The story of Louisiana has been told many times, each time with more knowledge and perspective. The destruction wrought by Big Oil is now well known. But Ain’t There No More, from the Third Coast series is a remarkable collection of history, photos, maps and stories that show total disregard for the physical state. Big Oil only gets mentioned briefly. There’s a whole lot more destruction going on.

Maps going back centuries show the constant ebb and flow of land and water. Louisiana is ever changing. One estimate says a football field size lot is created or destroyed every hour. But settlers refused to work with nature; they insisted on bending nature to their wants. Wetlands were considered worthless – even though they provided game, furs and feathers for industry. So levees and canals redirected the Mississippi – with disastrous results. The canals mean all the silt flows right into the Gulf of Mexico, and when added to constant erosion and damage from hurricanes and flooding, Louisiana is in dire shrink mode, with no compensating factors. Since the 1930s, it has lost nearly 2000 square miles of coastal land. Neverending flooding meant locals built homes on stilts, or at very least lived on the second floor. Roads to connect coastal settlements were pointless, because either the road or the settlement could disappear at any time.

Agriculture in Louisiana is a litany of failure. Cotton, sugar, cattle, strawberries and rice all failed. In the case of rice, grids of canals to flood rice paddies eventually allowed saltwater incursion, ruining both land and water supplies. Sugarcane fermented in the frosts and became worthless. Gulf shrimp have been so polluted by the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, even the federal government says no one should eat more than four a month. In every case, Man’s hand can be seen working against nature.

On the human side, Louisiana suffered greatly when slavery ended, but learned to use child labor as badly as anyone had ever seen. And Louisianans are sedentary; they don’t move away to find a better life. It is not uncommon to find tenth generation families living in the same place. For a state so rocked by disaster and hardship, that is remarkable, and worrying.

Ultimately, the book disappoints a little, because it seems to want to be a museum catalog rather than a view of the world. All the old photos, bills of lading, contracts, share certificates and maps are interesting, but the collection needs editing if it wants to make a point. And although it is nicely laid out, with a lot of brown shaded sidebars and full color whenever the originals had it, you really need to see it on paper. The electronic version is a minor nightmare of zooming in and out, hundreds of times, to read the tiny type of the highly detailed captions and try to read the original text in the images of the documents. Stick to paper for this one.

David Wineberg… (altro)

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DavidWineberg | Nov 3, 2016 |

Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine di Marcelle Bienvenu

This is not so much a cookbook as a treatise by three authorities on the how and why of "Cajun". It is very illuminating, treating such subjects as the reasons food is of such major importance in Cajun society, how the various parts of Cajun society lived and ate, the history of Cajun life, and how the food of South Louisiana and New Orleans came to be mixed. I learned a lot!

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louparris | Feb 4, 2008 |