Class studies Katrina aftermath over break

Lauren Sutherland Life Editor

Before applying for a spot in the Environmental Science field course, Emily Vail ’09 had assumed she would be heading home for October break to catch up on sleep and enjoy the autumn. Instead, Vail found herself jumping not into a pile of vividly colored leaves last week, but into the Gulf of Mexico off of the Louisiana coast.

“We had just finished recording the elevations of sand dunes and studying vegetation on a barrier island,” recalled Vail. “Finally we just decided to jump into the Gulf in our clothes.”

Over October break, Vail and the 12 other Vassar students enrolled in the half-semester environmental studies course toured the geological landscape of southern Louisiana with Assistant Professor of Geography/Geology Mary Ann Cunningham and Associate Professor of Geology Kirsten Menking. The class is offered through the Environmental Studies Program every two years.

“The point of the course is to give students field experience in doing data collection and interpretation, in a place where environmental science issues come up,” said Cunningham. “It’s fun and exciting to learn together as a group, in a way that we rarely have the leisure to do when we’re distracted by a thousand other possibilities here at school.”

To gain a comprehensive understanding of the condition of the Louisiana wetlands, each student was assigned a specific area of environmental interest to research early in the semester, and was expected to direct the class’s discussion during relevant activities on the trip.

The class spent the majority of the trip at the Louisiana Marine Consortium based in Cocodrie, Louisiana, and also spent three days in New Orleans. According to Cunningham, one of the main focuses of the trip was to study the hypoxic zone off the coast of Louisiana, which is a low-oxygen zone where the ecosystem is in advanced stages of depletion.

The students also had the opportunity to work with experts in the field; at the Marine Consortium, they took marsh samples with geo-morphologist Denise Reed, who is a regular environmental consultant for publications like The New York Times, and a published researcher whose writings are widely accredited in the field of environmental studies.

According to Cunningham, the Environmental Studies Program had planned to visit other destinations until the intervention of Hurricane Katrina changed their minds. “The hurricane highlighted chronic problems of wetland loss, river control, and social inequity and brought these issues into the national spotlight,” said Cunningham. “It also exacerbated all these problems, so it was a great time to learn about the intersection of politics and economy and environmental
science.”

A central theme of the class was how the existent depletion of the coastal wetlands compounded the destruction wrought by Katrina. “Marsh degradation is linked to some of the problems of the hurricane storm surge,” explained Vail. “The less marsh remains along the coastline, the less distance the storm surge has to dissipate before hitting cities and towns.”

A true appreciation of the scope of the hurricane’s devastation would have been impossible without spending time in New Orleans, the epicenter of the Katrina-inflicted suffering. There, the class toured the gutted lower ninth ward of the city, and attended an environmental justice conference pertaining to the hurricane that featured the accounts of several Katrina survivors.

“[Before the trip], I had formed an opinion about the people who remained in New Orleans, namely that they were extraordinarily stubborn and unintelligent for continuing to live in such an area,” said Geology Department student intern Yvonne Yeung ’07. “I now realize the ties that people have to the land, and can at least understand their desire to stick to their roots. The social and political repercussions were a lot more extreme than I had imagined.”

Cunningham said that the goals of the trip had as much to do with studying coastal Louisiana as they did with developing a broader understanding of the nature of environmental study.
“I hope students learned that you can interpret a lot about the environment by carefully examining a relatively small amount of data,” said Cunningham. “I also hope they gained experience in the complexity of social and environmental challenges, which are more real when you see them than when you read about them in class.”