Louisiana’s Turn to Mass Incarceration: The Building of a Carceral State
Louisiana's prison and jail incarceration rates from 1978 to 2015 showing the number of people incarcerated in state prisons and local jails per 100,000 people; #methodology The history of the Louisiana penal system is marked through crisis. For the majority of the 20th century such crises revolved around the state’s singular prison, the Louisiana State…
Coastal Land Loss in Louisiana: From Denial to Reality
The coastline formed by the Mississippi River is changing continually as part of the never-ending interplay between the forces and processes reshaping and realigning coastal contours and bathymetry. Over millennia, this formative process created Louisiana’s expansive wetlands that once encompassed million acres (11,500 square miles) – about the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined –…
Beneath New Orleans, a Coastal Barrier Island
Nearly all of New Orleans’s soils were deposited by the Mississippi, but the river itself was guided here in part by a preexisting barrier island formed by the Pearl River. This article by Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas, explores the subterranean Pine Island Trend (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next…
New Orleans Was Once Above Sea Level
Everyone has heard that New Orleans is below sea level; locals joke about it with a mix of dark humor and beleaguered pride, and it affects the region’s flood risk and future sustainability in fundamental ways. Yet few people realize that this condition is anthropogenic in its origins, and for the first 170 years of…
Four Cadastral Fingerprints on the Louisiana Landscape
The Louisiana landscape bears the imprints of four cadastral (land surveying) systems, more than nearly any other state, and they reflect and affect local society in profound ways today. By Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the…
Louisiana Topography: Third Lowest, Third Flattest, and Most Interesting
A look at quirks and idiosyncrasies of topographic flatness in "Louisiana Topography: Third Lowest, Third Flattest, and Most Interesting" by Tulane geographer Richard Campanella, courtesy Louisiana Cultural Vistas (PDF). New Orleans: Place Portraits — Over the next nine months, AAG’s “Focus on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” will feature a series of articles on New…