TY - JOUR
AU - Crosby, Sara L
AB - “Grand Isle.” There it was, in the New York Times, February 24, 2018. Grand Isle, my family’s home for over 200 years, had been filed among “communities that … may not outlast the people who currently live there” and our fate summed up with the tagline: “the question is less whether it will succumb to the sea than when—and how much the public should invest in artificially extending its life” (Sack et al.). Islanders become used to prophecies of doom and discounting, but something about seeing our obituary in America’s most respected newspaper of record launched me from my chair into a frantic pacing. Maybe I was overreacting. After all, “the question” was a practical one, and, from a certain perspective, its asking indicated progress. Since the 1970s, advocates in South Louisiana have been trying and mostly failing to alert the larger public to the fact that we are losing a football field of land every hour, the equivalent of Manhattan dissolved into the sea each year, and that, unless the rest of the nation stepped in with material support, we were set to lose everything south of Baton Rouge, including New Orleans (Blum and Roberts). At least the existence of this article suggested that finally, after Katrina, after BP, maybe America was listening, but its attitude also implied that “the public” had responded to this new awareness not by finally committing the resources needed to save South Louisiana but by throwing up its hands and rushing from denial to despair, skipping the intervening step of doing. Not exactly the “practical” reaction for which South Louisianans had been hoping. Advocacy groups like America’s Wetland Foundation or the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana have, in fact, long based their arguments for restoring South Louisiana on pragmatic national interests. They point to the outsized benefits the USA receives from South Louisiana and its deltaic wetlands and the enormous costs that would attend its loss. They invoke economic and national security interests: This one compact region produces, processes, and transports roughly a third of all the seafood, oil, and natural gas consumed in America, and its ports handle 20 percent of all U.S. waterborne commerce.1 Alternatively, advocates trot out statistics demonstrating the wetlands’ crucial environmental role: South Louisiana contains the country’s largest coastal wetland—responsible for filtering and cleansing the waste run-off of roughly half the continent. Sixty-six percent of Gulf commercial and sport fish spend part of their life cycles in these marshes, and they provide vital habitat for 70 percent of the country’s migratory birds, including the neotropical birds that need barrier islands like Grand Isle as that crucial first and last stop on their epic roundtrip to Central and South America.2 Ultimately, advocates lay out the massive cost–benefit ratio: Saving South Louisiana would require a federal commitment to a comprehensive plan of restoration and cost $91 billion, but inaction has already cost hundreds of billions in property damage and disaster relief and will cost hundreds of billions more in lost resources and infrastructure.3 The tremendous price of inaction has been and will be drained from the nation as a whole because, in spite of its natural riches, Louisiana’s broke: Its captivity to American extractive industry has left it one of the poorest, as well as least educated, unhealthiest, and most environmentally damaged, states in the union. Considering all these hefty national interests, saving South Louisiana is an incredible deal. But neither reasoned arguments about economy and security nor appeals to environmental concerns have yet generated the necessary national commitment, and the state is left scrambling through near bankruptcy to cobble together funding itself. Why? Certainly, obvious factors such as Louisiana’s weak hand in federal electoral politics and a generalized nationwide denial of environmental realities play important roles, but there is also something more specific and fundamental at work.4 South Louisiana is one of the oldest “sacrifice zones” in the US. Since the 1990s, environmental theorists—with scholars like Robert Bullard and Craig Colten using South Louisiana as their central case study—have increasingly turned to the “sacrifice zone” as a key term of critique aimed at accounting for the strange phenomenon described as “the curse of natural resources;” that is, the paradoxical fact that locales rich in natural resources so often experience poverty, political corruption, and environmental devastation. Instead of enjoying the promised bliss of resource extraction and capitalist development, these communities have instead been “sacrificed” to it, becoming, in Hugo Reinert’s definition, “spaces, areas, habitats and tracts of land that have been destroyed, poisoned or otherwise rendered uninhabitable in return for some sort of benefit” (599), most of which accrues to individuals and entities far removed from the zone. Yet, such a blatant injustice is typically justified, as Rebecca Scott observes, “in the name of a higher purpose, such as national interest” (31). Excusing a sacrifice for a national benefit runs into a logical problem, however, when it is applied to internal national sacrifice zones, such as South Louisiana. Sacrifice relies upon an identarian distance, an othering, such that one distinct entity is sacrificed for another distinct entity lest the sacrifice turn from beneficial theft and murder into nihilistic self-mutilation. Yet, the nation/“national interest” and South Louisiana are simply not separate, and overcoming this fact has required a profound exercise in rhetoric. Curses need magic words, and economic and political actions (or inactions) rely upon a rhetorical structure to legitimate and maintain them. They require metaphors—metaphors that produce stories, stories that justify behaviors. In this essay, I examine the metaphor that enabled South Louisiana’s creation as an internal national sacrifice zone and that continues to impel its sacrifice, even past the point of negatively impacting both the extraction and the nation. It is a very old, deep, and tenacious metaphor that has taken on a monstrous momentum of its own, impervious to reason. It whispers that there’s something not quite American, not quite “us,” about South Louisiana and, most importantly, that its otherness rises like a malarial malaise from the landscape itself. The deltaic region with all its rich and fecund wetlands, with all its oil, with all its seafood and songbirds, is simply not American soil because it’s “dirt”—and so perceived as not quite properly part of the national body, as fecal, as vaginal—and such dirt should be politely ignored or, eventually, swept away. Thus, although the US’s apathy toward Louisiana’s crisis appears irrational, it emerges from and follows its own metaphorical logic. The remainder of this essay seeks to untangle that logic by sketching a brief history of the recognition (or non-recognition) of South Louisiana’s coastal erosion disaster followed by a decomposition of the metaphor that shaped that history: (1) South Louisiana’s dirt is not American soil because it is not in America. The region’s expansive coastal wetlands plus its complex racial and cultural history have long set it apart from a clearly legible, white, Protestant vision of the nation. It simply does not fit within the imagined cartography of the nation; (2) South Louisiana’s dirt is not American soil because it is shit. In the imaginary that envisions the nation as a body, the deltaic wetlands and its runoff stand in for the country’s excretory unmentionables and effluvia that—well—don’t bear mentioning much less preserving; and (3) South Louisiana’s dirt is not American soil because it is a whore. In the imaginary that envisions land as a female body, “a working coast” that is neither publicly pristine nor privately owned by small homesteaders defies national narratives about “virgin” land. Victimized by the peculiar misogyny directed against sex workers, it is unworthy of preservation and can only be used and then discarded.5 A Theory of Wetlands and Louisiana Dirt Dirt is a complex metaphorical (as well as material) substance, but each of its components, at least in the case of South Louisiana, derives from its fundamental association with a wetland landscape. Mary Douglas defines “dirt” as “matter out of place,” a moral danger that threatens order, the “anomalous” that “must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained,” and, historically, wetlands have been the geographical manifestation of such disorderly and dangerous “dirt” (47–50). Intensely fertile “wastelands,” neither soil nor sea and always shifting, wetlands challenge epistemological and legal boundaries.6 Wetlands qualify as what Julia Kristeva, in an extension of Douglas’s insights, describes as “the abject,” that amorphous material, akin to excrement, reproductive female bodies, and corpses, which blurs categorical boundaries and so reminds us of our incoherence and mortality (54–55). When we come to conceptualize the national homeland, the good, clean “earth” or “soil” of the state, this abject “dirt” serves a useful defining function. As Rodney Giblett observes, communities have employed swamps, bogs, and marshes as the “scapewetland”: “the geographical equivalent of the scapegoat on which communal sins are heaped … driven out to die in the wilderness … so the sins of the community are expiated, the community cleansed of its moral dirt” (12–13). Scapegoating the wetland allows a community to externalize its own abjection and construct itself as a clean and unified whole. However, the ejection of the dirty scapewetland defines not just the community but the “soil” that serves as its fundament and boundary and enables it to maintain its illusion of solidity, coherence, and purity. Whereas land figured as dirt is the “not us” that must be cleansed, land seen as “soil” becomes the productive turf of the homeland, the “us” that creates the “body” of the nation and that deserves recognition and even protection and care. Since the rise of the modern environmental movement, attempts have been made to rethink and revalue wetlands as American “soil,” rather than “dirt.” But now that many Americans acknowledge their ecological and economic importance—as nurseries for fish, as flood protection, as filters for pollution—South Louisiana’s wetlands still don’t fit comfortably enough in the national imagination to merit the same protection the nation affords other wetland environments, such as the Everglades. In the words of America’s Wetland Foundation, Louisiana’s swamps, marshes, and barrier islands are slipping away because of an “identity crisis” that makes them incomprehensible, invisible, or expendable to the rest of the country. Something about South Louisiana’s wetlands remains “dirt” in the American imaginary and not soil. R. H. Caffey and M. Schexnayder, in a report sponsored by America’s Wetland and other organizations, encapsulate the problem best with a question: They worry, “Can Louisiana convince the national interest that a ‘working coast’ is worth saving?” (7). Can the rest of America be made to accept South Louisiana’s kind of wetland—the dirty anomaly that meshes sweaty, money-making humanity into an ecosystem that is neither pastoral nor wild—as a worthy part of the nation and thus a part worth saving? In short, can America recognize South Louisiana as American soil, rather than dirt, before it disappears? A History of Louisiana Dirt As the coastal crisis has intensified, getting a “yes” answer to this question has increasingly driven the work of South Louisiana’s advocates, but the problem, of course, extends out of a much longer history. South Louisianans have felt and feared the earth was slipping from under our feet for decades. People who live off the land can’t ignore a football field’s worth of it being lost every hour, and this is certainly true for my own family on Grand Isle. Lying almost directly south of New Orleans, Grand Isle is a “chenier ridge,” a thin backbone of ancient live oaks crucial to migrating birds, and the only inhabited barrier island off the coast of Louisiana. Furthermore, as the term “barrier island” indicates, it takes the first hit from any hurricane heading to the city and blunts its force, which included Katrina, of course. My family has lived on the island—shrimping, growing cucumbers, teaching school—since the 1780s. My grandmother even wrote a book about it. In “Seven Miles of Sand and Sin”—really a Square Deal Notebook with “39¢” penciled on the front—she never quite gets to the “Sin” part, but she has a lot to say about the slipping status of the “Sand.” After apologizing for her lack of education, she testifies to both her love of the island and her puzzled grief over its decay: My island was a paradise. It was so plentiful of all of God’s beauty and his gifts… . Long before I was born there were large orange groves here and all the boats had sails. When it was spring time and the boats carrying supplies to and from our island got lost in the fog they could tell when they neared the island by the smell of orangeblossoms. Now there isnt an orange tree left. The hurricanes and the d[is]ease kill them all. There were also grapefruit and grape vines and mongrnates [pomegranates] and fig trees. People didnt want for fresh fruit there were also lost of plum tress. But as I said before hurricanes have killed them all. As Grandma points out, the hurricanes and disease were the immediate causes of the destruction she witnessed. However, they could create this orange tree apocalypse because the island was sick. Starved of fresh water and soil, the ecosystem couldn’t counter the inundations of saltwater heaved up by storms. The island had simply begun to dissolve into the Gulf. My grandmother had a seventh-grade education, and my grandfather couldn’t read. They didn’t know why everything was dying or who could help stop it. But by the 1970s, scientists and conservationists in Louisiana put a name to the problem—“coastal erosion”—and identified it as an unnatural disaster. In the “natural” course of things, the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico do battle. The River deposits sediment and fresh water that nourishes the wetlands and expands the land, while the Gulf rushes in to rip soil away and sends surges of poisonous salt into the marsh. European settlement with its madness for levees began to tip this balance; but, even up to the 1930s, the River had been winning (mostly), and the delta and the barrier islands had been holding relatively steady or even growing. After the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 inundated towns far up into the heartland, however, federal engineers constructed a water-tight system of levees, which cut off the Louisiana wetlands’ supply of freshwater and dumped the remaining sediment off the continental shelf instead of on the marshes and islands where it was needed. Even at the time, citizens and experts argued with the Army Corps of Engineers that strategic freshwater diversions into wetlands would be both safer and more ecologically sensible, but the Corps, thrilled by its own manly capacity to conquer nature, ignored them (Barry 157–68). The second cause was subsidence and dredging for oil field canals and pipelines. The fossil fuel industry removed massive amounts of oil and natural gas from under the wetlands, exacerbating the soil’s natural tendency to compact and sink, while, at the same time, it sliced approximately ten thousand miles of channels into the coastal wetlands. Although legally obligated to restore the wetlands’ natural hydrology, most of the companies didn’t want to spend the extra time or cash, and so they left the channels open, allowing saltwater to ooze in from the Gulf to kill the marsh grasses that held the remaining soil, which enlarged the canals, let in more saltwater, and so on. And, of course, there’s the darned nutria, an invasive South American rodent, chewing up what’s left (Bourne passim). When Louisiana scientists and residents first began lobbying state politicians to advertise these findings to the nation, they had to battle the oil industry as it tried to dodge liability for chopping up the wetlands by denying coastal erosion. (I almost said “climate change.”) However, twenty years later the situation became so dire that even the oil companies began to rethink their resistance just a bit, although they still vigorously denied any liability. In 1990, Congress passed the Breaux Act, which called for “no net loss” of coastal wetlands, although its funding remained wholly inadequate to the task (“Environmental Legislation in Louisiana”). In 1998, scientists and residents tried to counter this inadequacy by drawing up a clear assessment and overall strategy they hoped would convince the nation to make the necessary investment. The report, “Coast 2050: Toward a Sustainable Coastal Louisiana,” laid out a series of freshwater diversion projects meant to replenish the wetlands and help them rebuild themselves by a slow process of accretion. I n spite of lobbying efforts, nothing happened. Or, rather wetlands were saved, but not in southern Louisiana. In 2000, two bills were presented to Congress—to restore Florida’s mostly internal wetlands ($7.8 billion) and Louisiana’s coastal wetlands ($4.5 billion). The Florida bill was approved. Louisiana’s was denied, even though billions of dollars and millions of lives in Louisiana were depending upon this restoration (Caffey and Schexnayder). Every 2.7 miles of wetland drains a storm surge by one foot, and, without its healthy hem of coastal wetlands, South Louisiana lay exposed and helpless waiting for the inevitable catastrophe, which finally arrived on August 29, 2005. In a strange way, Katrina also occasioned new hope for the wetlands. After 80 percent of New Orleans went underwater, Louisianans hoped that finally the rest of the nation would take the problem of coastal erosion seriously. Katrina caused such terrible loss of life and property not only because the Army Corps of Engineers built faulty and inadequate levees, but because New Orleans had lost its most critical front line of defense. The barrier islands and the wetlands south of New Orleans were almost gone, leaving the city isolated at the end of a funnel of hot, open water that fed Katrina’s ferocity far inland. In 2006, reporter and advocate Mike Tidwell put the situation bluntly: The sky had truly fallen on Louisiana. And since it had fallen, it was now a given that Louisiana would finally receive the $14 billion7 it needed to rebuild the wetlands and barrier islands that could make the coast habitable again. After all, what was $14 billion compared to the estimated $200 billion in economic losses and government recovery spending associated with Katrina? While the Bush administration threw money at rebuilding (still inadequate) levees, it refused to even say the word “wetlands.” Again, Tidwell best explained the consequence of that decision: This “means the people and culture of south Louisiana will in fact go the way of Easter Island. It’s practically assured. What happened along this coast prior to August 29, 2005, can be justly called a regional suicide. Everything since is a federal mass murder” (Ravaging Tide 46). We awaited execution, but then a miracle happened. Like most Louisiana miracles, however, it involved absolute disaster. In BP’s rush to drain what’s left of Louisiana’s natural resources, it messed up … badly … and created the gravest environmental disaster in American history. South Louisiana took the brunt of five million barrels of spilled crude and watched its tourist and seafood industries crash, while residents looked forward to years of breathing, drinking, and eating a cocktail of petrochemicals and unknown “dispersant” toxins. However, when President Obama delivered his big speech about the crisis, coastal advocates celebrated, because he said the magic word, “wetlands.” On June 15, 2010, he came before the entire nation and declared: Beyond compensating the people of the Gulf in the short-term, it’s also clear we need a long-term plan to restore the unique beauty and bounty of this region. The oil spill represents just the latest blow to a place that has already suffered multiple economic disasters and decades of environmental degradation that has led to disappearing wetlands and habitats … That’s why we must make a commitment to the Gulf Coast that goes beyond responding to the crisis of the moment … I make that commitment tonight. (“Address to the Nation”) This speech actually acknowledges South Louisiana’s status as a sacrifice zone—the years of “economic disasters” and “environmental degradation”—and proposes to reverse it. Yet, the national press, mysteriously clueless, widely panned the speech for its lack of macho, take-charge aesthetic. Slate.com’s response was typical: “President Obama’s Oval Office speech about the Gulf oil spill was almost [lousy] enough to make you miss President George W. Bush” (Gross). However, whereas President Bush’s post-Katrina speech militantly ignored the underlying cause of the catastrophe and consigned South Louisiana to further destruction, Louisiana’s advocates realized that, “Finally, we have someone at the highest level recognizing the significance of this issue and the significance of the pending tragedy, and just that is worth its weight in gold” (Burdeau). The fact that the national news media missed that “significance”—even after the days and days of non-stop coverage it gave to Katrina and the oil spill—indicated a profound and almost inexplicable blind spot. The national news media’s blindness to the coastal erosion crisis was matched by even more bizarre disavowals from national legislators. After the spill, Louisiana’s senators and representatives fought a pitched battle to claim a share of the settlement, proportional to the greater damage Louisiana suffered and enough to really begin restoring our wetlands as promised by President Obama. Instead, they slammed into rhetorical roadblocks like that laid out by Florida Representative, Republican John Mica, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Mica and many of his colleagues dismissed their arguments with a breezily broad-minded condescension, claiming that while “he understands why Gulf lawmakers want to ‘make their states whole,’” “his role would be to represent the national interest, ‘the people of the United States’” (Alpert). Although an uncharitable reading could certainly critique this position as short-sighted self-interest cloaked in a faux-Burkean patriotism, Representative Mica’s rhetoric suggests something stranger and far more virulent: that the people of South Louisiana were not quite Americans and that saving South Louisiana was not really part of the national interest. This is a patently absurd notion, but it’s an oddly persistent one that the congressman did not invent for the occasion. It belongs to the (il)logic of the internal sacrifice zone: As Rebecca Scott points out, “inasmuch as [the sacrifice zone] remains unsacrificed, it does not achieve national belonging,” meaning that as long as South Louisiana and its people remain “whole” and thus part of the nation, they cannot be part of the nation (222).8 Representative Mica’s statement is thus framed by this paradox, which is itself an extrusion of a deeper geographical and ecological imaginary: a metaphor about the substance and boundaries of American soil that has produced some of the most surreal moments in the national discourse about South Louisiana. South Louisiana’s Dirt is not American Soil because it’s not in America One of the most bizarre of those interludes occurred in the immediate aftermath of Katrina in the uproar over the media’s description of the evacuees as “refugees.” Although reporters argued that “refugees” indicated the scope of the horror more clearly than “evacuees,” critics protested that it implied that when South Louisianans crossed the state border (to venture into the Houston Astrodome, for instance), they had also crossed an international border, that they were, in effect, not really American citizens. Commentators quite correctly linked this controversy to racism and how “refugees” once again “seemed to deny that black folk were citizens of the nation” (Dyson 176).9 However, white Louisianans also “freaked out.” For instance, I remember phone calls to my mother (when I could reach her through the post-Katrina telecommunications snarl) in which she maintained sunny composure while discussing the possibility that our home, and even the land it sat on, might be sifting through Gulf waves. But she broke down in tears when she heard a reporter calling us “refugees … as if we’re not even Americans.” The way the nation constructs race in Louisiana certainly fueled this outrage over “refugees.” The non-Anglo heritage of many South Louisianans has made whiteness and American-ness fragile even for the nominally white and well-off. But this sensitivity to racial othering also derives from the pain of geographical othering, an alienation of the land of South Louisiana, an abandonment that Katrina merely underscored. In America’s cultural imaginary the region is simply not part of the nation. Our great national songs—“America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land”—do not include the Gulf coast or its prodigious coastal wetlands. "America the Beautiful" stretches our country “from sea to shining sea”—and neither of those seas is the Gulf of Mexico. The Woody Guthrie anthem takes out some of the first song’s manifest destiny overtones, but it still imagines the nation “From the redwood forest to the gulfstream waters …”—and those waters again are not in the Gulf. Granted these are old songs, but subsequent environmental or social consciousness didn’t much alter Louisiana’s displacement. For instance, the Library of America’s important anthology of American environmental writing, American Earth, first published in 2008, fails to have a single piece that discusses coastal Louisiana or its wetlands—although that is where the “American Earth” is most directly threatened by being literally washed away. When South Louisiana does make it onto the mental map of the nation, it appears at an improbable, willfully disconnected margin. Take one of the most popular representations of South Louisiana: Swamp People, the History Channel’s long-running hit reality show/documentary about alligator hunters in the marshes and swamps south of Baton Rouge. Each episode begins with an introduction that frames the region in a way that makes nonsense of cartographers’ maps but reveals a great deal about the mental map Americans carry in their heads. After a silent warning about viewer discretion, a deep, backwoodsy male voice reminiscent of a 1970s Disney nature documentary intones: “In the farthest corner of America, lies the nation’s largest swamp—a hidden world where nature rules and man fights back … Welcome to the swamp.”10 First, describing South Louisiana with the spatial metaphor “corner” makes no physical sense. Corners happen, well, in corners—where two edges meet at a roughly 90-degree angle. Even, if the continental US could be forced into a square, the delta that drains its center would not be a “corner.” Second, calling South Louisiana “the farthest corner of America” radically misrepresents the national landmass. Such a description should place the region somewhere next to Cape Flattery, Washington or Key West, Florida. If we wanted to stretch “corner” a bit to emphasize “farthest,” then perhaps Alaska or Hawaii should take that honor, but certainly not a region that snuggles between the less-than-exotic states of Texas and Mississippi. Describing South Louisiana as a “corner” only makes sense if you understand “corner” as an out-of-the way place where you find dirt, even sweep it. Swamp People’s intro, repeated and repeated to the American public as a “non-fiction” representation of South Louisiana, both reflects and reinforces this perception of the region in the national understanding, and that understanding almost refuses to grant the country’s largest coastal wetland any place in the nation, much less its actual central one. And when metaphors stray so far from reality as to call the US’s core river delta and the hub of its shipping and petroleum industries “the farthest corner of America,” such counter-factual dissonance indicates a strong ideological push. That push shoves South Louisiana right off the map of America. South Louisiana’s Dirt is not American Soil because it’s Excrement This cartographic disavowal of South Louisiana, however distorted, does satisfy a metaphorical logic, particularly if we also interrogate its association with dirt in other national tropes: the nation as body, for instance. If the country is a body with my current residence in Ohio as the “heartland” (and the “real” America) and the east and west coast as our shiny outer skin, what is the end of the body’s major drainage and filtration system? The deltaic wetlands are America’s rectum or urethra, spewing out the heartland’s offal. Within this bodily metaphor, the Mississippi delta’s geographic centrality encourages the country to renounce it as “the farthest corner of America,” just as we flush away excrement and awkwardly dismiss our own “down there.” Our national songs skip over South Louisiana because it is not “America the beautiful;” it is “America the unmentionable.” This excretory association is exacerbated by the wetland’s actual environmental function. Swamps, bogs, marshes, sloughs: historically, these hybrids of land and water with their filth and fecundity have suggested the most abject aspects of the body, including the unsavory products that we send away in part because, aside from stinking, they remind us of our abjection, our ultimate incoherence and mortality. South Louisiana’s huge mass of marshes and swamps make it an ideal candidate for the nation’s “scapewetland” that is “driven out to die” because it contains the “moral dirt” and waste we don’t wish to include in our nation’s body. But wetlands, especially massive deltaic wetlands like South Louisiana’s, perform a crucial ecological function for the whole country. The Mississippi River drains forty-one percent of the continental US, and, if they were allowed to work properly, the three million remaining acres of coastal wetlands in South Louisiana would cleanse the toxins and pollutants washed downstream from northern cities and farms. The leveeing of the River, however, does not allow enough of this material into the wetlands and so sends a poisonous stew straight into the Gulf, where it has created the world’s largest dead zone right off the continental shelf—a nightmare of abjection and a self-reinforcing consequence of treating the wetlands like dirt or “shit.” The fact that this egregious mismanagement is still happening suggests the unconscious tenacity of the bodily metaphor, even as it is opposed by a growing rational awareness of the commodity value of South Louisiana and wetlands in general. In the last seventy years, experts and officials, informed by advances in the science of ecology, have begun to recognize that wetlands confer profound ecological, economic, and even aesthetic benefits and so should be preserved and packaged for their use-value. The very word “wetlands” was invented in a 1951 Fish and Wildlife Department circular and was intended to reverse federal and state policy of drain-on-sight and instead facilitate conservation by replacing the morally fraught term “swamp” (Vileisis 209–10). In other words, “wetlands” shifted the frame for understanding these landscapes from morality to ecology and economy and so enabled Americans to see these formerly abject “wastelands” as useful and even productive zones. Instead of renouncing “swamps,” we could now be managing “wetlands.” With “wetlands” as the “real” designation, cultural critics have found that people are more inclined to regard swamps and their inhabitants as kitschy cultural theatre to be consumed and enjoyed rather than rejected and destroyed. When Anglos first began settling South Louisiana, they recoiled in horror from free “Black Creoles” and described Cajuns as vicious, lazy, and racially degraded—i.e., “Acadian nigger[s]”—but now, through a host of reality shows, documentaries, and even Oscar-nominated films (e.g., Beasts of the Southern Wild), we hold an exotic appeal (Brasseaux 100–02). Instead of “moral dirt” that must be renounced, the swamp and its people have become consumable commodity and swamps attractive places to achieve authenticity by proxy (Wilson 180). Swamp tours make big money, and swamp people become part of the show as the “man” in “a hidden world where nature rules and man fights back.” In an era of climate crisis, when, because of “man,” nature’s rule is becoming violent, harsh, and unpredictable, the idea of wetlands as the site of an unmediated and winnable personal contest engages a nostalgic appeal, which Swamp People plays up as it follows its characters from manly blood sport to warm family gatherings. Yet, the capacity to be consumed does not signal escape from abjection or guarantee “American-ness.” Many Cajuns over fifty can relate tales of being beaten or shamed at school for speaking French—for, in other words, not being American (Bernard xxiii). Then, after a generation had suppressed its identity and assimilated, suddenly and bizarrely “Cajun-ness” became the cornerstone of how Louisiana marketed itself to the nation as a tourist destination. “Laissez les bon temps rouler” popped up on road signs, and “Cajun Tours” began motoring out of Houma. But twenty years of kitsch—putting on the “stage Cajun” for History Channel cameras, letting the bon temps rouler for tourists who want a taste of authentic history—has not slowed South Louisiana’s disappearance. All that this marketing has done is stuff South Louisiana’s abjection under a confused mix of capitalism and political correctness. The aesthetic and the moral are the closest of near neighbors. As Giblett argues, “wetlands may not be regarded as ecologically valuable until they are seen as aesthetically pleasing,” and the shift in the economic or ecological valuation of wetlands has been accompanied by a superficial aesthetic validation that nonetheless leaves an underlying abjection intact (12). This aestheticization, then, always seems to come with a caveat attached. “It’s pretty but …” Take for instance, one of the most popular fictional representations of South Louisiana, the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris. (Alan Ball translated these novels into the even more popular HBO series, True Blood.) Although Harris’s protagonist Sookie—a telepathic waitress with a penchant for dating were-people and vampires—spends most of her time in North Louisiana, she characterizes her first encounter with the wetlands south of New Orleans thus: Swamps and bayous abound in Louisiana, of course. The bayous and swamps are rich in wildlife, and they can be beautiful to look at and maybe tour in a canoe or something. But to plunge into on foot, in pouring rain, they suck … Maybe from a tracking point of view this swamp was a good thing, because once we were in the water we wouldn’t be leaving any scent. But from my personal point of view, the swamp was awful, because it was dirty and had snakes and alligators and God knows what else. (Definitely Dead 269) Sookie certainly has a point, but her nervous repetitions of “But … But” sound strangely like someone who wants to say something racist or sexist without being seen as racist or sexist. There’s a new politically correct piety she is acknowledging—i.e., South Louisiana’s aesthetic beauty and economic and ecological richness, as well as the potential for escape from pursuit and oppression they hold—but the wetlands still “suck.” They are still “dirty” and dangerous, still abject. And I should point out that this disgust and fear of the wetlands is being expressed by someone who copulates with vampires—cold, dead, occasionally covered in grave dirt, and capable of ripping her throat out. The fact that stepping in some chilly muck next to a sluggish gator or two fazes her suggests that the landscape of South Louisiana is still taboo, still unacceptable. Sookie’s struggle to accept the heretofore unacceptable also gestures to another metaphorical association of the “dirty” body that has made South Louisiana disgusting to the rest of America. “Down there” are not only taboo excretory organs but reproductive ones, feminine ones in particular, which, for centuries, have been figured as excremental and unclean (Von Staden passim). This association becomes even nastier when applied to sexually transgressive women or sex workers, and in the last century the American national imaginary has consistently connected South Louisiana’s wetland landscape to so-called “dirty whores.” South Louisiana’s Dirt is not American Soil Because it’s a Dirty Whore Ecofeminist scholars have long pointed out the continuity between misogyny—the hatred, disgust, and fear of women and desire to control and exploit them—and ecophobia—the hatred, disgust, and fear of nonhuman nature and desire to control and exploit it. The connection emerges forcefully on the level of metaphor, which frames nature and women’s sexualized bodies in terms of one another, and this practice becomes particularly overt when it is applied to distinguish national soil from dirt. The foundational national metaphor used to conceptualize American soil, in fact, figured it as an eroticized and reproductive female body: the supposedly “virgin land” of the settler colonial frontier, which Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman farmer then led to the altar as a demure wife. Characterizing the land as virginal, of course, erased Indigenous peoples and so enabled a guilt-free conquest, while, as Annette Kolodny points out, the Jeffersonian wifely ideal crafted “an almost erotic intimacy in the bond of man and soil” (27), which not only helped transmute alien “territory” into American “soil” and provide a sound property-owning basis for a republic, but mutually affirmed the national (marital) belonging of citizen and soil. South Louisiana and its wetlands, however, have never quite fit the virgin/wife mold. When the US acquired the region in 1803, any virginal fantasies about its “purchase” (a sexually loaded association anyway) were immediately frustrated by its large, modern urban center, which was already well-populated by vigorous communities of color and by the descendants of non-Anglo Europeans. The hinterlands afforded no better prospects: Pirates and Cajuns (both my people) infested the bayou country, and those shifting coastal wetlands baffled both cartographers and would-be yeomen husbands anyway. Nineteenth-century literature reflected this unease about South Louisiana’s place in the nation by approaching it as a vexed and even insoluble sexual problematic, a kind of failure to launch from proper virgin to proper wife. For instance, the century’s most famous depiction of the region, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847), forever connected it to a traumatized virgin who sought and sought her betrothed but could never become a wife. Unfortunately, this failure to fit the approved feminine metaphors left South Louisiana vulnerable to another, more dangerous association: In the limited misogynist and ecophobic imaginary, if a landscape is not a virgin or wife, then the likeliest alternative is the dirty whore—figured as abject and alien, neither pure nor kin and so not fully national soil, criminal rather, and so free to be used and abused. Thus, as the twentieth century rolled in and large out-of-state timber and oil conglomerates took a new and passionate interest in South Louisiana’s swamps and marshes, American popular culture joined in a kind of sexualized smear campaign and began churning out popular films and television series associating the region with women of easy virtue, who indulge in sexual transgressions, particularly transactional sex. Oscar-winning movies of the 1930s and 40s such as Jezebel (1938) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947, 1951), softcore trash of the 1950s like Bayou (1957), Louisiana Hussy (1959), or Swamp Women (1956), all the way to the hit first season of True Detective (2014), engaged the same basic trope: They translated the “American’s” experience of South Louisiana through an encounter with a sluttish Louisiana woman, while visually and thematically connecting that sluttishness with the land itself. The “working coast” had become a “working girl,” and, as the award-winning Louisiana mystery author, James Lee Burke, so cogently notes, extractive industries took full advantage of this metaphor’s possibilities: “Like the Great Whore of Babylon, Louisiana was always desirable for her beauty and not her virtue, and when her new corporate suitor plunged into things, he left his mark” (242). Representing South Louisiana as a dirty “Whore” meant that her “beauty” was not for preserving by worshipful conservationists or cherishing by a properly-courting husband, but for using and abusing by the johns of the modern era—predatory extractive corporations—who exploited the region’s natural resources and transmuted the land into a sacrifice zone, leaving only their “mark”—that is, dying marshes and dissolving towns. Yet, sacrifice zones just don’t happen when abusers show up, they happen when defenders don’t, and South Louisiana’s framing as a dirty whore helps account for this other mystery: Why, despite the region’s acknowledged ecological importance, did American environmentalists ignore it and its coastal erosion crisis for so long? A number of factors contributed to the oversight, but among them was the movement’s own aesthetics seeded by the unexamined misogyny and ecophobia embedded in the virgin/wife metaphors of national soil. For the strand of American environmentalism focused on conservation, this aesthetic translated into a “wilderness bias” that still defines only clean “virgin” ecosystems as American earth worth preserving.11 Think of the cold, lonely sweep of the Rockies or the wide grassy sea of the Everglades. These places get to be pure and untouched, ready for eco-tourism and thus federal salvation, but the Louisiana wetlands are occupied by roughnecks and shrimpers and their rusting detritus, while oil rigs hunkered just offshore spoil the view from the barrier islands’ beaches. Perhaps the influential back-to-the-earth agrarians, the strand of the American environmental movement critical of the wilderness approach and more tolerant of human presence, could have embraced South Louisiana and its rich soil. But, instead, their vision of environmental rejuvenation through small farming manifested a “homesteading bias” that was entangled in the same ecophobic metaphor as the “wilderness bias,” just the Jeffersonian wife side of the virgin/wife trope. As Wendell Berry, the movement’s leading voice, explained, the agrarian’s relation to the land “is like marrying your sweetheart” (513). Again, South Louisiana’s dirt is no more the sweet wife than it was the virgin. By the 1990s, the environmental justice movement began to correct this oversight and actually established South Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor as a kind of ground zero for its theorization of the sacrifice zone, but for whatever reason—maybe the prose was too dry and academic, maybe America was too racist—the nation didn’t quite come along. Abused by exploiters, ignored by defenders, and slipping away into the Gulf of Mexico, what was South Louisiana to do? The region’s representatives and activists worked political channels and appealed to the oil industry, but to little avail. Then Katrina hit and desperation with it, and local writers and artists began employing a desperate tactic to save the sacrifice zone: They would join the ecofeminists. They would use that damnable dirty metaphor, they would embrace the dirtiness—and begin rubbing it all over America. Planet of Dirty Coasts Over the last decade, ecofeminist theorists, such as Stacy Alaimo and Mary Phillips, have begun offering a cure for the sacrifice zone with a corrective to both the extractive mindset and the prejudices of the traditional American environmental movement: They advocate for a new embrace of “the vulnerability of the body” as a means to “foster an ecocentric ethics wherein the vulnerability of nature is also recognized” (Phillips 61). They suggest that, in order to effectively perceive and act upon the current environmental crisis, humanity, especially the economically privileged who have contributed most to climate change, need to accept their own transcorporeality or physical permeability with nature—their own abjection. Yet, such a project has to work both ways. Humanity must embrace and validate not just the abject human body, but the abject landscapes of nonhuman nature, which must include the archetypal abjected environment—wetlands—as well as extractive capitalism’s most abused landscapes—sacrifice zones. South Louisiana happens to fit both categories, and, since Katrina, local designers, writers, and even tourism-related businesses have been working to deconstruct the logic of the sacrifice zone and to convince America to embrace South Louisiana by valuing and embracing the landscape’s abjection. Artists as disparate as the popular and pointedly named souvenir company, Dirty Coast, and the award-winning poet, Martha Serpas, author of the 2007 poetry collection The Dirty Side of the Storm, have been reframing South Louisiana’s dirt in all its filth as worthy of American identity and aesthetic validation. Dirty Coast’s mission statement, for instance, rejects “kitsch” (like the regressively fake authenticity of Swamp People’s Man v. Nature) for “democratic” and “civic-minded” representations of the Big Easy, including one popular slogan, “It’s not beautiful being easy.” By putting this statement on its customers’ t-shirts or coffee mugs, Dirty Coast is asking them to hold up the abject “dirty whore” image of South Louisiana as a cool badge of identity and belonging while pithily mocking the exclusionary virgin/wife “beauty” standards of American soil (Dirty Coast). Serpas’s abject aesthetic, similarly, refuses to pretty up the wetlands to fit those beauty standards and demands that her readers reconsider their aesthetic prejudices. She thus describes the wetlands along Bayou Lafourche: “From the sky the marsh rises like moldy velour, / like swatches of work shirts and dungarees / floating in an oil-slicked wash” (77). She makes readers see the “work” and the “oil” and the “moldy” dirtiness of a compromised marsh, yet accept it as aesthetically worthwhile. American popular culture has—slowly, hesitantly—responded to these abject reframings of identity and aesthetics with new validating representations of the South Louisiana and its wetlands. For instance, two recent examples from the perennially popular superhero genre—the TV series, Marvel’s Cloak and Dagger (2018–19) and D.C. Universe’s Swamp Thing (2019)—both portray South Louisiana’s swamps and marshes in all their gross and gooey muck, while simultaneously insisting on their worth and even heroic American glory. Most notably, the Swamp Thing reboot, unlike earlier iterations, immediately jumps to Alan Moore’s shocking plot twist—that the hero is not a man transformed into a swamp plant, but a swamp plant that just thinks it is a man transformed into a swamp plant. Swamp Thing is thus the Louisiana wetlands—its dirt and muck—manifested as a literally homegrown American superhero. The existence of series like these hints that America might be reconsidering its exclusion of South Louisiana and its wetlands from American soil, but we’re definitely not there yet. After all, Swamp Thing was cancelled after one season despite positive critical reviews and decent viewership numbers, and the coastal parishes are still battling the federal government, the oil industry, and their old dirty rhetoric for even a sliver of necessary restoration funds. The metaphor that defines a place as dirt is still a dangerous and unpredictable weapon, a gun resting on the mantle, and you can’t be sure who’ll pick it up or where they’ll point it next. Potentially, very few communities in America qualify as clean American soil. If my home can be sacrificed and discarded, so can yours, and, as we process the latest dire IPCC report, the American public needs to consider carefully what narratives and metaphors we will use to frame a planetary triage. For all their flaws, nation states are still the planet’s primary political actors and possibly the only entities currently capable of reversing the fossil fuel industry’s extension of the sacrifice zone to the entire planet. Such a radical change will require nations, particularly nations of outsized influence like the US, to defuse the logic of the sacrifice zone by reincorporating their internal sacrifice zones and embracing their dirt. Simply put, if Americans cannot save the sacrifice zones within our own borders—our own dirty coasts—it seems highly improbable that we can knit together the international coalition necessary to save a planet of dirty coasts. South Louisiana and Grand Isle are thus a test and an opportunity. The ideological and political work that America would need to do to save Grand Isle is the same work it would need to do to pull humanity back from the brink of planetary catastrophe. Even so, I know that maybe the New York Times is right, maybe Grand Isle can’t be saved. Maybe it’s just too late. But if I have to watch my home wash away—the ancient black oaks fretted with songbirds, the newly whitewashed tomb with a century of my family’s bones, the last orange trees sweet blooming in spring—I want the sacrifice to be genuine. I want it to be the fault of ineluctable facts and clear-eyed calculation, not cruel and foolish prejudice. I want to be able to say good-bye knowing that Grand Isle was soil America loved, not dirt it despised. Footnotes 1 South Louisiana contains the “NUMBER ONE port system in the USA” See “Why the Concern?” 2 See “Why Is Louisiana Important?” The best overview of all these facts is Dardis and Pendarvis. For more detailed statistics, see Garcia, “Louisiana Coastal Facts,” “Coastal Erosion: Facts and Figures,” and “Coastal Protection and Restoration.” 3 The original price tag was $14 billion, then $50 billion according to the “2012 Coastal Master Plan” and the “2017 Coastal Master Plan.” However, that number came from an estimate in 2010 dollars. A more recent study out of Tulane has adjusted it for current inflation and thus the $91 billion. See Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy. See also B. Marshall. 4 On one level, the answer is clear: electoral politics. After a screening of The Big Uneasy, Harry Shearer’s exposé of the Army Corps of Engineers’ role in causing the post-Katrina destruction of New Orleans, I asked Shearer why he thought the federal government refused to address coastal erosion (especially since it has thrown billions at protecting Florida’s beautiful but less nationally crucial wetlands). He explained that national politicians ignore Louisiana because, according to a cynical political calculus, they can. The state delivers only a small number of electoral votes that, unlike Florida’s, go reliably red. 5 Another related narrative, but one I don’t have space for, holds that the landmass of South Louisiana is not American soil because it is already dead/ forever undead. As even our advocate, Mike Tidwell, suggests in his un-ironically named Bayou Farewell, we’re already gone. Or, more fancifully, we are vampire land, where the “foul liquid and meat” of corpses cannot become Walt Whitman’s healthy national “compost.” Either way, why bother saving the dead? 6 Even now government agencies produce contrasting definitions of “wetlands,” with some emphasizing flora and fauna, others soil types or length of inundation. Lewis 27–40. 7 Because the state and federal government dragged their heels and allowed another decade and a half of land loss, the price has gone up since the 1998 study that generated this $14 billion estimate. 8 Our inclusion as Americans can only happen as sacrifices to extraction, a catch-22 that President Trump recently reaffirmed at an October 2019 rally he held in Lake Charles to unseat John Bel Edwards, the state’s most prominent coastal restoration advocate and Democratic governor. Trump called Louisianans “loyal rock ribbed, American Patriots” but only because (after a few platitudes) “with your help, right here in Louisiana, the United States is now the No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas anywhere on the planet” (Trump). He then led the crowd in booing Edwards and wind energy. Edwards won anyway. 9 See also “Calling Katrina Survivors ‘Refugees’ Stirs Debate.” 10 The most recent seasons of the show have ditched this offensive intro in favor of something more neutral. 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TI - American Soil, Louisiana Dirt: The Metaphor Enabling the Sacrifice Zone
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa110
DA - 2020-10-05
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DP - DeepDyve
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