Transgression

Last week we lost the country's 31st most populous city (in the 2000 census) and leading port. Rebuilding will be very expensive and also ill-advised, since the Mississipi delta keeps eroding and equally violent storms are likely to strike every few years. The destruction of busy port cities has been a literary theme for thousands of years - think Tyre, Troy, Atlantis - and perhaps this one will also be remembered for generations, its watery ruins sought by adventurers.

As New Orleans flooded, I was reading a birthday present, Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which for many pages touts the wonders of globalized business. It's a worthwhile book despite the unfortunate metaphor in the title (compounded by the introduction's ridiculous assertion that Columbus showed scientifically that the world was round), and Friedman does include reservations about the environmental degradation caused by industrialization and reiterate his laudable call for a crash program (similar to the Apollo initiative) to end our dependence on fossil fuels. But the flooding in the Gulf coast, in India, and in central Europe, and the varying levels of chaos that followed make it starkly clear that sustained global trade can't take place at all without reality-based societies that can take care of themselves to be the trade partners. Corporate boosterism and high-tech consulting turn helpless before even entirely predictable bad weather. Prudence can't be outsourced.