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Why New Orleans Must Be Rebuilt

After struggling to absorb the enormity of the human toll in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it wasn't until I read this article in The New York Review of Books that I understood the vital imprtance of the New Orleans as a city. And it has nothing to do with Mardi Gras.

The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: it permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the East and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.

But it was not the extraordinary land or the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography—the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one —the Mississippi—and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold, and reloaded on oceangoing vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

Hurricanes will continue to assault the Gulf Coast and our best efforts will never guarantee the safety or lives of all coast dwellers. But people will return. The city is in a shambles, its population scattered, but in order for raw material to flow up the Mississippi and American-made goods to flow down, New Orleans must rise again.