Katrina

No better laboratory for studying the complexities of environmental injustice exists than Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that exposed not only a presidential administration's heartless incompetence but also centuries of breathtaking greed, corruption, and structural racism. Andy Horowitz's new book is a bracing assessment of a political and environmental geography that seems increasingly to represent American social history writ large. Like deadly sludge bursting from an Appalachian coal mine; oil spewing from the Deep Water Horizon oil rig; or lead leaking from broken water pipes in Flint, Michigan, Hurricane Katrina has long been misread as a single “event” that seemed to “come out of nowhere.” In fact, like most “environmental” catastrophes, the hurricane ravaged a city, a state, and a region that had long since committed to land use and public policies that made the disaster predictable, even inevitable, Horowitz writes (p. 12). By the time the storm hit, the Gulf

Criminology · Geography · Hurricane katrina · Injustice · Language change · Natural disaster · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Storm · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Law