As the Floodwaters Rise

 
    
 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him,
 “As for me, I am establishing my covenant with you 
and your descendants after you,
and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals,
 and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark.  
 I establish my covenant with you, 
that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, 
and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.” 

Genesis 9:8-11


 The HBO series Treme ran from 2010 and 2013 but we're only catching up with it now. Here is a succinct description pf the series:

The series takes its name from Treme, a neighborhood of New Orleans. It begins three months after Hurricane Katrina as the residents, including musicians, chefs, Mardi Gras Indians, and other New Orleanians, try to rebuild their lives, their homes, and their unique culture in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane.

Treme is a well acted ensemble piece and insightful into the unique character of New Orleans.It becomes apparent that the city will never be the same in the aftermath of that devastating storm. I discovered on my own that the population was roughly half a million at the time of Katrina but has shrunk to just under 400,000. Officials were reluctant to rebuild or reopen many of the poorer, flood-prone, and predominantly Black neighbourhoods, so residents have been permanently displaced.  The show suggests that government aid and insurance payments were excruciatingly slow, and that opportunists made a lot of money from the grief of storm victims. 

 

Photographs by Michel Varisco. Since 1955, 98 percent of Isle de Jean Charles,
 home of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, has washed away.

Because Treme is focussed on a particular area of New Orleans it doesn't explore the bigger picture of devastation in Lousiana's coastal areas, which continues to this day. The latest issue of the excellent Orion magazine features a Native community on Isle de Jean Charles, an island which was self-sufficient a century ago but whose territory has shrunk by 98% due to erosion, flooding, and poisoning by encroaching salt water. Climate change, oil company canals, and botched government efforts have conspired to eradicate this community.  A few residents persist but there are plans to relocate everyone inland even though their livelihood had been from the water for generations. The haunting film Beasts of the Southern Wild was filmed here. 

 

Kashechewan

I thought about First Nations communities in Northern Ontario as I read the Orion article. Places such as Kashechewan experience destructive flooding year after year, and residents are evacuated. Yet little is done to address the situation. We hear far more about what is happening in Southern Ontario or other provinces. As with Louisiana, marginalized people don't really count.

The truth is that climate change is becoming the "new abnormal" for all of us. As I've said before, the story of  the ark in Genesis may include a promise that God will never inundate the Earth again, but there is no assurance that we humans won't do this to ourselves: "we have met the enemy and he/she  is us."