Hurricane Katrina will see its third anniversary on August 29th, a cataclysm whose meaning has yet to inform the national politics of present-day America. But a new report released last month and a documentary film going national this month just might help transform that.
The report and the film are highlighting issues of environmental justice, economic opportunity, and racial equality and they are bumping right into a counter-effort the denialist machine has launched -- a fear-mongering campaign aimed at scaring the poor and minorities about higher energy prices.
It's the naked truth about Katrina and climate and race in America versus a cynical and nauseating brand of ugly politics orchestrated by the fossil lobby whose message was something like this: "Climate action is nothing less than a war on the poor."
And so, as the race issue briefly erupted front and center in the presidential campaign last week, with McCain accusing Obama of playing the "race card", it also emerged in the climate debate at the same time. Curious.
The good news is that in this nation of rampant visual consumption, the argument may just start and end with the film, called Trouble the Water.
The film takes you inside Katrina in a way never before seen. It won the grand jury prize at Sundance this year, and its promo poster declares:
It's not about a hurricane.
It's about America.
Indeed, the trailer ends with a comment from a black man who says to the camera:
Katrina is still going on.
Trouble the Water is set for release on August 22nd in New York and Los Angeles, and nationwide thereafter. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Given the charged political context -- with race and global warming major issues -- the film has a chance of profoundly influencing the presidential election. By all accounts, it's got the force of a Category 5 hurricane.
Trouble the Water opens the day before Katrina makes landfall, just blocks away from the French Quarter but far from the New Orleans that tourists know. Kimberly Rivers Roberts is turning her video camera on herself and her 9th Ward neighbors trapped in the city. “It’s going to be a day to remember,” Kim says excitedly into her new camera as the storm is brewing. It’s her first time shooting video and it’s rough, jumpy but dense with reality. Kim’s playful home-grown newscast tone grinds against the audience’s knowledge that hell is just hours away. There is no way for the audience to warn her. And for New Orleans’ poor, there is nowhere to run.
As the hurricane begins to rage and the floodwaters fill their world and the screen, Kim and her husband Scott continue to film, documenting their harrowing voyage to higher ground and dramatic rescues of friends and neighbors.
Trouble The Water takes audiences on a journey that is by turns heart stopping, infuriating, inspiring and empowering. People leave the theaters wanting and needing to do something<span> </span>–<span> </span>not only about the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, but about the underlying issues that remained when the floodwaters receded – failing public schools, record high levels of incarceration, poverty, lack of government accountability and structural racism.
While awaiting release of the film, good intellectual preparation would be to read a new report called A Climate of Change just released by the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative. It provides another Category 5 experience inside a statistical, quantitative analysis of what just climate action must look like.
Climate change is not only an issue of the environment; it s also an issue of justice and human rights, one that dangerously intersects race and class......
Though far less responsible for climate change, African Americans are significantly more vulnerable to its effects than non-Hispanic whites. Health, housing, economic well-being, culture, and social stability are harmed from such manifestations of climate change as storms, floods, and climate ariability.
African Americans are also more vulnerable to higher energy bills, unemployment, recessions caused by global energy price shocks, and a greater economic burden from military operations designed to protect the flow of oil to the U.S.
The 60-page report is a must-read. Authors J. Andrew Hoerner and Nia Robinson raise the stakes on climate environmentalism, applying an acid test that mainstream enviros barely touch: justice. For example, take their analysis of the Iraq oil war. They break down the war into three buckets of costs -- social, macroenconomic and budgetary -- and assess their disproprotionate impact on African-Americans. They come to a shocking conclusion:
To summarize, for the seven million African American households with below-median wealth the cost of the war will exceed their total wealth under any plausible repayment scenario. As a result, it is anticipated that his segment of the African American community will undergo some combination of painful belt-tightening and wiping out of their accumulated savings over the next five to ten years as a direct consequence of the war.
Supporting the release of the report was House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), who spoke at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, to help launch the Commission to Engage African Americans on Climate Change.
It is critical our community be an integral and active part of the debate because African Americans are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change economically, socially and through our health and well-being.....
Clyburn was not alone. Leaders of South Carolina’s African American denominations -- representing more than 200 churches -- also for the first time called for action against climate change.
So it was no surprise that this upwelling of speaking truth to power would meet with organized resistance from a front group disguised behind a name curiously appropriate to the task: the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE. CORE staged a rally on Capitol Hill with placards that read "Stop the War on the Poor," and whose national spokesman, Niger Innis, had this to say:
Environmental extremists, and the politicians who do their bidding, are strangling consumers, minorities and the working poor by restricting our ability to produce enough American energy and forcing energy prices to go through the roof.
CORE, it turns out, is an oil industry front group. It's taken $275,000 from Exxon since 1998, and it didn't take long for CORE to be embarassingly outedin the mainstream media for the dubious motives behind its Stop the War on the Poor campaign.
These people have no shame. So amateur. So heartless and manipulative. And so cruel -- trying to fool the poor into believing industry lies -- the week before Exxon announced its greatest profits, ever.
Time to Trouble the Water indeed.
(Hat tip: Holley Atkinson)