"Large sections of New Orleans (Orleans Parish) and the three surrounding parishes (Jefferson, Plaquemines, and St. Bernard) were flooded for weeks, leading to extensive mold growth in buildings. As residents reoccupied the city, local health-care providers and public health authorities were concerned about the potential for respiratory health effects from exposure to water-damaged homes. On October 6, 2005, CDC was invited by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (LDHH) to assist in documenting the extent of potential exposures…46% of inspected homes had visible mold growth…and residents and remediation workers did not consistently use appropriate respiratory protection...In post-hurricane New Orleans homes, mean indoor endotoxin levels were more than 20 times higher than the 1.0 EU/m3 average, with an inversion of the expected indoor-outdoor relationship."

From "Health Concerns Associated with Mold in Water-Damaged Homes After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita," January 20, 2006, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Civilized nations! While the barbarians, deprived of your light, know how to maintain their societies and their institutions for thousands of years, how is it that yours are overthrown so rapidly, and often in the same century which gives them birth? We hear you continually deploring the fragility of your works, and the cruelty of Nature, who causes the prodigies of your genius to be so speedily destroyed. Cease to attribute these disasters to time or to chance; they are the result of the gross incompetency of your social systems, which fail to insure to the destitute masses the means of labor and subsistence.

--French philosopher Charles Fourier (1772-1837), as excerpted from Fourier: The Theory of the Four Movements. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Jones, Gareth Stedman, and Ian Patterson, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

William Faulkner (1897-1962) was a great American writer from Oxford, Mississippi who lived and worked in New Orleans, Louisiana. Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, his novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). In his acceptance speech at the 1950 Nobel Prize banquet, Faulkner proclaimed:

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.

Faulkner began this speech by addressing and advising young creators on developing their moral and social conscience. Listen to him deliver his Nobel speech on YouTube here.