VISIONS FOR GULF COAST CLIMATE FUTURES

Location: NEW ORLEANS CULINARY AND HOSPITALITY INSTITUTE, 725 Howard Avenue, 5th Floor Beverage Lab

Speakers:

• Boyce Upholt
• Richard Campanella
• Nathaniel Rich

• Reception at the current exhibition “What Matter’s Here.?!” at the Tulane School of Architecture’s Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, 1725 Baronne Street
  • Speakers: Liz Camuti and Margarita Jover

TOOLS FOR MOVING FROM VISIONS TO [TRANSFORMATIVE] ACTION

Location: TULANE RIVER AND COASTAL CENTER, 1370 Port of New Orleans Place

Speakers:

• Joanna L. Lombard
• Annalisa Molini
• Moderators: John Sabo, Wes Michaels

Speakers:

• Kate Orff
• Sönke Dangendorf
• Moderators: John Sabo, Ehab Meselhe

Speakers:

• Richard Campanella
• David Waggonner
• Wes Michaels
• Moderators: Catherine Sckerl, Jesse Keenan

Speakers:

• Colleen McHugh
• Duke Reiter
• Kelly Shannon + Bruno De Meulder
• Moderators: Carol McMichael Reese, Jesse Keenan

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About the Symposium

Climate change is a pressing issue, especially in the Gulf Coast Region, which embodies a conflicting dual character: we actively participate in its doom. Anthropogenic actions performed at different scales and intensities, mainly enacted by a polluting elite, exacerbate the regional effects of this new climatic regime. The area has one of the largest energy footprints on a national and global scale due to the extraction and processing of raw fossil fuels and gas reserves. Petrochemical plants and monumental infrastructure networks extend over vast geographies that supplying the insatiable needs of an industrialized Technosphere.

Our enormous energy consumption pattern is not always aimed at achieving socioecological welfare. It is too often based on a greed for wealth rooted in capital accumulation. Economic development was posited as the sole source of a flourishing good life, justifying the establishment of sacrifice zones that have acted as global dumping grounds. However, within the region, this economic revenue is kept by a few or shipped away, while the effects of extractivism remain for all. These consequences are further intensified by a built environment conceived as a tool to control Nature. Levees, spillways, pumping stations, draining systems, and impermeable surfaces, among others, have altered water cycles affecting regional ecosystems and communities.

The Gulf Coast Region clearly reflects how Western societies have understood Nature as something opposed to Humans, an externality that could be obscured. However, Nature is now pushing back, implying we must learn to engage with her through a new set of values.

The Gulf Coast inhabitation logic is based on extractivism. Human actions filter into the environment as carbon dioxide, toxic agrochemicals, and many other manmade traces poison the air, water, soils, and multispecies bodies, ultimately degrading the native biodiversity. Non-human cycles are also altered by, for example, the exhaustion of sediment deposition within the littoral, causing the loss of coastal ecosystems. Not to mention how the toxicity in the Mississippi River contributes to the Gulf hypoxia Dead Zone. Unfortunately, these degraded landscapes could be the ones helping us remediate climate change effects. We are losing our regional immune systems.

Wetlands and swamps could protect shore communities from flood risk or could help sequester excess carbon dioxide. Seasonal flooding of river watersheds contributes to soil nutrient replenishment, reducing the dependency on agrochemicals. These examples show us regenerative practices that can inform a new vocabulary of actions so that we can attune with, think with, care for. However, identifying natural value cannot be exclusively based on what services can be provided to us. The region was, and could be again, a unique set of habitats with ecological corridors for more-than-human species, where mutualist relations enhance biodiversity. This ecological plurality defines a common welfare. Therefore, to foster this cohabitation, we must imagine and invest in a new living paradigm.

Rethinking the built environment inevitably brings us back to the need for climate adaptation strategies. The necessity to react has become a public concern, even reaching institutional transnational authorities. The 2015 Paris Agreement was a binding treaty to reduce greenhouse emissions so that global rising temperatures remain below 1.5 ºC by 2030. We are almost there, but the scenario does not seem promising. These plans have frequently focused on short-term strategies that could produce quick fixes. However, thinking in the long-term, in a timeframe spanning from the biological to the geological, means reframing the cultural constructs that sustain our societies.

We need new values to drive a novel way of inhabiting the territory where climate concerns are fundamental imperatives. We must become a society that fosters renewable energy locally, harvests seasonal food, aims for zero waste, and cares for water conservation. This inescapably means leaving behind energy overabundance, one of the primary fuels of our socioecological crisis. Energy reduction encompasses a plethora of strategies such as mobility reform, decentralization of energy production infrastructures, or mix-use development amongst others. This reduced energy budget implies a transition to decarbonization, coupled with absorption or cleaning strategies like reforestation and caring agriculture practices. Unproven geoengineering techniques are out of the question. Phasing out from this path dependency implies political determination, new regulations, and substantial investments that will defend the commons.
The sum of these actions is framed as part of a regenerative and care-based approach, where wealth is understood as a welfare embedded in the built and more-than-human environment. The symposium will address these and many other complexities by fostering a conversation to discuss:

Panel 1: New nature-culture visions for the Gulf Coast.

Panel 2A-2B: Implementation through interdisciplinary tools.

Panel 3A-3B: Scenario planning that could lead to transformative action.