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Blog like nobody’s watching: The Verdant Yank’s One Year Anniversary

3/16/2017

It’s hard to believe it’s already been one year since I launched The Verdant Yank blog on St. Patrick’s Day 2016. Honestly, the blog was born out of pure frustration. -There were stories that needed to be told but conventional media wasn’t giving me a platform to tell them, in part because conventional media is generally poor on environmental coverage but also because they had no interest in content from a “blow in” with a funny accent and even funnier last name. Hence, with some encouragement from friends, I decided to own the challenge and embark on my second blog ‘The Verdant Yank’ – Blogs on Ireland’s environment from my outlandish Irish-American perspective.

Those same friends thought I’d lost a few marbles when I accompanied my first blog on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with an off-the-wall video that involved eating copious amounts of cream cake, but the blog was my laboratory and it was fun to see what kind of reaction letting out the cray-cray would get. If not on Paddy's Day, then when?!

Over the year, I’ve become more media savvy and found creative ways to get environmental stories into the mainstream Irish and international press. Thus, ‘The Verdant Yank’ has become a playground for a different type of writing – something more personal and cathartic. My musings in the mainstream press are things I think other people need to know, while what I write on the blog helps me work through my arguments and conflicting thoughts. The blog is my only platform to write about environmental problems in a deeply personal way, which seems to resonate with those looking for something different and authentic.

My motto for blogging is the same as my motto for dancing: Do it like nobody’s watching. -Drop the ego and insecurities and get funky!

Ironically, my blogs occasionally have more impact than mainstream content even though the latter reaches a wider readership. For example, during the Irish General Election of 2016, I wanted to analyze how Ireland’s political parties stacked up on climate policies in their manifestos, mainly to figure out who to vote for in my own constituency. Nonetheless, I decided to blog and vlog about it to save some other poor soul the trouble of reading nearly 700 pages of manifesto promises.

My effort featured on RTE News and the Irish Times with many people writing to thank me for doing the work so they didn’t have to. I made some enemies within a few political parties who weren’t too happy with my critical analysis, but I’m willing to bet they’ll dot their i’s and cross their t’s the next time they address climate change in their manifestos, and that’s the kind of impact I’d be really happy with.

Looking back on this year of blogging, I was curious to find out which blogs got the most attention. Overwhelmingly, it was a post I wrote after a train wreck of a TV appearance on TV3's 'Tonight with Vincent Browne' show last August. I’d been assured before I went on that the debate would be about Ireland’s response to climate change, not an archaic debate about the existence of climate change, but the minute we went live it was clear I’d been misled when the presenter started the show asking the audience “are you a believer?” as if the science of climate change was some kind of religious belief.

My colleagues and I valiantly argued against the token contrarian “communications consultant” but went away disappointed we didn’t get to tackle the real burning issue of the Irish government’s complacency on climate change.

In an effort to reclaim the debate, I took to the blog that night and vented my frustrations. The post, sarcastically titled "Long live the status quo!", went viral the next day though I suspected I’d never be invited back on Vincent Browne’s show again after expressing my opinion so publicly. Fair dues to the show’s producers, however. They invited me back on as a regular contributor to discuss the news headlines with Vincent Browne and I’m about to make my fourth appearance this coming Tuesday. It’s been an even better opportunity to bring environmental issues into everyday news and it’s a good learning experience to develop informed opinions beyond climate and environmental issues. A blog I expected to spell career suicide turned out to be an opportunity in disguise.

The biggest surprise of my year of blogging ‘The Verdant Yank’ was winning the Irish blog awards in the current affairs and politics category last year. I applied for that category along with the science category but had been disappointed when I didn’t make the short list for science, which seemed a more obvious fit, so I never expected to win an award in current affairs and politics. As it turned out, having an environmental blog nationally recognised as a current affairs issue was far more meaningful than having it recognised as an obvious science issue.

The award put my blog “on the map” and resulted in a lot of amazing opportunities, including getting recognized on the Irish Independent’s list of 20 "influencers" in Ireland’s response to climate change -a deeply satisfying moment of my career to date because it made all the trolling and frustration over the years worthwhile.

The Verdant Yank lives on (at least as long as I have a U.S. passport). I’m fuelled to keep writing by the wonderful comments I get from readers. Thanks to those of you who have reached out to let me know you’ve been inspired to ‘keep fighting the good fight’ through my work. Environmental advocacy can be a thankless vocation, so those comments mean more than you can imagine and keep me fighting the good fight too. In this world of dark skies, it’s nice that we have each other. :-)

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from The Verdant Yank and, as always, keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara

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What it means to miss New Orleans: An environmentalist’s view growing up below the sea

3/14/2017

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I spent ten of my formative years in The Big Easy -New Orleans, Louisiana or NOLA as we lovingly refer to it. My parents and I moved there on Mardi Gras day 1982, straight off the plane from two years in the Middle East.

We couldn’t have stepped into any more of a contrast from the burkas and mosques of Abu Dhabi to completely naked women walking down Bourbon Street. You can only imagine what I thought as the taxi forced its way through crowds of parade goers to our hotel -something close to “WTF kind of crazy place have my parents brought me to?!”

New Orleans is unique in every aspect, both culturally and geographically. For example, when you live in New Orleans, you get used to walking up, not down, to the water. New Orleans is a city that shouldn’t exist. The mighty Mississippi River winds its way above the land with earthen and concrete levees to protect us from drowning in it.

This feat of engineering sustained a city of up to 400,000 people for over 70 years, but they have to bury their dead in ornate sarcophagi because the ground is too spongy and flood prone to keep them below ground. Growing up below the sea gives one a unique perspective and is perhaps the reason why walking down to the sea from my home in Ireland still seems like a novelty for this Southern Belle.

In the decade my family and I lived in NOLA, we fell head over heels in love with the city. It was easy to see why many people from New Orleans never even cross the Mississippi River, let alone leave the state. Why would you go anywhere else when you live in what’s regarded as the “most unique” city in America? The food, the music, the history, traditions and people were out of this world in all respects, and I feel privileged to have been infused with their “laissez les bon temps rouler” spirit. However, the New Orleans of my youth wasn’t paradise. -It was gritty, poor, dangerous, unofficially segregated and downright racist in places. In 1992, my parents felt we needed to move west for a safer life that allowed teenage Cara a lot more freedom (and them a lot less worry).

Hurricane Katrina hit the city 13 years later in 2005. It is ranked as the third most intense tropical cyclone to make landfall in the USA and the deadliest since 1928, taking at least 1,465 lives. It flooded 80% of the city of New Orleans, mostly due to a storm surge and levee failures that could have been prevented through better engineering. Hurricane Katrina was the costliest natural disaster in the history of the United States and it’s considered the world’s worst engineering disaster since Chernobyl.

My parents and I watched on the television as our former city fell apart and was utterly ignored by the political elite in Washington D.C. Old friends drowned in their attics and our hearts were broken. In response, my father returned to New Orleans to help bring power back to the city, sleeping on a cruise ship docked along the Mississippi River for three months while working for the U.S. Department of Energy.

Climate change wasn’t high on my radar when Katrina hit New Orleans. I still naively thought dwindling freshwater resources would be the biggest environmental problem of my generation and that climate change was a longer-term challenge with less urgency. I can’t even say I made the connection between Katrina and climate change when it happened because hurricanes had always been a part of my life. My elementary school teachers in New Orleans recounted terrifying stories of Hurricanes Betsy, which killed 81 people in 1965, and we prepared to evacuate during hurricane season every year just in case another big one hit. Hurricanes, flooding, termites, fire ants, stinging caterpillars and humidity were the sacrifices we made for the privilege of living in New Orleans.

It wasn’t until 2007 that I started to connect the dots on how climate change might destroy everything I love, including the city that raised me. That’s when Al Gore eloquently explained the link between our warming ocean and more violent storms in his movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, and that’s when I realized the culture and history I grew up with might one day be lost beneath the sea forever.

Last week, I returned to the Crescent City for a family gathering. It was my first time back since Katrina. As I entered the USA via New Jersey, I was surprised how much had changed state-side since I left 14 years ago. Restaurant staff in Newark airport have been replaced with ipads so you scan your credit card and place your order via computer and only come into contact with a person when they silently place your meal in front of you. -Some how they still managed to lose my order... Everyone in the airport was on their phones and disconnected from what was going on around them. America seemed a lot more high-tech but less friendly than when I lived there.

I expected to see big changes in New Orleans too. I mean, the internet hadn’t even been invented when I grew up there so the city had plenty of scope for modernization since my day. Instead, I found a city that seemed to be stuck in a time warp. The poverty rate of 30% has remained the same as it was in 2000 and the murder rate remains the highest in the United States. Aside from the tourist spots, the parts of the city I visited looked poorer than ever.

The impacts of Katrina fell disproportionately on the black community, who now comprise a smaller percentage of the population and are less represented in government. Nearly 100,000 black people and 11,000 white people never returned to the city after Katrina. In the lower 9th ward, 40% of the mostly black population never returned, in most cases because they couldn’t afford to. Of those who did return to New Orleans, the median income of black households is a staggering 54% lower than of white households.

In spite of the inequality and poverty, New Orleans is still wonderful. I savoured as many of my favourite childhood foods as I could from beignets to crawfish and gumbo; I marvelled at the jazz musicians on street corners and clubs of Frenchman St., so talented I couldn’t comprehend why they weren’t playing in giant sold out concert halls; and I had fascinating conversations with taxi drivers and waiters about their lives. Even more than a decade later, everyone wanted to tell me where they were when Katrina hit and how they survived in the months afterwards under truly primitive conditions.

Tourism is nearly back to pre-Katrina levels and it’s easy to see why. -There is simply no place and no people in the world that can do it like they do it in New Orleans. However, as I flew out of New Orleans International Airport to return home, I could see just how close the sea was to consuming the city.

Here's my version of heaven. #NOLA #Brass #Jazz pic.twitter.com/93pvkSxFUZ
— DrCara Augustenborg (@CAugustenborg) March 11, 2017

Under “normal” conditions over its 300 year history, most of New Orleans is about half a meter to 2 meters below sea level but the Northwest Gulf of Mexico is now experiencing some of the largest rates of relative sea level rise in the USA and New Orleans is projected to have one of the highest increases in sea level among 138 coastal cities on the planet.

The existing levees rise 2m above sea level in the most populated parts of the city, but not all parts of the city are as protected and subsidence is causing those levees to sink by nearly half a meter per decade in some places. The land being swallowed by the Gulf waters also houses half of America’s oil refineries, along with pipelines that serve 90 percent of the nation’s offshore energy production and 30 percent of its oil and gas supply, giving us another good reason to divest from fossil fuels before they too are underwater. A 2015 study indicates New Orleans is locked in to drowning by the end of the century based on our actions to date. Already, a football field worth of land is being lost to the sea every hour in Louisiana.

All of us will lose things we love to climate change eventually but how surreal to live at a time when that includes losing the entire city you grew up in. New Orleans is a city which can both least afford to be further below the sea and least deserves any further tragedy, yet it will be most impacted by climate change and its resulting sea level rise. In Louis Armstrong’s famous words, I think I finally know what it means to miss New Orleans because now I understand that it won’t always be there to return to.

Thanks to the people of NOLA for being amazing, kind and resilient and making my trip “home” magical and memorable. Keep fighting the good fight.

-Cara

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Blog like nobody’s watching: The Verdant Yank’s One Year Anniversary

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What it means to miss New Orleans: An environmentalist’s view growing up below the sea

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