Mathematically, delta is the triangle-shaped symbol which means change or displacement. Geographically a delta is a triangular fan of rivers that flows into an ocean. Delta is also the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet.
For centuries, numerous Indigenous groups lived alongside the river. “Choctaws in the south called the river “Misha sipokni (beyond age).” Monique Verdin, “Southward into the Vanishing Lands,” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas, ed. Rebecca Solnit and Rebecca Snedeker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 19. The names by which some of these Indigenous groups referred to themselves also reflected their relationship to the river. See Jacob F. Lee, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 9-10.
Laura Tenenbaum, “The Mississippi River Delta is the Fastest Shrinking Delta in the World. NASA Wants to Know Why,” Forbes, February 24, 2020. ➝.
“2019 Billion-Dollar Disasters,” Climate Central, November 6, 2019, ➝.
Associated Press, “Arctic Has Warmest Winter on Record: ‘It’s Just Crazy, Crazy Stuff,’” The Guardian, March 6, 2018, ➝.
On November 15, Venice suffers its worst flood in fifty years. A state of emergency is declared. The legendary engineering buffer has failed. “Venice was destroyed the other day,” says Mayor Luigi Brugnaro. Riccardo Bastianello, Emily G Roe, “Venice hit by another ferocious high tide, flooding city.” ➝. See also Jonathan Watts, “Climate Scientists Shocked by Scale of Floods in Germany,” The Guardian, July 16, 2021, ➝.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s terms “crypt” and “phantom” are generative here. The crypt represents an inadmissible crime or guarded secret in one generation that is so unspeakable it has to be sealed off from individual or collective memory. But the denied or entombed secret is buried only half-alive, creating disturbances and memory-traces that are borne phantom-like to the next generation. The next generation becomes thereby the unsuspecting bearers of nameless traumas and unresolved enigmas. The crypt’s secret survives half-glimpsed in disturbances in historical narratives, half-submerged in national secrets, half-heard in gaps in family stories. For Abram and Torok, the phantom works its silent havoc and disarray through disturbances in language. But phantoms of denied or disavowed violence also manifest as visual disturbances in photographs and images, and as environmental scars, ruins and apparitions on the landscape itself. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Nicholas T. Rand, vol. 1 (The University of Chicago Press, 1994). In Ghostly Matters Avery Gordon discusses hauntings in terms of Freud’s notion of the uncanny, which she sees as deriving for Freud from two sources: “repressed infantile complexes” and the return of “primitive belief.” See Avery F. Gordon and Janice Radway, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 50. For my purposes, Abraham and Torok’s trans-generational and historically inflected figures of the crypt and the phantom open up more generative routes to a critique of colonial power and settler domination, without the racist undertow of Freud’s theory of the uncanny. I explore this in more detail in nineteenth century photographs in “Ghostscapes from the Forever War,” in Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, ed. Alan C. Braddock and Karl Kusserow (Princeton University Art Museum, 2018).
The fundamental edict of US imperialism is that it is no empire at all. Matthew Jacobson describes the “extraordinary ingenuity with which Americans have been able to forget their imperialist past (and so absolve their imperialist present). Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Imperial Amnesia: Teddy Roosevelt, the Philippines, and the Modern Art of Forgetting,” Radical History Review 1999, no. 73 (January 1, 1999): 117–27, 116. ➝.
Cited in John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 21.
“About | Delta-X,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology, ➝.
Nathaniel Rich, “Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana,” The New York Times, July 21, 2020, sec. Magazine, ➝.
Rich, “Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana.”
Rich, “Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana.”
Peter Lehner and Bob Deans, In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, The Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction (OR Books, 2010), 49-54.
Bob Marshall, “Louisiana Is Drowning, Quickly,” Grist, August 28, 2014, ➝.
Marshall, “Louisiana is Drowning, Quicky.”
According to Rich, the Mississippi carries 40% of the country’s agricultural exports between heartland and coast. See Rich, “Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana.”
Marshall, “Louisiana is Drowning, Quicky.”
Marshall, “Louisiana is Drowning, Quicky.”
Quoted in Mark Schleifstein, “‘We’re Screwed’: The Only Question Is How Quickly Louisiana Wetlands Will Vanish, Study Says,” NOLA.com, ➝.
Tornqvist, cited in Schleifstein, “‘We’re Screwed.’”
The Baton Rouge Fault Zone is a series of faults running roughly west-east north of Lake Ponchetrain. Baton Rouge itself is 81 miles north west of New Orleans.
Amy Wold, “Washed Away: Locations in Palquemines Parish Disappear from Lastest NOAA Charts,” The Advocate, April 29, 2013, ➝.
New Orleans is the largest population center at risk from sea level rise in the country and is now experiencing one of the highest rates of sea level rise in the world. “Louisiana’s Sea Level Is Rising,” Sea Level Rise, ➝.
Josh Archote, “Sinking Louisiana: Is It Too Late to Save Louisiana’s Coast? LSU Professors, Researchers Weigh In,” The Reveille, November 18, 2020, ➝.
Simon Winchester, The End of the River (Scribd Originals, 2020), 9.
Winchester, The End of the River, 33–35.
In both rituals (baptism and colonial ‘discovery,’ “western men publicly disavow the creative agency of others (the colonized/women) and arrogate to themselves the power of origins.” Baptism is a “surrogate birthing ritual, during which men collectively compensate themselves for their invisible role in the birth of the child and diminish women’s agency.”Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1994), 29.
Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 35.
Ghosh, 36.
Nikole Hannah Jones, The 1619 Project. A New Origin Story, Random House, 2021. Adam Mandelman, The Place with No Edge: An Intimate History of People, Technology, and the Mississippi River Delta (LSU Press, 2020).
Mandelman, 20.
Susan Scott Parrish, The Flood Year 1927 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
McPhee, The Control of Nature, 12.
McPhee, The Control of Nature, 7.
McPhee, The Control of Nature, 45.
Since the 1930’s every social crisis of neo-liberalism rolling in has been managed by the language of war: the war on poverty, the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on AIDS, the war on COVID.
Peter Lehner and Bob Deans, In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, The Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction (OR Books, 2010), 87.
Lehner and Deans, Deep Water, 87.
Lehner and Deans, Deep Water, 87.
“More of the Biggest Offshore Structures in the World,” NES Fircroft, December 4, 2018, ➝.
Sarah Lyall, “At BP, a History of Boldness and Costly Blunders.”
“Over the last five years, BP’s net production in the Gulf of Mexico has increased by more than 60 percent, rising from less than 200,000 boe/d (barrel of oil equivalent/day) in 2013 to more than 300,000 boe/d today… BP is currently the top oil producer in the Gulf, and anticipates its production growing to around 400,000 boe/d through the middle of the next decade.” Mark Schleifstein, "BP to spend $1.3 billion on Atlantis Gulf oilfield," NOLA, January 8, 2019, ➝. “The Thunder Horse find comes in the wake of the company approving major expansion at the Atlantis field in the Gulf of Mexico … the latest example of BP’s strategy of growing advantaged oil production … in the Gulf.” “BP Detects 1 Billion Barrels of Oil at Thunder Horse Field,” OilNOW, January 8, 2019. ➝.
Funding for the project comes in part from roughly $9 billion in BP settlement money the state will receive through 2032. The Master Plan includes a menu of 124 projects designed to restore and protect thousands of acres of the damaged wetlands.
Oliver Milman, “US Auctions off Oil and Gas Leases in Gulf of Mexico After climate Talks,” Wednesday 17 November, The Guardian, ➝.
Oliver Houck, quoted in Kevin Sack and John Schwartz, “Left to Louisiana’s Tides, a Village Fights for Time,” The New York Times, February 24, 2018, ➝.
Julie Dermansky, “The draft EIS states that “construction impacts on minority and low-income populations could be disproportionately high...,” ”Can the Fate of Dolphins and Louisiana’s Fishing Industry Stop A Massive Mississippi River Diversion Plan?” Desmog, June 21, 2021. ➝.
Cited in Rich, “Destroying a Way of Life to Save Louisiana.”
Coastal Restoration Press Release. “The report also found that construction firms will benefit the most from these projects, garnering 82% of sales.” ”New Study Shows Construction of Sediment Diversions will Deliver Significant Economic Benefits” October 16, 2019. ➝.
Wetlands American Trust (WAT) is one of the nation’s largest accredited land trusts, holding conservation easements on more than 400,000 acres. WAT is a major philanthropic support to Ducks Unlimited, a wetlands and waterfowl conservation organization.
Kevin Sack and John Schwartz, “Our Drowning Coast, Left to Louisiana’s Tides,” New York Times, February, 25, 2018.
Pointe-aux-Chenes (Oak Point) is the marshy island home of the Pointe-au-Chien (Point of Dogs) Independent Native Indian Tribe, one of the three state recognized Houma tribes, a breakaway group from the United Houma Nation. Some residents on the island identify as Chitimacha descendents.
Nikole Hannah Jones, The 1619 Project. A New Origin Story, Random House, 2021. Early Louisiana’s plantation owners used the forced labor of enslaved Native Americans. As early as 1708, the Nicolas de La Salle census counted nearly 170 Native people enslaved on Louisiana’s plantations. Native people were also sold to the West Indies. Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, Yale University Press, 2002, 309-310. See also Andres Resendez, The Other Slavery, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Apache, with its logo of a Native American in a feather headdress, became called the Apache Corporation and is one of the leading independent crude oil and natural gas producers in the United States. In 2013, Apache sold its holdings on the Gulf shelf to Riverstone Holdings, New York Times, July 18, 2013. See also Nathan Jessee, Elder Rosina Philippe, Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, Theresa Dardar, Traditional Chief Albert Naquin, and Chantel Comardelle, “Resisting the Oblivion of Eco-Colonialism,” Anthropocene Curriculum (October 11, 2020), ➝.
In 2010, during the BP disaster, all fishing was prohibited. The Pointe-au-Chien fishermen were offered jobs cleaning up for BP on condition they accepted gag orders. Russell Dardar found oil in the nearby marshes and refused to be silenced. Theresa Dardar, Donald’s wife, told me she got their shrimp tested and when she was told it was toxic, she stopped shrimping. “I couldn’t sell shrimp I won’t eat myself,” she said. Interview Anne McClintock.
Donald Dardar, Russell’s brother is leading an effort to return oyster shells to the water to protect the sacred mounds and serve as “living shorelines” to save their drowning island, buffer the land against the hurricanes and create new land. See Tristan Baurick, “Louisiana Tribe Protects Historic Sites with Oyster Shells,” NOLA.com, April 18, 2019, ➝. NOLA.com. “Protecting Wildlife and History, One Oyster Shell at a time” ➝.
Rebecca Saunders, “Archaic Shell Mounds in the American Southeast," Oxford Handbooks Online. January, 2017. ➝.
Professor Alan Cooper describes kauri ghost trees in New Zealand as “like the Rosetta Stone, helping us tie together records of environmental change in caves, ice cores, and peat bogs around the world.” “Ancient Kauri Trees Points to a Turning Point in Earth’s History 42,000 Years Ago,” HeritageDaily, February 18, 2021, ➝.
We are witnessing a dramatic increase in books, documentaries, Ted Talks, photographs, academic courses, and so on, on forests and trees.
Murray Carpenter, “Native American Secrets Lie Buried in Huge Shell Mounds,” New York Times, October 19, 2017, ➝.
Elizabeth and Edison Dardar Sr, both 72 and elders in the island’s Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, returned to Isle de Jean Charles a few days after evacuating, to live beneath their devasted home in a blue tented tarp. Anne McClintock Interview with Chris Brunet. Also Oliver Laughland, “Ida is Not the End.” The Guardian, September 12, 2021. ➝. The Louisiana State’s projected resettlement of the inhabitants of Isle de jean Charles further north has garnered considerable attention. For a detailed examination of the embattled resettlement process see Nathan Jessee, “Reshaping Louisiana’s Coastal Frontier: Managed Retreat as Colonial Decontextualization,” Journal of Political Ecology (Forthcoming).