Joshua Lewis - a Profile of a New Orleans Scholar

Josh Lewis returned to New Orleans only a few weeks after Katrina made landfall. He came back to a city where more than 200,000 homes were partially or completely destroyed and the slow process of recovery was only just beginning. In the years following Katrina, Lewis, now Schwartz Professor of River and Coastal Studies at the ByWater Instiute, was seeing an emerging problem in post-Katrina recovery that, in time, would form the basis of a multi-year study. While the city grappled with rebuilding housing, Lewis looked at the empty spaces where houses once were and the ecosystems emerging in their wake.

For context, Lewis wasn’t the only one drawn to these emerging landscapes. The ill-conceived “Green Dot Plan” commissioned by the city was an early effort at grappling with the city’s changing footprint. The plan identified multiple neighborhoods in New Orleans that might be transitioned to more “natural” conditions.

This plan was poorly received and had many glaring flaws. Many of the areas identified in the plan to be abandoned were home to working class and Black communities, and in some cases, weren’t necessarily more flood prone than other slated for redevelopment. To add insult to injury, the commission initially tasked with post-Katrina planning included some of the wealthiest developers in town that had little interest in the self-determination of everyday residents. This failed effort was just the beginning of a process of repopulation and recovery that discriminated against less affluent, mostly Black residents.

The arguments for the re-greening plan were starting to take shape in public discourse. Laden with conservationist tropes, this new vision painted a picture of a New Orleans where ‘nature’ would be allowed to follow its ‘natural’ course, taking over hard-hit neighborhoods and supposedly reducing flooding risks. The assumption that glued this narrative together was that re-greening, even when it was unplanned or unmanaged, was an inherently good thing.

But Lewis, whose family has lived in New Orleans for generations, was alarmed at how supposedly “environmental” thinking was setting up a pretext for disinvestment in historic working class and Black communities.

“Turning the city into some naturalistic organism? It’s not that. It’s a place that is created and maintained through decision making that reflects social power and authority. All of the city is artificially drained, and yes a significant portion has subsided below sea level. You can’t return that to some condition of wildness,” Lewis said.

In his paper in the journal Ecosphere entitled “Socioecological disparities in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina” Josh and a team of researchers analyzed how post-Katrina management of the city’s natural landscape reflected and reinforced already existing inequality. On the ground, Josh and his team cataloged the kind of plants that were taking over New Orleans’ abandoned lots and how these plants differed from neighborhood to neighborhood.

“The question was, — what benefits and hazards are associated with these landscapes and what are some interesting ways you can manage those in the future? How does society actively participate in re-envisioning urban space?” Lewis said.

After multiple summer field seasons conducting vegetation surveys, the team found major disparities in plant cover. Abandoned lots in poorer neighborhoods were being taken over by invasive species that created breeding grounds for pests, mosquitoes, and illegal dumping. Richer neighborhoods, however, were more likely to have intact live oak canopies and other trees perceived to be more visually appealing and provided better habitat for native species. The vegetation taking over poorer neighborhoods reinforced disparities in property values and capital investment at the root of inequality in the city more broadly.

The paper had three main goals. First, supporting concerned residents and neighborhood groups struggling to rebuild their communities. Second, generating data that could be used to persuade decision makers to take a proactive approach to the city’s landscape and mitigate environmental risks, and third, contributing a key case study for the science of vegetation dynamics in the aftermath of a major disaster.

“What I wanted to do is create scientific research in the public interest. To inform debates about land use and environmental management that would make the city a livable healthy place for people. One where they can participate in the decision making about their own town,” Lewis said. Josh is involved in ongoing efforts to create green stormwater infrastructure in the city, carrying with him the lessons learned in those early days after Hurricane Katrina.