New Orleans       A recent study produced by Yale researchers had some grim news for people living in New Orleans that can be succinctly summarizes as “run for the hills.”  With climate change and water rising, their predictions were dour and put the city with water, water, everywhere by 2100.  More than twenty years after Hurricane Katrina and more than sixty past Hurricane Betsy with many decisions about when to stick and when to fold in my past, I’m jaded on this score.  Having moved around constantly as a boy and travelled constantly as a man, while making my living as an organizer of communities, I’ve come to appreciate how important both having a place to call home and a community that is real and substantial are.  I won’t be reckless, and I won’t be alone, but I’m not going anywhere.  Advocating with the devil, I could argue that, given climate change and the course we’re on, where exactly is the safe space in 2100?

A Community Voice, ACORN’s New Orleans affiliate, has listened to their members.  They have regular debates about “climagration” and make plans to meet the challenge.  Learning from Katrina, they have visited cities like Natchez and Vicksburg as places, where they could develop shelters for their members who might be displaced, either temporarily or permanently.  People without resources are imperiled.  Having alternatives as a community, they can imagine a community that could be sustainable until they return.  The organization may be leading in preparing for such an eventuality.  It’s not easy.  In its aftermath, I wrote The Battle for the Ninth Ward:  ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans and the Lessons of Katrina.  Families need the basics: jobs, schools, housing, and healthcare facilities.  They also need their community and a firm sense of home.  Academics talk about resilience, but these are the factors that are the infrastructure.   Rebecca Solnit’s classic, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, written in 2009, masterfully makes these points.

There’s no question that things are seriously bad.  A recent column argued that perhaps the major factor in declining US birthrate was not the economy and the cost of childcare as much as young adults’ concerns for the future, and climate change and our impotence in dealing with it is high on their list.  Rather than doomscrolling and prepper hoarding, a better case about surviving disasters was made by someone who had weathered flooding and fires and heard the sirens warning, who argued that building a community with your neighbors was the best “real preparation” that any of us could make.  It’s one of the reasons we’re fighting for flood warning sirens in Arkansas.

We can’t do this alone or just for our family.  We still have to “be prepared” like the scouts always preached, but we have to join with other who understand that home is not something packed in a suitcase, but deep in the soul, and community is something intentional that we have to build wherever we are.  “No man is an island,” as John Donne wrote four hundred years ago before New Orleans was founded in swamps along the Mississippi River almost three hundred years ago with that full knowledge.  I’m betting New Orleans will still be here in one way or another.  I won’t be here to collect, but home and community I believe are powerful enough to meet the challenges of the future somehow.