential for movement through this biogeographically complex region. We obtained larval collections from over 80 sites and utilised a diverse array of molecular markers that evolve through different processes. Individuals were initially identified to species and genotyped using the ribosomal DNA second internal transcribed spacer. DNA sequencing of a single copy nuclear ribosomal protein S9 and the mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase I loci were then investigated and 12 nuclear microsatellite markers were developed and analysed. Our data revealed three genetically distinct populations – one in Papua New Guinea, the second on Buka Island (Bougainville Province, Papua New Guinea), and the third on Guadalcanal Island (Solomon Islands). Genetic differentiation within Papua New Guinea was much lower than that found in studies of other closely related species in the region. The data does suggest that A. punctulatus has undergone a population bottleneck followed by a recent population and range expansion in Papua New Guinea. Humans and regional economic growth may be facilitating this population expansion, as A. punctulatus is able to rapidly occupy human modified landscapes and traverse unsealed roads. We therefore anticipate extensive movement of this species through New Guinea – particularly into the highlands, with a potential increase in malaria frequency in a warming climate – as well as relatively unrestricted gene flow of advantageous alleles that may confound vector control efforts.     

Nitrogen loading into an urban estuary: Lake Pontchartrain (Louisiana,U.S.A.)

We constructed a nitrogen loading budget for the Lake Pontchartrain watershed located north of New Orleans, Louisiana (U.S.A.). Water quality measurements, discharge estimates, and literature values were used to establish the annual and seasonal variations in loading rates for total nitrogen and nitrate. The relatively stable annual loadings (million kg N) are about 10× that of the pre-settlement nitrogen loading, and come from atmosphere (1.3), the watershed (7.8), pumped urban runoff from New Orleans (1.0), and leakage through the Bonnet Carré flood control structure (0.5–0.9). Relatively minor additional amounts come from nitrogen fixation in the Lake. Occasional openings of the Bonnet Carré Spillway (for flood protection) could triple the annual average loading within 1–2 months. Proposed smaller diversions (for wetland restoration) could raise present N loadings by 50%. The results of water quality management, flood protection and wetland restoration may thus have conflicting effects on the Lake's phytoplankton community, which is primarily nitrogen limited. Lowering the total nitrogen loading, however, seems quite possible, especially given that the present loadings are almost all reducible through existing technology, especially sewerage treatment. The analysis demonstrates that the consequences of ecosystem restoration efforts, continued population growth and flood protection to estuarine nitrogen budgets are intertwined with each other, have a seasonal component, and are changing as policies evolve.