Free Thoreau's Legacy by Richard Hayes

Flanders , a psychiatrist, practices in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her family. She enjoys biking and gardening, and she volunteers as an urban ecosteward in Pittsburgh’s parks.

Above Portland
    Gary Braasch
    The tram, one of the latest elements in my hometown’s innovative transport system, allows medical personnel, patients, and students to avoid an estimated 2 million vehicle miles a year in traveling to the medical school. The tram carries more than 100,000 passengers a month along 3,300 feet of cables at about 20 mph. It connects with a trolley and light rail system that extends to many suburbs and the airport.

    Gary Braasch is an award-winning conservation photographer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author and photographer of Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World.

    Above Portland. View from the top of the aerial tram at the Oregon Health and Science University. Photo by Gary Braasch.

The Big Uneasy
    Randall Curren
    A NATIVE OF NEW ORLEANS, I LIVED THERE UNTIL I
was twenty-two, and I continued to visit until not long before Hurricane Katrina struck. In the first days after Katrina, I worried about displaced family members and friends unaccounted for. I remembered my mother carrying me home when a summer rain made the streets impassable, the water too deep for me to walk through. My neighborhood, Gentilly, was where the deepest flooding from Katrina occurred, but as a child I had no idea we lived in the lowest and most vulnerable part of town. When I was ten, I scavenged firewood for cooking in the days after Hurricane Betsy, which left us without power for many days.
    When boats began rescuing Katrina victims in earnest after days of incomprehensible delays, I remembered riding out Hurricane Camille in a dormitory at the University of New Orleans,
a few yards from Lake Pontchartrain and the London Avenue Canal, breached by Katrina. Camille had headed straight toward New Orleans and deflected to the east as it made landfall, sending a thirty-foot surge of water across Biloxi, Mississippi, much as Katrina did.
    After Katrina, I began to feel that I would never be able to go home again. “Come and stay with us and I’ll drive you around,” my brother said a year after the storm. “But it’s mile after mile of devastation, and I can’t look at it myself without tears streaming down my face.”
    Once dubbed the “City That Care Forgot,” the Big Easy is not so easy or carefree anymore. Before Katrina, no one on the Gulf Coast imagined they would ever see a hurricane as bad as Camille again. Water in the streets and narrow escapes during hurricanes were normal, and no predictions of Katrina’s possible devastation could persuade New Orleanians that they would not be able to return home in a few days. My brother’s family evacuated with little more than a checkbook and a change of clothes; it was eight months before they could reoccupy their home.
    The human truth that Katrina made vivid for me is that our experience of what is normal leads us to discount objective evidence that something out of the ordinary is happening. The truth of climate disruption is that a major American city could be lost to the sea much sooner than people realize. In the thirty years between Camille and Katrina, the delta between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico lost 1,500 square miles of land mass, and the surface waters of the gulf warmed to a peak summer temperature of 90 degrees F. As oceans rise and warm, I fear that New Orleans will not be the only city more vulnerable to the bigger storms we can expect.

    Randall Curren is a professor of philosophy and department chair at the University of Rochester, where he holds a secondary professorship in education. Growing up in New Orleans, he divided his time between the library and the marshy woods near his home.

Canceling Catalogs:
A Gift Whose Time Has Come
    Jennifer B. Freeman
    JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING, MY FAMILY GAVE A
holiday present