Defend New Orleans--Why Law School? Part 2

I have friends and acquaintances with real problems. They’re unemployed. They’re sick or their mother is, their marriage is on the rocks. And I think, here I am in a comfortable place in my life—trouble’s going to come soon enough, but in the meantime why shake things up? Well, cause, I’m stagnating. I need a challenge. I think I’m capable of more.

But what, what exactly to do with this law school business?

Well---

There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen around town. It depicts a skull in profile, a fleur-de-lis tattoed on it, with a spiky mohawk. Above, gothic lettering reads "Defend New Orleans."

I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, outside of a steel town outside of Pittsburgh. My mother grew up not far away, in a tiny coal town in southeastern Ohio, near the West Virginia panhandle. It’s pretty, hilly countryside. We lived ten minutes from a state park. My childhood was full of walks in the woods, fishing trips and country drives.

But it was also a place where houses were covered with soot, where the rivers were toxic and the hilltops strip-mined. I hated all that. Before I had politics I intuitively felt the wrongness of it.

I’ve always been probably too sensitive to place. I loved and longed for cities, but if we went to Pittsburgh and took a wrong turn through a desolated ghetto, I was depressed for days.

But in some ways the suburbs seemed worse than the ghetto. We moved into the midwestern suburban sprawl when I started high school, and I was miserable every second I lived there. Again, I just felt in my gut that this was wrong, bad, an inappropriate use of land and an unpleasant, inefficient way to live. It breaks my heart now to see that same cancerous sprawl eat up the landscape of my earlier childhood.

In some ways I’m not sure if I’m constitutionally suited for life in New Orleans. I’m a bit too sober and upright. I’m in the south largely to avoid winter, but the reason I was attracted to New Orleans in particular was that it seemed sheltered from the strip-mallization of America. At least inside the city, it has retained most of its architectural identity and its distinct culture.

There are costs associated with that. The ugliness of New Orleans’ suburbs always seemed to me a karmic cost. Besides that, New Orleans has been preserved by neglect and poverty. It would be better if it were preserved by love, care and intelligent management—but then would it still be New Orleans?

Anyway, even good historic preservation isn’t going to save New Orleans when the big hurricane comes up the river.

Maybe we should just shrug our shoulders. Maybe the city that lives by apathy should die by apathy. Maybe this town was meant to be the stuff of myth, and nothing will fulfill its fate like watery doom.

But John McLachlan at the CBR says that if you can solve New Orleans’ problems, you can solve the world’s problems. He’s prone to meaningless hyperbole, but in this case it might be grounded in reality.

The biggest threat to New Orleans’ continued existence is wetlands loss. Global warming is going to cause huge problems for people everywhere, and people in coastal areas most of all, but it seems to be a human trait that we can’t take seriously problems that are more than a decade away from manifesting themselves. But New Orleans is one of the first places to face a more or less immediate threat from rising sea levels, combined with oil-and-gas-related dredging that is causing Louisiana’s wetlands to wash away at a scary rate. Add the continued sinking of the city due to our dependence on pumping water out when it rains, and we could be underwater very, very soon. Even the Bubbas and Boudreaux’s seem to be catching on to this. And if we can figure out how to save New Orleans, we might have solutions that could be exported to even poorer coastal cities in Asia and elsewhere that will face similar threats in the future.

Other things we need to do to save New Orleans: Force the oil, gas and chemical industries to be responsible corporate citizens, and stop letting them anally rape the state while we smile and beg for more. We need an economy that's based on more than gas and tourism.

We need to get serious about fixing our abysmal public school system. This is going to take the introduction of competent and intelligent administrators, lotsa money, and most importantly (and improbably) an end to the Louisiana Way of graft, cronyism, and race politics.

We need to get serious and broad-thinking about curbing street crime and violence. Actually, fixing the schools will probably help a lot in this department.

Beyond that, we need intelligent planning and design, an ecologically sound way to control the formosan termites before they destroy our lovely old houses, and in general an appreciation of what we have. I’d like to think we could solve some of our problems without turning into Atlanta or Houston.

Anyway, Tulane conveniently has one of the best environmental law programs in the country.