More About ChangentsEarthkeeper | The Big Green Bus
Send Story to a Friend
The Big Green Bus
The Big grEasy
John Beardsley
Visiting New Orleans is a confusing experience even if you haven’t come to town riding in a green school bus. The mixture of excitement and sadness, of joy and apprehension, is a dizzying one. Add to that the desire to make the visit go along with the overall theme of our roadtrip, and you’ve got a situation in which it’s often pretty difficult to know how to feel.
But you’ve been to the Gulf Coast before. You know some things about the water, about the levees, and the failures of system after system. Approaching the three year mark from the storm, however, it’s getting difficult to look around and understand what went wrong, and how. Approaching the city from the Mississippi coast, I found my attempts to explain and give context to what had and hadn’t been there on my last visit fell short more often than not. As if the place weren’t already palimpsest enough, it was nearly impossible to try and construct, much less communicate, yet another vision of my surroundings. It was a feeling I’d encountered before, and one I’d recognized in many others who had been there.
Resignation is not a term we frequently associate with hope. But among the people I’ve met who have given some of their life and time to reconstruction and recovery, it is one of the surest indices of one’s mentality I’ve come across. Not a resignation to despair, but a reconciliation with what’s happened, and what is to come. A toughening in the eyes; a measure in the stride. It comes with the realization that no matter how long and hard one works, that the labor is only the labor, and at best, perhaps part of an enormous whole. The pleasure of the work is only in the work, rather than in the progress. At times, the motion forwards is palpable, and occasionally even visible. But the movement extends far beyond the personal, to the federal, state, local and cultural milieu, and to take comfort in something so much larger and less accountable than oneself is risky at best, and foolhardy at worst - especially given the historical record by which we can judge.
But this resignation has nothing to do with despair, and neither does it depend upon hope. It is oriented towards the common benefit, yet rooted in the reality of the present moment. It ends by strengthening the resolve of all whom it comes to inhabit.
It is this condition that I have come to recognize in the residents, volunteers, public servants and returning exiles of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast. Understanding this, and living and working by it, has become the only way that coming back to New Orleans with any other agenda has made any sense at all.
We on the Bus are fortunate that our cause shares a common goal with much of what is so vital to New Orleans at present. My spirit was bolstered to recognize architects, students, bartenders and paper-pushers alike laboring in the same condition I have grown so familiar with. The potential for responsible and sustainable redevelopment in New Orleans is staggering, and we were lucky to witness a great first step in that process.
On Andry Street in the lower 9th ward, a mere stone’s throw from the levee, Global Green USA has completed the first unit of New Orleans’ first sustainable, affordable low-income housing development. The innovations and applications of pre-existing green sense and technology in this house are staggering and inspiring to see. That it can be offered for less than $200k defies conventional real estate reasoning.
But that is the point we’ve come to, and that’s where the Bus’s message really coincides with the themes of redevelopment: if we do this now, and do it right, we can only benefit from it - both immediately, and in the long run. Personally, in our pocketbooks and in the air we breathe, and nationally, in our energy and economic strength and independence. Nowhere is this exigency more apparent than in the schools, homes and businesses being rebuilt throughout the city of New Orleans.
The friendly and driven people we met at FutureProof, Global Green, and all over the city contributed to our high spirits upon our departure from New Orleans. We’ve continued out across Texas, through Houston as you’ve read, and now from Austin out towards Amarillo. Despite our departure from the Gulf Coast, it remains in our hearts and minds as a testament to the risks and rewards inherent in the effort to make good in this country.
-John
Flag as spam/inappropriate
Comments
Post new comment