From an interview with Mike Tidwell on Salon.com

Q: You write that the president telling people to return to New Orleans now is an act of "mass homicide," like sending civilians into the path of a tsunami. Why is that?

A: The president and all the offices of the federal government combined have done nothing at all to treat the disease that killed New Orleans. They've haphazardly tried to treat the symptoms, to improve the hurricane levees, to create better evacuation plans, to have more supplies pre-positioned for subsequent hurricanes. These are all symptoms. The disease in south Louisiana has been catastrophic land loss, and there's been a plan that's been on the table to reverse that land loss, since the '90s. And for reasons that are truly inexplicable, this government refuses to invest any real money into that plan.

Therefore, if you tell people to go back and you tell them to repair their homes and re-enroll their children in schools in New Orleans, and you've done nothing to treat the disease, then the cancer is going to return. New Orleans is still catastrophically vulnerable to another Katrina. Nothing substantive has been done to protect the city from another record surge tide. The only thing that can protect that city from mammoth surge tides from future hurricanes is to rebuild the land that has been lost. There's a plan on the table, and it's not expensive, certainly not compared to other ways that we spend money. Fourteen billion dollars to substantively rebuild barrier islands and begin rebuilding wetlands is about the cost of six weeks of fighting in Iraq, or the cost of the Big Dig in Boston.