Hurricane Katrina and the sinking of coastal Louisiana stand as a reminder that we must address climate change, competition over resources and marginalisation as the root causes of conflict before it is too late.

Most will remember the horrific pictures on the news in 2005 when hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. Nearly 2,000 people died, thousands more were left homeless and displaced, the material destruction was catastrophic with damages well over $100 billion.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina once again proved that marginalised people have the least resources to cope with environmental constraints and natural disasters. Nowhere in New Orleans was the devastation greater than in the Lower Ninth Ward, a predominantly poor African American neighbourhood. Most residents of the Lower Ninth Ward had fewer options of where to go, did not want to leave their homes behind and lost everything due to the damage caused by Katrina and their lack of financial resources to rebuild the community.

Katrina was not the last and probably not the most destructive disaster to hit Louisiana. Over the past years, a significant discovery has been made: Coastal Louisiana is sinking, at a rapid rate. Some estimate that an area the size of a football field is lost roughly every half hour.

Once again, this will affect already marginalised communities the most. Science Illustrated argues “something drastic must be done” because “the current state of affairs means that they [the affected communities] may soon be the first climate refugees in United States history”.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change sceptics appear to be fighting a losing battle in the face of greater levels of sound scientific data. Yet, governments are still reluctant to take necessary steps like drastically cutting carbon emissions and switching to green renewable energy sources. Hopefully this will change as addressing climate change will be essential in tackling the security challenges of an increasingly interconnected world.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Lord Stern, author of a 2006 UK government review on climate change, admitted he had got it wrong: “Looking back, I underestimated the risks. The planet and the atmosphere seem to be absorbing less carbon than we expected, and emissions are rising pretty strongly. Some of the effects are coming through more quickly than we thought then. This is potentially so dangerous that we have to act strongly. These risks for many people are existential”.

The risks are indeed existential for many people living in the coastal communities of Louisiana. Rising sea levels, mainly due to melting ice caps, are threatening those who live in the Louisiana Delta.

When interviewed by PBS, Torbjörn Törnqvist, geoscientist at Tulane University who studies Louisiana’s wetlands, said: “there is no doubt that the sinking land is a direct implication of climate change, because it actually reflects what we see worldwide. And if we go forward, we know that sea-level (rise) will continue to accelerate. The only thing there is uncertainty about is how large that continued acceleration will be. But I think the important thing we know now is that, even in the past century, accelerated sea-level rise has already contributed to the loss of these wetlands […] ultimately it [climate change] could very well become the single most important factor.”

Although climate change and the consequent rising sea levels are an important reason why coastal Louisiana is rapidly losing land, there is more to it. To prevent flooding, extensive levees have been built (some more than 100 years ago) around the edges of the Mississippi river and channels and water ways have been carved to redirect flows. However, the levees prevent the land in that area from receiving sufficient sediments to stay above water, and the manmade channels through the wetlands have weakened the buffer zone for hurricanes and storms. So sea levels are rising and the land is sinking.

These factors combined account for “the largest land loss currently on the planet”, says Val Marmillon, the managing director of America’s Wetland Foundation. “The massive land loss is not only threatening to destroy an entire ecosystem, including dozens of endangered animal species, but it could also severely affect local residents. Up to 2 million people are at risk of having to leave their homes.”

DRILLING FOR OIL

In addition to rising oceans, manmade levees and diversions, oil drilling along the coast has also contributed to rapid subsidence of the marshlands. The oil and natural gas industry, with annual revenue of approximately US $325 billion, started drilling in Louisiana in 1901. This has caused the wetlands to collapse and erode as channels are being dug for oil pipes. The process of removing oil from beneath the land is causing it to further sink, letting in salt water which destroys much of the natural habitat.

The Sustainable Security Programme at Oxford Research Group (ORG) sees “competition over resources” as one of the main drivers of global conflict: “there will be greater scarcity of three key resources: food, water and energy. Demand for all three resources is already beyond that which can be sustained at current levels.” A recent ORG publication states that “a narrow resource base for these energy reserves is at the root of the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf and does much to explain recent and current conflicts, but the even greater global concern stems from the potential impact of climate change”.

Oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana is detrimental to the environment, impedes addressing the causes of climate change and most importantly further marginalises already disenfranchised coastal communities.

MARGINALISATION

The political, social and economic marginalisation of the people of New Orleans and coastal Louisiana plays a central part of this story. Frances Fox Pivan in her article Marginalization and American Politics argues that in the case of Katrina “many of the victims had been marginalized before the hurricane and the floods overwhelmed them, which is surely part of the reason that the danger of hurricane and the ensuing floods was ignored. As is amply evident, this was not simply a natural disaster.”

She goes on to link marginalisation, poverty, the effects of natural disaster and violent crime: “Behind those images [of Katrina] was an intricate story of marginalization in the United States. The population of the city [New Orleans] was overwhelming black, and poor. The median income was only 70 percent of the national average, and poverty rates were twice the national average. The main jobs were low wage jobs in the hotels, casinos, restaurants and bars that catered to the tourist industry. Government income support programs, including welfare and food stamps and subsidized housing, that sometimes supplemented the earnings of some poor people, had been whittled away for several decades, and especially under the presidency of George W. Bush. The schools were bad, with high dropout and suspension rates, and the illiteracy rate of the city hovered at about 40 percent. Homicide rates were extraordinarily high, roughly ten times those of New York City.”

In the current situation of the sinking wetlands, most of the 2 million people who are directly affected are also living on the margins of society. According to 2011 US Census data the poverty rate in Louisiana is the second highest in the nation at 20.4% and 9.4% are living in extreme poverty. 14.1% of the population are affected by food insecurity and over 33% are in low-wage jobs as Louisiana is one of the five US states without a minimum wage law.

Small island communities in the Mississippi Delta, such as the Isle de Jean Charles, are inhabited by members of various Native American tribes. Some tribes do not have recognised status from the US government and hence have no access to any help from the state. Many people in the area live off the land they live on and sustain themselves through fishing and other subsistence activities. What will they do when their land disappears? Where will they go?

Marginalised people have much fewer resources to cope with a changing environment. They do not have options. Desperate people are also more willing to turn to desperate means. The case of Louisiana exemplifies the dangerous nexus of climate change, competition over resources and marginalisation. Working towards sustainable security will mean addressing those underlying factors in order to prevent violent conflict.

In President Obama’s second inaugural address, he put climate change centre stage as one of his top three priorities: “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition; we must lead it.”

Words will no longer be enough. We must see action, now.

Anna Alissa Hitzemann is a Peaceworker with Quaker Peace and Social Witness, and is currently based at Oxford Research Group. She works as a Project Officer for our Sustainable Security Programme, with a focus on our ‘Marginalisation of the Majority World’ project.

image source: Brother O’Mara

Action sports are increasing in popularity in the Middle East. For youth in conflict zones, these collaborative projects provide space for local voices and means of empowerment.

In 2001, Kofi Annan founded the United Nations Office on Sport for Development and Peace (SDP), advocating sport as having ‘an almost unmatched role to play in promoting understanding, healing wounds, mobilising support for social causes, and breaking down barriers’. Since then, the SDP movement has continued to proliferate with groups and organizations using sport and physical activity to help improve the health and well-being of individuals and communities around the world.

Of the 1000+ organizations currently working under the SDP umbrella, many are focused in sites of war and conflict with the aim of peace building, with growing interest in the potential of sports programmes as psycho-social interventions following natural disaster.

SDP organizations such as Football 4 Peace, Right to Play, Hoops 4 Hope, Skateistan, and Peace Players International have been acclaimed as making valuable contributions to the quality of many individual’s lives in contexts of war, conflict, and poverty.

Afghan boy on a skateboard. Image credit: Skateistan.

Despite the best intentions, however, too many SDP programmes adopt a ‘deficit model’ that assumes poor youth in war-torn or disaster stricken contexts need ‘our’ western versions of sport for their empowerment. Sport sociologists Douglas Hartmann and Christina Kwauk, for example, are concerned that officials of sport-based intervention programmemes tend to “ignore the ways in which youth interpret and actively and creatively negotiate poverty and inequality as well as the ways in which their sport-based interventions actually commit symbolic acts of violence while reproducing conditions of marginalization”.

Instead, they advocate a more critical alternative to youth development that pays attention to “local practices, local knowledge, the sociocultural and political-economic contexts as well as the needs and desires of communities themselves”.

My research (funded by a three-year Marsden, Royal Society grant) has been a direct response to this call by focusing on the multiple and diverse ways youth are actively and creatively engaging with recreational, non-competitive sports in their responses to conditions of war, conflict and post-disaster. The case study of Gaza provides an interesting example of the grassroots approaches being developed by youth in contexts of conflict.

Youth Engagement with Sport in Conflict Zones: The Case of Gaza

Youths doing parkour in Gaza Strip. Image credit: PK Gaza.

Parkour (also known as free running)—the act of running, jumping, leaping through an urban environment as fluidly, efficiently and creatively as possible—reached Gaza in 2005 (shortly after the withdrawal of the Israeli army and the dismantling of Israeli settlements), when unemployed recent university graduate Abdullah watched the documentary Jump London on the Al-Jazeera documentary channel in his over-crowded family home in the Khan Younis refugee camp. He promptly followed this up by searching the Internet for video clips of parkour, before recruiting Mohammed to join him in learning the new sport. Continuing to develop their skills, they soon found parkour to be so much more than a sport, “it is a life philosophy” that encourages each individual to “overcome barriers in their own way”.

To avoid conflicts with family members, local residents and police, members of PK Gaza (the name chosen by the group) sought out unpopulated spaces where they could train without interruption. Popular training areas included cemeteries, the ruined houses from the Dhraha occupation, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) schools, and on the sandy hills in Nusseirat, formerly an Israeli settlement now deserted in the centre of Gaza City. The latter is particularly meaningful for the youth who proclaim that by practicing parkour in the space, “we demonstrate that this land is our right”.

As part of the younger generation of technologically savvy Gazan residents, the founders of PK Gaza are explicitly aware of the potential of the Internet for their parkour practices, and for broader political purposes. “We started filming ourselves with mobile phones and putting the videos on YouTube”, explains Mohammed, and have continued to develop more advanced filming techniques using borrowed cameras and editing the footage on a cheap computer.

Boy doing parkour in Gaza. Image credit: PK Gaza.

The PK Gaza Freerunning Facebook page has thousands of followers from around the world, their Instagram account has almost 3000 followers, and the group also posts regular YouTube videos that can receive upwards of tens of thousands of views. Each of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are key spaces for interaction and dialogue with youth beyond the confines of the Gaza strip. In so doing, “we contribute very significantly to raising international awareness of what is happening in Gaza. We offer video clips, photographs and writings related to the situation in which we live in the Gaza strip and deliver the message to all the people’s that’s watching online that there are oppressed people here”, proclaimed Mohammed.

Professor Holly Thorpe giving a presentation on research findings. Image credit: Holly Thorpe.

As well as raising awareness of the conditions in Gaza and offering a temporary escape from the harsh realities of everyday life, the PK Gaza team strongly advocates the socio-psychological benefits of their everyday parkour experiences. They proclaim the value of parkour for their resilience and coping with the frustrations, fears, anxieties and pains of living in the Khan Younes refugee camp. As Abdullah explains, “I have witnessed war, invasion and killing. When I was a kid and I saw these things, blood and injuries, I didn’t know what it all meant … this game [parkour] makes me forget all these things”. As the following comments from Gazan psychologist, Eyad Al Sarraj (MD) suggest, some medical and health professionals also acknowledge the value of such activities for young men living in such a stressful environment:

Many young people in Gaza are angry because they have very few opportunities and are locked in. An art and sports form such as free running gives them an important method to express their desire for freedom and allows them to overcome the barriers that society and politics have imposed on them. It literally sets them free”.

Such observations are supported by a plethora of research that has illustrated the value of physical play and games for resilience in contexts of high risk and/or ongoing physical and psychological stress (e.g. refugee camps), and the restorative value for children and youth who have experienced traumatic events (e.g. natural disaster, war, forced migration).

Conclusion

To conclude, a key finding from my research to date is the need to move away from the ‘deficit model’ that assumes poor youth in developing or war-torn contexts are victims needing ‘our’ versions of sport for their empowerment. If the SDP community can begin with a recognition of the agency, creativity and needs of local youths, then we can better work with them to achieve their self-defined goals in contexts of conflict.

Dr Holly Thorpe is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Health, Sport and Human Performance at the University of Waikato. As a sociologist of sport and physical culture, she has published widely on youth sport, action sports, and critical sport for development, including six books and over 60 journal articles and chapters. In 2016, she founded Action Sports for Development and Peace (www.actionsportsfordev.org), and gave a Ted talk ‘Action Sports for a Better World’. She continues to work on a Royal Society funded project—Sport in the Red Zone—examining the power (and politics) of sport in sites of conflict and disaster, including Afghanistan, Gaza, New Orleans and Christhcurch. She welcomes your feedback, so please feel free to get in contact: