Remembrance: New Orleans after the storm

Pulling the insides out of a flooded, post-Katrina house in New Orleans has one huge saving grace: It helps someone free themselves from the mire of an ocean bed and move on. It helps them breathe again.

Our group of nine had driven down to the city from Asheville, a motley collection of men and women, young and old, many of us drawn to New Orleans because of some prior connection or distant memory.

At our first house project, in Chef Menteur, we waded into a home that hadn’t been touched since the storm--a daughter’s bedroom of gritty stuffed animals, warped cassette tapes and fused vinyls, a corroded trumpet and academic books about music; a father’s study of do-it-yourself manuals, records and files, a band saw, rusted handguns, chairs and desk lamps—in other words, everything in exactly the same place it was in the day before the water rose.

I couldn’t help but imagine the kind of people who lived there, their loves and ambitions; how they were with each other; what it was like to be in the house from dozens of loose photographs; the tides of conversation that ebbed and flowed there.

We separated out all the interesting, salvageable pieces, things that could live through a flood, and a brother of the owner came by with his wife and sorted the stack wearing rubber gloves, as if on an Egyptian dig. He poured over documents and memorabilia--army medals, plaques and certificates and old, typed letters, and at one point shrugged, “My God—they never threw out anything.”

We knew that some of the pieces we were saving out of the grunge would wind up in the hands of family. So, from that perspective, we felt like we were wresting treasures from a sea bottom, combined with a kind of last rites for all the stuff that had laid around in the soup too long, not only physically but in the psyches of those who knew it was in there.

We never, by the way, found a wedding band we were told was left behind, somewhere in the acrid coffers of all things Katrina.

On another day, in Lakeview, the owner of a second project house stopped in to buy us lunch. Stuttering with emotion, she talked about how she’d spent 39 summers teaching kids how to swim in her backyard.

We flushed out her pool water, dark like coffee, with a sump pump, watching fish (stocked by the city to cut down on mosquitos) rise in scatters to the surface. It was easy to envision the children who had also skittered across that same pool--all those lives in some way altered by the path of the storm, even if they’d long since left the street and moved to Portland or Little Rock or just to the other side of Lake Ponchartrain.

The owner, herself 83, had been staying with a sister in some far western sun state, apparently too long. For despite the gappy, unsteady state of New Orleans’ piecemeal neighborhoods, she could hardly wait to get back. “Everything was too perfect out there—I was bored out of my head,” she said. “And this—this was a happy house—ooh, such a happy house.”

On our last work day, in the Lower Ninth Ward, we pulled down ceilings and jerked out wall board, rolled up carpets and scooped out debris, tossed mattresses and headboards, curtains and clothes. The house to the immediate right leaned to the side; another had no front. The very fact that the cottage we were working in didn’t buckle or cave seemed like a small miracle in such a battered, storm-soaked neighborhood now dotted with white FEMA trailors. We found a few treasures in the rubble, but only a few; mostly albums with pictures of children growing up and smiling into the camera a long time ago, before the levees broke and everything changed.


I still see New Orleans from the eyes of a 14-year-old when I traveled down there from Tennessee to stay with my aunt and uncle and four kids for two weeks. Pete Fountain had his own club and Al Hirt was a god. At Preservation Hall, a fabulous black woman would play keyboard with her hands and bells with her toes.

I remember riding the trolley into Jackson Square and having my face sketched in charcoals. The streets were green and lush. The city moved in song. One day, I rounded a corner in the house and bumped into my aunt getting out of a shower. My whole life congealed on the spot: the music of New Orleans, the tropical beauty, the amazements of a full-grown naked woman.

And food. Food that seemed to have a crazy dignity about it. Jambalaya. Etouffée. Beignet. Muffaletta. The resident language of yum.

To come back, now, to such devastation made me look for existing portals to the place I knew.

I found them. I found them one night at St. Anna’s parish church, which has a mission of serving free food to New Orleans musicians, who are making half their former incomes. I found them in the music of the Jazz Vipers, a sextet playing free that evening, riffing on Cole Porter pieces and the music of Hoagy Carmichael and Irving Berlin.

I found them in a generosity of spirit: one day we went to pay for lunch at a corner sandwich shop only to find that someone had anonymously picked up our tab.

And I found even more. I found that there actually is a New Orleans underneath the flooded bedrooms and kitchens; behind the houses still marked with dates and patrol abbreviations and numbers for known bodies, behind the paperwork and postponements, behind the politics, absurdities and disappointments.

It’s down there, it’s cooking and it will be back.

Attracting readers to a small town newspaper

The front of a direct mail postcard, one of a series and part of a diverse campaign to remind neighbors of the value of hometown journalism.

For ArtSpace Charter School: A work in progress

At a charter school in which the standard course of study is re-imagined through the arts, Ron Zisman and I were asked to re-imagine an existing logo. The process of envisioning isn't over but this sketch suggests the great energy of an enthralled school where Shakespeare can be a second language even in the second grade.

Communicating your non-profit: Positioning, storytelling, going with the flow of new media

For non-profits in Graham County, North Carolina, a three-hour workshop based on the art of storytelling, a vibrant (and totally ancient) way to build bridges with those you serve and with those who make possible your compassionate and visionary work. Rather than subverting the stories that make you who you are, social media can provide new stages and public forums for them--and create new generations of friends, collaborators, benefactors and clients. (I especially enjoyed the results of dividing the room into brainstorming groups which helped particular non-profits find new ways to talk about what they do.)

Ramps and other essential things: A piece for the Forest Service

Forest farming with non-timber forest products: Bringing science to a traditional practice

Farming the forest with understory herbaceous plants, rich in historical anecdote and tradition, represents a category of agroforestry that’s rapidly gaining ground in the Southeast and many parts of the world.

“Take ramps,” says Jim Chamberlain, forest products technologist with the SRS National Agroforestry Center. “Martha Stewart started cooking with ramps (wild onions) in the mid-1990s. It was just the kind of media attention that stirred up a new market. For example, about six years ago, the owner of a mid-western family farm delivered 1,800 pounds of ramps to Chicago restaurants. He made $15,000. Last year he made about $30,000 again harvesting ramps from his wood-lot.”

Ramps, of course, are only a small (though totally unforgettable) part of what the Forest Service calls non-timber forest products (NTFPs) which, in the United States include wild mushrooms, berries, ferns, tree boughs, cones, moss, maple syrup, honey and medicinal products like black cohosh, and ginseng. Even with little active management—a condition Chamberlain and others in the field are working to improve—the NTFP industry has been growing rapidly since the mid-1980s and annually contributes billions of dollars to the U.S. economy.

By managing forestland so that product diversity flourishes, an owner can increase his or her long-term forest value while, at the same time, furthering biodiversity conservation and sustainable forest management.

In 1998, a coalition of scientists, environmental organizations, botanical gardens, and museums reported that 29 percent of the nation’s 16,000 plant species were at risk of extinction (part of a report issued by the Species Survival Commission of the World Conservation Union). Many medicinal plants, an important class of forest products, are in jeopardy from over-harvesting and loss of habitat.

Forest farming activities, on the other hand, support diverse species without interfering with landowner goals and practices related to water capture and filtering, soil erosion control, microclimate moderation and maintenance of habitat for wildlife.

Gathering information

In the South and elsewhere, forest farming is especially attractive on small tracts since it can be entered into on a modest scale with “sweat equity” scheduled to coincide with off-season work loads. SRS, in collaboration with the Virginia Tech Department of Wood Science and Forest Products and Top of the Ozarks Resource Conservation and Development in Missouri, developed one of the first web sites (www.sfp.forprod.vt.edu) devoted to sharing information on NTFP products and markets--information available for harvesters and growers, marketers, processors, and end-users.

There, under medicinal and herbal products, are fact sheets covering: black cohosh, catnip, echinacea, ginseng, goldenseal, slippery elm, St. John’s Wort, and sweet gum. Under decorative products: holiday greenery and vines for wreaths. And under edible products: black walnuts, honey, pecans, persimmon, and shitake mushrooms.

Each product is detailed, covering aspects of uses, cultivation, marketing, harvest, storage and processing. Within the black cohosh profile, for example, there’s a note under “conservation and management concerns” that reads: “To decrease the pressure on the natural habitat, black cohosh can be cultivated. . . . clumps of bugbane (i.e. cohosh) mature quickly and can be divided after only a few years.”

What’s possible to grow, of course, shifts according to region, climate and environment. For example, Florida is the world’s source for saw palmetto, used to treat enlarged prostate, and also as a tonic, antiseptic and expectorant. Regardless of place or plant, the fundamental issues remain the same.

“We manage forests for trees, for wildlife, for water, for endangered species,” says Chamberlain. “But when it comes to non-timber forest products like medicinal plants, we have a big job ahead of us to develop the science and move into managing the resources from which those products originate.

“We recently set up a forest farming network of about 12 landowners and have begun a series of replicated research trials to improve our understanding of the production potential of five native medicinal plants. We are looking at ginseng, goldenseal, black cohosh, false unicorn, and Virginia snakeroot and the feasibility of private landowners producing these as an alternative income source.. We selected these because they are all wild-harvested and have ready markets. Now we can track the production of these important medicinal plants and estimate volume projections. This will help landowners determine how much and when to harvest. Then a landownder can leave the trees and manage the understory productively.”

Diversifying the economics of the forest

Non-timber forest products can supplement or supplant timber cutting. Moreover, active management can maintain ecosystem complexity, restoring biodiversity and balance. Bringing to market a broader range of natural products also leads to economic diversity, a long-standing experience of countless earlier generations.

“Long before the technology existed to cut timber, people were gathering useful products from the woods,” Chamberlain says. “Early European settlers learned from native Americans about useful platns. One of the earliest exports from the New World was sassafras that was collected at Martha’s Vineyard. Ginseng as well as indigo were harvested from the forests and shipped back to the continent.”

Today, with lively markets in alternative medicines, organic foods and natural products and with more and more applied science available via web sites, extension agents and workshops, stewardship of non-timber forest products is likely to become more well-informed, more imaginative and more roundly successful.

“We’re talking about a natural resource that does not get sufficient management,” says Jim, “The SRS and NAC are working hard to figure out ways to manage these resources so that folks can continue this way of life, while ensuring the health of our forests.”