Sociology Now, Census Update

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.