In the late summer of 2005, Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath slammed into the Gulf Coast. The federal levee system, built to protect the people of metropolitan New Orleans, breached in fifty-three locations. Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded, with some neighborhoods under water for weeks. The effects were staggering. Approximately 650,000 people displayed. Over 215,000 homes destroyed or severely damaged. Nearly 1,400 individuals dead. The trauma of the storm and the floods that followed will likely last for generations.
Over the next fifteen years, around 500 new non-profit charities, started by deep-rooted New Orleanians and new transplants, rushed to aid in the city’s recovery. Over 1.5 million volunteers from across the United States came to New Orleans, accumulating over 100 million hours of service work. Many of the non-profits focused on rebuilding and reimagining the city from the ground up, through community gardens, farmer cooperatives, and educational coalitions.
Jeanette Bell, the beloved godmother of New Orleans’s community garden scene purchased a trash-filled Central City lot, transforming it into a rose garden, Fleur d’Eden, that brightened the day of many Katrina first responders. She went on to launch Garden on Mars, a series of organic flower, citrus, and vegetable gardens carved from vacant spaces in the Lower Ninth Ward, where she taught classes that promoted urban and container gardening.
Also in the Lower Ninth, jackie sumell, a multidisciplinary artist and activist, created a combined working garden-art project that highlights the cruelty of prisons in the U.S. At Solitary Gardens, garden beds, designed by incarcerated individuals, are built to the same dimensions of solitary confinement cells.
In New Orleans East, Khai Nguyen, cofounder of the Village de L’Est Green Growers Initiative (VEGGI), encouraged Vietnamese maritime workers affected by the 2010 BP oil spill to turn to urban farming. Through the co-op model, VEGGI growers sell their vegetables and herbs to city restaurants and in subscription boxes.
Marguerite Green turned a career in farming into advocacy work. First at the organization SPROUT, now as the director of the Louisiana Food Policy Council, Margee aids farmers and farm workers with collective organizing and agricultural policy.
Similarly, Marianne Cufone works in food, farming, and fishery policy and advocacy. Director of the Environmental Law program at Loyola University, Marianne founded Recirculating Farms in 2010 to spread the gospel of aquaponic farming.
And at Grow Dat Youth Farm, Leo Gorman leads a youth leadership non-profit that cultivates the next generation of young leaders, paying them an equitable wage to grow and sell fresh produce through the organization’s CSA.
These individuals, alongside many others, have dedicated their lives to persuading all New Orleanians to get our hands dirty by tilling soil, planting seeds, and reaping the benefits. Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, they work at the community level to develop a movement based on thinking about the land on which we live, how we treat it, and the historical, cultural, and social connections between us and the Earth.
