I have been thinking a lot since I got back from New Orleans. Being there was amazing, but I came back very disheartened by what I experience, disheartened and angry. Angry at the devastation I witnessed and the lack of an appropriate governmental response, angry that so many people have been displaced and are unable to return because their homes have been seized, angry that the media has disappeared and the national awareness of what has happened and what continues to happen is virtually non-existent.

I have been thinking a lot about what I can do to have an effect on this situation, short of volunteering, which I plan to return to New Orleans to do once ITP is over. Ideally, I would like to do something that encourages people to donate money, but I have yet to figure out an adequate plan for how to do that. Do people really give money online? Would they donate to this cause if presented adequate and correct information from reliable sources? I don't know.....

So, for the time being I have been contemplating simply how to create an awareness. I was shocked when I arrived in the city, and I think other people would be too because they simply don't know what it looks like there now. I also feel that what has happened there directly relates to issues surrounding global warming and climate change. Much of the information I have found online suggests that the idea of building a city that is below sea level was asking for a disaster of this nature to happen. But what happens if sea level rises, what happens when other coastal cities, like New York, become at risk. It is hard to get people to care about something that doesn't affect them. Perhaps it would affect them if it was directly relate to where they live...

New York if sea level rises 14m

Somehow I am going to try to re-appropriate this image:

More about this to come.