Burners (and Pagans) Without Borders
The San Francisco Bay Guardian spotlights ongoing efforts by Pagan author and activist Starhawk (who is working with the Common Ground Collective and the Pagan Cluster) and the Burning Man community (“Burners”) to help rebuild and restore the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.
“The failures of the government to prevent this disaster or respond effectively -? both during the storm and since then – are a national shame. The corruption and incompetence -? some would even say greed and racism – that have hampered efforts to plan for the return of residents to poor urban neighborhoods is a tragedy that is still unfolding. But there’s another story here on the Gulf Coast, a more hopeful story. It’s a story of people from around the country -? including many from the San Francisco Bay Area -? who have descended on the region, placing their lives on hold so they can help their fellow humans dig out of the muck and rebuild.”
Burner Tom Price talks about his experiences in the rebuilding effort, and how his experience as a Burning Man participant prepared him for the chaos of the Gulf Coast.
“When burners started hitting the Gulf Coast, the question of whether Burning Man is more than just a big art party in the desert stopped being some boring art-house debate or pedantic argument yelled over drinks at the Make-Out Room. This is about as real as life gets. Down the road from me, there’s a 65-ish, toothless man named Morgan Collins who’s had to stare for five months at the rotting morass of what used to be his mobile home, because no one from the government or anyone else would help him get rid of it. And today, in about five hours, a friend and I broke it up and bulldozed it out of the way. Meanwhile, at the other end of town, a half dozen other volunteers humped salvageable wood out of broken homes so they could rebuild a new one a few doors down for a 71-year-old retiree who was left only with the Harley he’d outrun the storm on.”
Despite these fine efforts by individuals and communties working together, Starhawk lays out what the area really needs.
“Our efforts, the whole growing Common Ground project, show what people can do without government support of resources. And yet the scale of this disaster demands a response far beyond anything we can do on a lesser scale… The good news is that a plan exists to address this problem, a plan that everyone from environmentalists to oil companies agrees upon, and has actually been adopted by the Louisiana legislature in 1998, the Louisiana Coast 2050 Plan. It would divert water from the Mississippi upstream from New Orleans and bring it to the wetlands areas, allowing the river to flood in a directed fashion that would rebuild sinking lands and restore barrier islands. The bad news is that the Federal Government has yet to fully fund the plan. It is estimated to cost 16 billion dollars over two to three decades??a fraction of the cost of Katrina’?s damage, or of the ongoing cost of war. No community-based effort, no bunch of college kids on spring break with shovels, are going to do this. It needs a commitment on the scale only the Federal Government can provide.”
Whether our government will truly step up to the plate and work to restore the Gulf Coast remains to be seen. So far cronyism and corruption is still rampant, and money for post-Katrina restoration is being tied to yet more money for the wildly unpopular occupation of Iraq.
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