This is an expansive interpretation of New Orleans – America’s most unique city. Eckstein pursues meanings of the phrase ‘sustaining New Orleans’ from the images that remain through media activities to the competing demands of social justice.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

When the levees broke in August 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, 80 percent of the city of New Orleans was flooded, with a loss of 134,000 homes and 986 lives. In particular, the devastation hit the vulnerable communities the hardest: the old, the poor and the African American. The disaster exposed the hideous inequality of the city. In response to the disaster numerous plans, designs and projects were proposed. This bold, challenging and informed book gathers together the variety of responses from politicians, writers, architects and planners and searches for the answers of one of the most important issues of our age: How can we plan for the future, creating a more robust and equal place?

What is it about the city of New Orleans? History, location, and culture continue to link it to France while distancing it culturally and symbolically from the United States. This book explores the traces of French language, history, and artistic expression that have been present there over the last three hundred years. This volume focuses on the French, Spanish, and American colonial periods to understand the imprint that French socio-cultural dynamic left on the Crescent City. The migration of Acadians to New Orleans at the time the city became a Spanish dominion and the arrival of Haitian refugees when the city became an American territory oddly reinforced its Francophone identity. However, in the process of establishing itself as an urban space in the Antebellum South, the culture of New Orleans became a liability for New Orleans elite after the Louisiana Purchase. New Orleans and the Caribbean share numerous historical, cultural, and linguistic connections. The book analyzes these connections and the shared process of creolization occurring in New Orleans and throughout the Caribbean Basin. It suggests “French” New Orleans might be understood as a trope for unscripted “original” Creole social and cultural elements. Since being Creole came to connote African descent, the study suggests that an association with France in the minds of whites allowed for a less racially-bound and contested social order within the United States.

This book fills a gap in the literature on environmental sustainability by addressing the topic from the perspective of social and economic development. Progress in understanding and achieving sustainability requires the integration of scientific, social, economic, and legal issues. Yet progress in understanding and achieving sustainability will only be achieved through integration of scientific, social, economic, and legal aspects. A treatise on environmental sustainability should raise the current state of knowledge by proposing and recommending decision-making efforts and breaking new ground with agendas aimed for the younger generation. These younger scientists will be confronted with future uncertainty related to the set of crises that characterise the 21st Century (e.g. ecological, social, food, energy, environmental, climatic, financial, etc.). Currently, there are a number of indicators that demonstrate that ecological conditions are being compromised globally. These include reduced primary productivity, reduction in biological complexity, spreading pollution such as eutrophication, ecological degradation in any continental/basin/coastal/sea ecosystem, reduction in biodiversity, lowered resilience and slow recovery of damaged ecosystems, and reduced ecological integrity. All of these problems are related to social and economic pressure. The challenge for most ecological systems is not only to establish the baseline for current ecosystem conditions, but also to explore options for recovery and sustainability. The latter involves ecological restoration where ecosystem and environmental services are maintained and enhanced. These services are essential to social integration and economic development. This book not only introduces a theoretical and conceptual framework for the topic, but also analyses the uncertainty for sustainability because of dwindling natural resources. It includes contributions providing a basis for public policies, case studies integrating concepts and tools for solutions, and a set of position papers addressing new agenda topics that will shape the 21st century. The book will be useful for researchers, professors and students alike, as well as for all stakeholders from social, economic and academic sectors.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent the leading governance frame with which the international community tries to address complex interconnected global issues. The SDGs can be considered the only relevant agenda for progress in the years to come.

In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.