ON AUGUST 23, 2005, the summer’s twelfth tropical depression formed over the Bahamas.
Soon it was upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane named Katrina. In a busy hurricane season,
most of the world didn’t pay much
attention as it made landfall in
Florida, caused little damage, weak-
ened into a tropical storm, and blew
off into the Gulf of Mexico. But then
the warm water strengthened it into
a Category 5, with winds of 175 miles
per hour, the most intense hurricane
to ever hit the gulf. On August 28,
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagle ordered
a mandatory evacuation of the entire
city. By the morning of August 29,
only 20 percent of the 1.3 million
residents remained, mostly those too
poor or sick to move. Shortly after landfall, a storm surge breached the levees in several
places. Four-fifths of the entire city was under water.
So far this doesn’t sound very much like the introduction to a chapter in a sociology
textbook. Read on.
During the subsequent
days and weeks, news reports
described a city in chaos, with
snipers, rapes and murders,
people dying of hunger and
exposure, bodies lying unat-
tended in the streets. (Later it
turned out that many of the
reports were exaggerated or
even made up.) National Guard
Sociology of
Environments:
The Natural,
Physical, and
Human Worlds
617
We think of people and the natural and
built environments in which they live
as separate, even conflicted, realms.
Sociologists are interested in the
dynamic relationships among the
human, the physical, and the urban
environments.