Interview with Donald Worster

Abstract

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina revealed some startling vulnerabilities of U.S. empire and emphasized divisions of race and class in the nation, New Orleans native Brian Azcona sat down with a pioneer of environmental history to discuss what lessons the field might provide in the storm s wake. Donald Worster, who grew up in Kansas and today is the Hall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Kansas, drew parallels between the Katrina disaster and a disaster closer to his home and personal experience, the Dust Bowl, his treatment of which has become the standard historical work on the 1930s ecological disaster. The strategic position of New Orleans in the U.S. empire demands the city and the levies that hold out the Mississippi River be rebuilt, just as the importance of Great Plains agriculture to the nation warranted that land-use ill-adapted to the dry plains environment as it was be sustained by massive federal subsidies. The logic behind that national empire persists, to be questioned further.