Green-LIT: Shipping Containers in Your Backyard

The Port of New Orleans and Governor Jeff Landry are moving forward with plans to build the Louisiana International Terminal (LIT) shipping container port facility and yard in Violet, LA (down river from New Orleans in St. Bernard Parish) despite a great deal of local opposition. The Save Our St. Bernard (SOStbernard.org) local preservation movement, largely funded by prominent Isleño attorney Sidney Torres III, has launched several petitions and legal actions to interrupt the project. Of note is the fact that this terminal will be built within the colloquial borders of the St. Bernard Port Authority, effectively ceding it to the Port of New Orleans. Additionally the site that both St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parish residents have suggested as an alternative would almost certainly create a conflict of jurisdiction with the Louisiana Gateway Port of Plaquemines Parish. Mirroring the fracture of Southeast Louisiana’s competing port authorities the members of the “Stop the Grain Train”(Lower 9th/Holy Cross/Arabi) and “The Canal Will Kill”(lower and upper 9th ward) grassroots campaigns were not present at the public hearing held on May 27th at Val Riess Recreation Complex in Chalmette, LA despite the hopes of several members of SOStBernard that activists from New Orleans would be attending. Different notions of belonging and mobility create dynamic geographic relationships that alternatively embrace or challenge material interdependence through trade in different real and imaginary commodities. In the case of these competing port authorities their respective specializations would likely ensure no redundancies if they were consolidated under one authority, but the invisible commodity of their prestige and by extension credit and financial autonomy would clearly erode over time. Similarly, where older residents in historic ethnic enclaves could openly embrace new residents - from wherever so long as they fight alongside them to preserve a way of life dependent on place as much as space - instead cling to their trade in the invisible commodity of cultural heritage bound to a decaying notion of nativism. This intransigence in ceding market share of invisible commodities is a result of a historical-material process that has forced humans to value themselves solely on whatever aspect of their identity can be clearly defined as private property and thus given corporeal rights and exchange value. This virtual market further abstracts the metabolic processes of the economy from the metabolisms of nature, creating a metabolic rift that is resolved through “natural disasters” and forced migrations.

Author dc:creator

• Carlo Ernesto Lopez Reyna (23291404)

• Geography

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451179.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451179