Nathaniel Rich made his mark in American journalism by publishing a report in 2018 that took up an entire issue of the New York Times Magazine : “Losing the Earth: a story of our time” (in France, editions du Seuil published a French version in 2019). This survey looks back on a decade of political inaction, between 1979 and 1989, in the face of a climate crisis that has already been proven.
His second book, Second Nature (not translated, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, 22 euros), tells, in ten essays, a world “Postnatural” in which nothing is properly ” Savage “, and where what we call “nature” can no longer do without man. Resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, Nathaniel Rich answered our questions from Alabama, where he had taken refuge with his family while waiting for the restoration of electricity.
Hurricane Ida, Category 5, the most severe, hit New Orleans on August 29, sixteen years to the day after Katrina. How has the city changed in the meantime?
Billions of dollars have been invested to build a state-of-the-art flood barrier system, which can be seen from space. A wall now surrounds the city. When you drive east from New Orleans, you come to this swampy area crossed by the freeway, then come across this spectacular concrete wall. It is equipped with doors that close when the storm arrives. It’s very dramatic, very medieval: it is announced that at such an hour the doors will close. And behind, there are these communities which are on the wrong side of the wall. It is a visible manifestation of what lies ahead with global warming.
The federal government had to draw a line somewhere and chose, for a number of reasons, to say that is where it would be. And, of course, after the storm, the people living behind the door were badly affected, and those inside are doing pretty well. So, there was hardly any flooding in New Orleans, which is pretty amazing.
Beyond New Orleans, the entire Gulf of Mexico coast is home to high-risk industrial facilities.
Much of the country’s oil rigs are in the Gulf of Mexico. There is a huge concentration of chemical industries on the Mississippi, known as the Cancer Alley [la zone du cancer], which is endangered by rising sea levels and hurricanes. So this is a huge national security problem.
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