Researcher Anna Hartnell marks the twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, highlighting the human causes of New Orleans’ crisis (“There is no such thing as a natural disaster”) while questioning ‘Anthropocene’ labellings of human nature as hard-wired for destruction.
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The hurricane that hit the US Gulf Coast in the late summer of 2005 was undoubtedly a ‘natural’ phenomenon — even if the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, that had whipped up what was initially a category 5 storm, were unusually warm as a result of changes in the climate engendered by human activity. But as the terrible toll of the storm and the subsequent collapse of the New Orleans levees became clear, so too did the role of human decision-making. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, a documentary directed by Traci A. Curry to mark the twentieth anniversary of the storm this August, repeatedly emphasizes that human error is what turned ‘disaster’ into ‘tragedy’ in New Orleans in 2005. Just minutes into the first episode of this mini-series, presented by National Geographic, Malik Rahim — a former Black Panther who founded the Common Ground Collective after Katrina and whose commentary constitutes one of the film’s moral touchstones — tells us that “the tragedy of Katrina was man-made”.
This is a message that has now been sounding for twenty years. Almost as soon as the storm hit, the idea that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster” became an important organizing slogan forcefully articulated in the face of those seeking to deny the facts around the criminally inept response to Katrina. When the floodwaters began to recede and analysis of the causes of the disaster began, it remained an important response to anybody unwilling to recognize the lurid portrait of America that Katrina painted: a toxic brew of racialized poverty, ever-widening social inequality, corporate irresponsibility and a rapidly retreating social safety net.
Katrina was a stark warning of the consequences of decades of neoliberal deregulation and neglect that allowed oil and gas infrastructure to destroy large parts of the Louisiana wetlands — that provided natural flood barriers and protection against hurricanes –- while the system of human-made levees surrounding the city was allowed to go into a state of managed decline. The spectacle of some of America’s poorest communities stranded in the flooded city with no food, sanitation or medical supplies was a sharp reminder of what ‘rugged individualism’ looks like in the context of an economic system that has privatized the commons and redistributed wealth upwards. This story unfolded as the grotesquely unjust ‘recovery’ that began in subsequent months revealed plans for a whiter, wealthier New Orleans. The crisis created by Katrina was used as an excuse to demolish public housing blocks that had withstood the storm remarkably well. The city’s Charity Hospital was shuttered in the midst of a public health emergency. A sizeable diaspora of displaced storm survivors, disproportionately and overwhelmingly African American, were not supported to return home.
“There is no such thing as a natural disaster.”
I spent about ten years researching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and know well how the human costs of this catastrophe drown out other perspectives that might more fully account for a non-human ‘nature’. I met and interviewed people working at all levels of community organization, many of whom were justifiably angry about how badly New Orleans had been let down by the public officials who were meant to serve it. My own understanding of the storm’s unravelling was drawn inexorably towards the bad actors and corrupt systems that not only allowed this tragedy to happen, but which actively constructed the world that made it a likely occurrence.
I came to the topic with interests in the climate crisis but even that larger horizon — with its inarguably anthropogenic features — seemed too big and baggy and not respectful enough of the specific and extraordinary ways in which New Orleans’s geography and population were exposed to environmental harms quite literally engineered by human beings. Yes, it represented a flashpoint moment and seemed to be a sign of things to come in a warming world. But the human story and the facts on the ground felt far more urgent than the bigger environmental picture.
We have invented a host of terminological designations to ensure that we do not forget the human contribution to our own ecological predicaments. ‘Environmental racism’ is a long-standing and important concept that evolved in the context of US grassroots environmental justice campaigns to remind us that it is no accident that people of colour are routinely and systematically exposed to environmental harms at far higher rates than more privileged and generally whiter populations. That African Americans were far more likely to inhabit flood-prone neighbourhoods and live close to collapsed levees is an instance of environmental racism that Katrina vividly illuminated. The same insight about human agency, intentions and systems runs through the idea that “there’s no such thing as a natural disaster”, which was widely appropriated from its initial deployment by activists, becoming the title of an academic collection of the same name, published in 2006, and also claimed, if I remember correctly, by one of the Katrina bus tours that snaked through destroyed neighbourhoods very shortly after the storm — presumably to perform the tour company’s allegiance to social justice.
It turns out that #NoNaturalDisasters is an organized campaign that formed in the years since Katrina and which has been adopted by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, to reflect mounting climate awareness in the wake of the sobering and politically momentous 2021 IPCC report — which for the first time stated unequivocally that humans are warming the planet. As the UN campaign page explains:
“By shrugging off a catastrophic event as a ‘natural disaster’ one is refusing to take responsibility for the damage and destruction … Next time you hear that phrase – ‘natural disaster’ – step up to the mark and correct the speaker: ‘There is no such thing as a natural disaster.'”
But is this protesting too much? What does this insistence entail and what do we lose sight of by refusing to see anything but human causes, actions and consequences? I’ll return to the Katrina crisis — the terminology I have preferred in my work as a way of attempting to take in the myriad points of rupture introduced by the storm as well as its illuminating role and potential as a turning point. Now, I will briefly think about these issues through what is perhaps the ‘master’ term for emphasizing human agency when it comes to environmental change: Anthropocene.
Anthropocene by human choice, not by human nature
When ‘Anthropocene’ was initially proposed in 2000 as the name for a new geological era in which human agency has become central, climate denial was ubiquitous. This denial was not aimed at climate change itself — which is usually broadly accepted as a real phenomenon — but rather the human role in the crisis was disputed. Mainstream media was complicit with this narrative by framing the very existence of human-induced climate change as a ‘debate’, despite widespread scientific consensus that it was an established fact. In this context, the idea that our current era might be named the Anthropocene was an important mobilization against this denial. It was a way of naming the larger nexus of environmental harms done to Earth by human hands, but the scale of climate change has dwarfed all other related issues. The insistence that Katrina was ‘man-made’ in 2005 echoes this claim about human centrality and derives from the same political context.
Twenty years on and these contexts are fundamentally different. As Michael Mann argued in The New Climate War published in 2021, the centre of gravity of climate denial has shifted, from directly disputing human contributions via carbon emissions, to the promotion of various forms of greenwashing as ‘solutions’ to distract from the crisis. And as Curry’s twentieth anniversary documentary on Katrina demonstrates, the idea that the disaster was largely ‘human-induced’ is now widely accepted, thanks principally to community organizers who have worked tirelessly to resist attempts to whitewash the tragedy as ‘natural’ and thus inevitable.
The International Union of Geological Sciences, a representative group of the world’s geologists, voted just over a year ago to reject ‘Anthropocene’ as the official name for a new era. The proposal they voted on did not reflect the original idea put forward by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to identify the Industrial Revolution and specifically the invention of the steam engine as the beginning of the Anthropocene. Instead, it brought the date even further forward, to 1952, to mark the first hydrogen bomb tests. Arguably it was this decision, to squeeze the timeframe of human impact, that led to the rejection of the term. While those who dissented from this decision did so vociferously and from an environmentalist standpoint — as The Guardian pithily summarises, “critics say it is a missed chance to recognise that the planet irrevocably left its natural state in the mid-20th century” — the possible reasons for not officially embracing the term are illuminating.
As one group of scientists from outside geology put it, quoted in a New York Times article, “our impacts have less to do with being human and more to do with ways of being human.” An obvious objection to the term Anthropocene which has been sounded by environmental justice campaigners for some time now is that the majority of humans on the planet are not the problem; it is those wielding enormous wealth and power who are responsible for climate and ecological breakdown and it is wrong and politically counter-productive to suggest that there is something inevitably destructive about human interaction with the planet. This objection to the term ‘Anthropocene’ thus refuses the suggestion that it is somehow ‘natural’ that humanity destroys the environment, that destructive environmental practices are a hard-wired part of ‘human nature’.
This objection is important for understanding post-Katrina New Orleans. The claim that ‘humans’ are to blame for the disaster — not ‘nature’ — overlooks the fact that humans were from the outset blamed for the tragedy, and this was a large part of the problem. The world’s media and political commentary were complicit in constructing the storm’s victims as somehow to blame for their own need, for their lack of transportation to heed the mandatory evacuation order, for their lack of food, medication, sanitation. The appalling humanitarian crisis that overtook the New Orleans Convention Center and the Louisiana Superdome — the so-called ‘places of last resort’ — were met with revulsion and disgust, with racist stereotypes about chaos and criminality abounding. ‘Nature’ was nowhere identified, and humans were certainly in the frame — just the wrong ones. This was a striking case of what Edward Said described years before as ‘blaming the victims’.
If we return to planetary time scales, human history is no more than the blink of an eye. It seems that the key reason that the world’s geologists declined to embrace ‘Anthropocene’ was that the period is just too short — perhaps even if it was backdated to the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of the Americas or even the beginnings of agriculture. Writing in The New York Times, Stephen Lezak picks up on the paradoxical consequences of placing humans at the centre of geological time:
By placing Homo sapiens center stage, the Anthropocene also deepens a stark and inaccurate distinction between humanity and the planet that sustains us. The idea of ‘nature’ as something separate from humankind is a figment of the Western imagination. We should be wary of language that further separates us from the broader constellation of life to which we belong.
While the obvious rebuttal to this is that the very term Anthropocene signifies humanity’s entanglement with the planet, it does inevitably seem to put humans at the centre. It seems to usher in the very anthropocentrism it was meant to name and critique. In our rush to point the finger at ourselves we can only see ourselves. This seems unnecessarily pessimistic about human behaviour — which is not generalizable in this way — and blind to any agency which is not human.
Undoubtedly the term Anthropocene and the critique of the notion of ‘natural disasters’ have represented important stages in our conversations about environmental destruction, particularly the climate crisis, and responses to disasters. But what happens when we banish ‘nature’ as a meaningful force? What happens when we suggest, inadvertently perhaps, that humans are in full control of the ship?
Even within the context of human-made systems, this seems unrealistic. Naomi Klein’s otherwise excellent book The Shock Doctrine (2006), which explores various sites of disaster capitalism, including post-Katrina New Orlean, is sometimes limited by its reliance on ‘Chicago School’ and corporate villains. Gently pushing back on this tendency in relation to Katrina’s aftermath, my friend Cedric Johnson wrote in 2011, “inasmuch as she focuses primarily on the corporate skulduggery and White House patronage streams of the Bush era, Klein’s arguments neglect the more pervasive and equally consequential phenomenon of do-good capitalism where altruism, good will, and even social antagonisms are harnessed to the profit motive.” In our present age of conspiracy theories it is perhaps important to acknowledge and reject the seductive simplicity of the fully intending villain. The reality is more frightening.
The outcomes and long-term consequences of human choices and decisions are not fully knowable. Let alone when they are interacting with non-human ecosystems as dynamic as weather and climate. What strikes me as especially poignant on this twenty-year anniversary of one of America’s most destructive storms is not that anybody was conspiring against Katrina’s victims but rather the opposite: elites were indifferent, they did not care. There was no plan, and there certainly should have been — so much knowledge was already in place that might have averted some of the worst outcomes — but even the best laid plans can be defeated. We are not fully in control of our environments, and the fiction that we might be is surely part of the problem. New Orleans should not have been abandoned in 2005, and we should not underestimate the forces of nature that human activity has helped to unleash.
Find more
Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, directed by Traci A. Curry, premiered on National Geographic in July 2025 and is available to watch on many streaming platforms.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s #NoNaturalDisasters campaign page explains that “Hazards may be natural. Disasters are not . … A natural hazard, such as a hurricane, earthquake, or flood, only becomes a disaster when it impacts a community that is not adequately protected, and whose population is vulnerable as a result of poverty, exclusion or socially-disadvantage.”
The Guardian article quoted is Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch, by Damian Carrington (22/3/24).
The New York Times opinion piece quoted is Scientists Just Gave Humanity an Overdue Reality Check. The World Will Be Better for It, by Stephen Lezak (22/3/24).
The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (2011), edited by Cedric Johnson, is published by University of Minnesota Press/
Mary Waltham
Excerpts from Selborne Local Landscape Character Assessment (2014) are included here to clarify the position of the site.
