CONTENTS
Amy Gutmann
Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter
Robert Giegengack and Kenneth R. Foster
Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha
Raymond J. Burby, Arthur C. Nelson, and Thomas W. Sanchez
Frederick Steiner, Barbara Faga, James Sipes, and Robert Yaro
P. Patrick Leahy
Robert E. Lang
Mark Zandi, Steven Cochrane, Fillip Ksiazkiewicz, and Ryan Sweet
Rachel Weinberger
Eugenie L. Birch
Lawrence J. Vale
Jeffrey Lubell
Lester A. Lefton and Yvette M. Jones
Elijah Anderson
Vivian L. Gadsden
Richard J. Gelles
Gary Hack
Thomas L. Daniels and Harris Steinberg
Randall Mason
Dell Upton
Jonathan Barnett and John Beckman
Nick Spitzer
Sandy Sorlien and Leland R. Speed
Ronald J. Daniels
PREFACE: THE WOUND
Amy Gutmann
Hurricane Katrina was a wound.
Wound is a better word than disaster, which connotes a purely natural occurrence. Wound makes room for human agency. And when a wound is inflicted by human beings, so too, are women and men left with the task of its healingor, to borrow Abraham Lincolns phrase, to bind up our nations wounds.
Hurricane Katrina was most obviously inflicted by nature, not by man. But was it solely a random, natural misfortune? Or were its effects also the product of human injustice? The Lisbon earthquake of 1755, as Judith Shklar has pointed out, was the first natural disaster after which such questions rose to the fore. At 9:20 A.M. on the morning of November 1, 1755, an earthquake, now believed to have equaled 9.0 on the Richter scale, struck the Portuguese capital. A devastating tsunami and fire followed. Some 90,000 peoplea third of the citys populationare estimated to have perished. Eighty-five percent of Lisbons buildings were destroyed. The catastrophe prompted intense debate and speculation in religious and intellectual circles across Europe. Was it a random act of nature? Was it a divine punishment? Or was the failure to plan for foreseeable tragedy a human crime?
We shall find it difficult to discover, Voltaire famously declared, how could the laws of movement operate in such fearful disasters in the best of all possible worlds. Surely, this could not be the work of a just, even if incomprehensible, God, Voltaire argued, but merely a random misfortune of impersonal nature. But it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who recognized that if nature made the wound, it was human beings themselves who had held the knife. If the population had not been concentrated in such a small area and if the homes had not been built so many stories tall, the toll in physical and human loss would have been much less. The Lisbon disaster challenged both Catholic theology and Enlightenment rationalism, and in part through the early writings of Immanuel Kant, it spurred the earliest beginnings of a truly scientific seismology.
Now, in the twenty-first century, there is no doubt that Hurricane Katrina was not just a misfortune, but also an injustice. It was not purely a natural disaster, though it may appear so on its face. What if human beings had done the right thing in advance of Katrina? How dramatically different the outcome, and its aftermath, would have been! Of course, we mortals never completely do the right thing. But rarely have we so completely done the wrong thing.
All too often, we do the wrong thing because we ignore facts; we ignore knowledge that we actually have. The tragedymore accurately, the injusticeof Katrina and similar wounds follows directly from the fact that we know things that could have made a difference. We know a great many things about urban spaces. We know much about environmental threats; about civil engineering; about city planning; about regional economic development and the management of risk; about Geographic Information Systems; about economic disparity, community formation, and racial inequality; about governmental and bureaucratic inefficiencyand how to make them more efficient; about supporting and restoring displaced populations; and about ameliorating the traumas of catastrophes.
None of this knowledge, even taken alone, is easy to acquire, master, or apply. But more difficult still is putting such disparate knowledge together into an integrated and comprehensive understanding of such a multifaceted event. Integrating our knowledge to comprehend how the many aspects of the problem work together is the challenge that complex problems like Katrina present. Fortunately, there is a base of empirical knowledge, theoretical understanding, and practical professional experience on which we can draw. So while knowledge is always a great challenge, it is not really our greatest challenge. Our greatest challenge, which we learned the hard way in Katrina, is the integration and dissemination of that knowledgeand most importantly, our willingness to engage it and to use it.
H. G. Wells put this well in his 1920 book, The Outline of History. Human history, he wrote, becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. The mission of education is to race as successfully as we can against catastrophe. The catastrophe catches up with us when education lags behind. Education, here, means not only what we do in universities, which is extremely important. We also need to attend to the education of civic and political leaders, of legislators, of journalists, and of ordinary citizens in advance of, and in the wake of, catastrophes. Such civic education is equally important, and it is not primarily learned in the classroom. It is rather the kind of learning that can occur only in some kind of meetingsome kind of convocationwhether it is a meeting of the state legislature, the city council, the neighborhood association, the editorial board of a newspaper, the live conversations with experts on CNN and MSNBC, or the kind of conference that brings together scholars, professional practitioners, political leaders, and ordinary citizens, as did the conference on which this volume is based.
Only through this kind of mutual education can we learn from and with each other, integrate what we have learned from multiple sources, and communicate our collective knowledge and understanding so as to make our learning truly useful. Albert Einstein made a similar point, half a century ago, when he noted that the unleashed power of the atom has changed everythingsave our modes of
