New Orleans greenery post-Katrina reflects social demographics more than hurricane impact.
Popular portrayals of “nature reclaiming civilization” in flood-damaged New Orleans, Louisianna, neighborhoods romanticize an urban ecology shaped by policy-driven socioecological disparities in redevelopment investment, ecologists argue in a new paper in the Ecological Society of America’s open access journal Ecosphere.
“Observers can be taken in by the post-apocalyptic image that some flood-damaged neighborhoods present over a decade after Katrina. It stimulates the imagination. But local people see it as a failure of public policy and a social problem,” said lead author Joshua Lewis, a research professor at the ByWater Institute at Tulane University and the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.
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