Shirley B Laska

• University of New Orleans

Efforts in the United States to plan or implement relocation in response to climate risks have struggled to improve material conditions for participants, to incorporate local knowledge, and to keep communities intact. Mixed methodologies of community geography provide an opportunity for dialogue and knowledge-sharing to collaboratively diagnose the...

Louisiana is a state subject to extensive extreme weather which is now being exacerbated by climate change. From its experiences are drawn by the chapter authors’ deep adaptation challenges that have been addressed with varying success. The chapters of this edited book offer analysis of how such issues have emerged and what actions should be consid...

Future conditions of coastal Louisiana are highly uncertain due to the dynamic nature of deltas, climate change, tropical storms, and human reliance on natural resources and ecosystem services. Managing a system in which natural and socio-economic components are highly integrated is inherently difficult. Sediment diversions are a unique restoration...

Bethel, M.B.; Brien, L.F.; Esposito, M.M.; Miller, C.T.; Buras, H.S.; Laska, S.B.; Philippe, R.; Peterson, K.J., and Richards, C.P., 2014. Sci-TEK: A GIS-based multidisciplinary method for incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into Louisiana's coastal restoration decision-making processes. Making more informed coastal restoration and prote...

Several sociologists arc currently debating the relationship of sociology to the physical environment. Their debates beg a question of more general importance to sociology: How do we organize our thinking about phenomena that are at once physical or material and symbolic or ideal? Our intention is not to add another voice in favor of or opposed to...

Not only is resiliency a term with a myriad of definitions microscopically specified by a wide variety of social and bio/physical scientists and practitioners, it is also incredibly complicated even when treated by individual academic/government/non-profit and business practitioners who are convinced that they have the perfect definition. By then l...

Based on the false promise of widespread prosperity, communities across the U.S. have embraced all brands of economic development at all costs. In Louisiana, that meant development interests turning wetlands into shipping lanes. By replacing a natural buffer against storm surges with a 75-mile long, obsolete canal that cost hundreds of millions of...

While “economic development” projects have long been proposed and supported by local growth machine elites, technological change has affected the social desirability of large projects in three ways. First, large development projects—we examine water transportation—have grown in size, meaning that backers often seek public funding. With increased si...

More informed coastal restoration decisions have become increasingly important given limited resources available for restoration projects and the increasing magnitude of marsh degradation and loss across the Gulf Coast. This research investigated the feasibility and benefits of integrating geospatial technology with the traditional ecological knowl...

Abstract There are few studies in the literature concerning economic development that examine the impact of offshore oil and gas extraction on communities and even fewer that use annual data, examine more than one community and account for the degree of involvement of the community in the oil industry. This study rectifies these problems. The resul...

Objectives. Although many observers have interpreted Hurricane Katrina's damage to New Orleans as a case of nature striking humans, we draw on the sociological concept of the growth machine to show that much of the damage resulted instead from what humans had done to nature—in the name but not the reality of “economic development.” Methods. We tria...

Hurricane Katrina devastated a large portion of the City of New Orleans in 2005. Extensive long-term flooding was caused by failure of the hurricane protection system. However many residents of New Orleans are victims of repetitive flooding. This flooding is not due to levee failure and storm surge, but rather usually from heavy rainfall. This pape...

The Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002 amended the Deepwater Port Act of 1974 to permit the construction of offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals. Terminals with environmentally destructive open-loop regasification systems were quickly approved in the Gulf of Mexico. This study analyzed the political methods of the George W. Bush...

By 1963, a narrow preliminary channel of MRGO had been excavated all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, allowing a ship named the Del Sud to make the first trip along the canal’s full length. The entire project was officially declared complete five years later, or a decade after construction started, in 1968. If any one event could be said to have crys...

In Katrina’s immediate aftermath, the media carried many reports of “looting problems.” In retrospect, it became clear that much of the looting involved food, water, medical supplies, and other necessities, which—given that the stores were closed and flooded—were simply not otherwise available to the stranded survivors. It is also clear that some o...

Even Before Katrina’s floodwaters had drained away, the investigations had begun. One of the patterns to emerge from those investigations is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continues to disagree, strongly, with the critics of MRGO—meaning that the agency’s officials, at least, would almost certainly disagree with almost everything in this cha...

The staggering disaster we have come to call “Katrina” was named for a hurricane that formed out in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean in the waning days of August 2005.

After Katrina struck, it took weeks for the flood-waters to recede, and far longer for the memories of human misery to do so—if they ever will. From a distance of several years, however, perhaps it is now possible to assess Katrina’s larger lessons.

After a number of New Orleanians died from Hurricane Betsy, having fled to their attics only to find them-JL selves trapped there, many families learned the wisdom of keeping an axe in the attic. One story about such an axe involves a family that was deciding whether or not to evacuate in the face of an advancing hurricane. After the man of the hou...

New Orleans has long held a special place in America, culturally and economically, but its location in the Louisiana coastal wetlands makes it unique in a geographic sense as well. At the time when Hurricane Katrina made landfall, a third of the nation’s seafood originated in Louisiana’s wetlands, and the complex of ports along the Mississippi, fro...

We noted in the prologue that Katrina became an event in human history when it left the waters of the Gulf and began to hammer the land, affecting areas that had been both settled and shaped by people. The largest concentration of population in the region, of course, is to be found in New Orleans, and for the people who lived there in 2005, the ter...

Any reference to the rich cultural stew that is southern Louisiana would be incomplete without taking note of the liquid in that stew. As folklorist Nicholas Spitzer points out, understanding southern Louisiana requires a deep knowledge of human relationships with water—specifically including the rich natural resources that can be found in a land t...

One of the names that will be familiar to anyone who has spent time in New Orleans belongs to a hero of the War of 1812 who was also one of the city’s most famous celebrities during its early years—Jean Lafitte. Lafitte, an early entrepreneur, was a pirate—or as he preferred it, a “privateer.” As such, his career involved an ambiguous relationship...

Formally legislated efforts by “men” to “come to the assistance of nature” in New Orleans are nearly as old as the city, but they took on a new level of intensity at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1895, “the New Orleans Board of Trade, considered the most powerful business association in the city from 1879 to 1928, organized a conference to...

Disaster studies have made important progress in recognizing the unequally distributed consequences of disasters, but there has been less progress in analyzing social factors that help create "natural" disasters. Even well-known patterns of hazard-creation tend to be interpreted generically – as representing "economic development" or "capitalism"...

A brief history of the conflict over the initially voluntary and subsequently mandated turtle excluder devices (TEDs) is given. Using surveys, focused interviews, and documentary evidence, the major stakeholders in the marine environment are profiled. Analysis is focused on the way each party to the environmental controversy over the protection of...

Author's Note: As I was developing the hypothetical situation depicting a devastating hurricane striking New Orleans, Louisiana, the disaster waiting to happen threatened to become a reality: Hurricane Ivan, a Category 4 hurricane (140 mph winds) fluctuating to a Category 5 (up to 155 mph winds), was slowly moving directly toward New Orleans. Forec...

In rebuilding after the largest disaster in our nation's history - Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans has faced two key challenges: (1) how to enable all residents, including those with the fewest resources, to return to the city without recreating pre-Hurricane Katrina vulnerabilities and the inequities they represent; and (2) how to prioritize limit...

This article examines how residents of communities frame environmental change. Specifically, how do respondents from Louisiana's coastal communities understand coastal wetland loss? For this article, the authors rely on 47 in-depth interviews from communities in two coastal parishes (counties). Respondents convey the meanings they give to land loss...

Hurricane Katrina's effects in New Orleans and neighboring states reveal that is not purely natural calamity that devastated the region but more obviously it was more of a man-made catastrophe. Other than protection failure of improved levees and floodwalls, unhealthy and reduced wetlands play vital role in the destructive effect of the hurricane....

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita showed the vulnerability of coastal communities and how human activities that caused deterioration of the Mississippi Deltaic Plain (MDP) exacerbated this vulnerability. The MDP formed by dynamic interactions between river and coast at various temporal and spatial scales, and human activity has reduced these interactions...

Social science research on natural disasters documents how a natural hazard such as a hurricane becomes a disaster through social processes and social structures that place human populations in general, and certain segments in particular, at risk. After a description of Hurricane Katrina and its impact, we describe how patterns of land development,...

Four propositions drawn from 60 years of natural hazard and reconstruction research provide a comparative and historical perspective on the reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Decisions taken over its 288-year history that have made New Orleans so vulnerable to Katrina reflect a long-term pattern of societal response to hazard ev...

Environmental impact analyses are routinely undertaken when large engineering projects such as coastal restoration are undertaken. Traditionally, these involve detailed predictions of impacts that will occur to the physical and ecological components of the area of impact. In the case examined in this study, a series of projects have been proposed f...

The panel was chartered to review and assess efforts to optimize manning on surface ships. This included the review of previous studies of the subject, current programs within the U.S. and foreign navies, and relevant technology efforts. The panel was also asked to identify technology opportunities and to recommend changes in procedures and policy...

In 1989, the shrimpers of the Gulf and South Atlantic staged the largest protest of fishery regulations in the history of the United States. Arguing that the mandated turtle excluder devices (TEDs) were still another ploy to remove commercial harvesters from the coasts of America, many shrimpers refused to “pull” TEDs. In order to examine the marin...

Sociology as a discipline has recently been confronted with several challenges, including questions of the existence and nature of its intellectual core, the impact of specialization on its integrity, and its relevancy. In this article I examine a relatively new specialty, environmental sociology, which has some unique qualities that make it a usef...

This article examines the public's responses to newspaper and television reports of an impending natural hazard that threatened local water supplies. A conceptual model is developed in which we argue that distinct characteristics of the two media differentially affect response behavior. The results provide strong support for the hypotheses derived...

This research examines changes in the environmental coalition over the 1980s. During these years, concern over environmental problems has increased. How has the coalition favoring greater environmental protection changed? We use logistic regression to examine changing determinants of support for increased environmental spending. In brief, ideology,...

This research examines the question of whether long-term adjustments to repeated flooding by individual homeowners can be explained by the application of the Burton, Kates, & White (1978) model developed to describe societal coping with natural hazards. A Flood Coping Scale is developed from the model and validated by conformity of the respondents...

Early efforts to mitigate flood hazards emphasized structural solutions such as dams and levees. More recent strategies have stressed regulatory, nonstructural measures. In neither case, however, has homeowner involvement been given a very important role. Frustrated with the limited success of past efforts, floodplain managers recently have become...

Renovation activity within 68 census tracts comprising old New Orleans, Louisiana, neighborhoods, as measured by real estate transfer (sales) rates, were estimated from a series of social, demographic, housing and locational characteristics of the tracts. The physical remnants of the nineteenth-century city - as measured by architectural design, ag...

The renovation of inner-city housing by middle-and upper-income residents who choose central-city neighborhoods may contribute to urban core rebirth. However, with the positive contributions made by such renovators may come unforseen policy and planning problems for city governments. Renovators, because of their higher socioeconomic status, may mak...

In rebuilding after the largest disaster in our nation's history—Hurricane Katrina— New Orleans has faced two key challenges: (1) how to enable all residents, including those with the fewest resources, to return to the city without recreating pre-Hurricane Katrina vulnerabilities and the inequities they represent; and (2) how to prioritize limited...

On September 9-12, 1992, at a workshop in New Orleans funded by Minerals Management Service (MMS) through the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON), a group of social scientists from all over the US, Canada, and Norway met with representatives of MMS and LUMCON, to design a social science research agenda for MMS in the Gulf of Mexico. T...

This report focuses on the effect of petroleum production in the Gulf of Mexico on social problems, educational attainment and strain, and community economic health on parishes in Louisiana. The parishes studies vary in degree of involvement (highly or minimally involved) and type of involvement (extraction or related activities such as refining, m...

The research contained in the report considers the relationship of oil production--a primary economic activity--to five social institutions: the family; poverty and social service provision; communities; government; and the political economy. Findings suggest a direct impact of offshore oil and gas production on these institutions. The impact is bo...