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Gallery III: Capitalocene
Extraction, Neglect, and the Political Ecology of Disaster
How centuries of extraction—oil, gas, labor, land—shaped the conditions that made Katrina catastrophic.
The Capitalocene shifts our attention from “human-caused” climate change to the specific economic systems that engineer vulnerability. In South Louisiana, oil and gas infrastructure carved through protective wetlands, corporate interests redirected water, and racialized disinvestment left entire neighborhoods exposed. Katrina was not only a meteorological event—it was the predictable outcome of policies that treated land, labor, and lives as expendable. This gallery reveals how extraction and neglect co-curated the disaster long before the storm arrived.
01
Land Loss as Infrastructure — Oil & Gas Cuts Through the Coast
Louisiana’s coast is disappearing at one of the fastest rates on Earth—not by accident, but through petro-capitalist engineering. Thousands of miles of oil and gas canals sliced through marshlands, allowing saltwater intrusion to kill the vegetation that once held the soil together. These wetlands acted as natural buffers, absorbing storm surge and slowing hurricanes. Their destruction is an example of slow violence—damage distributed across decades that prepares the stage for acute catastrophe. Here, the landscape itself becomes evidence of the political economy that made Katrina so devastating.
Touchpoint Markers:
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Slow Violence (Nixon)
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Capitalocene (Moore)
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Environmental Racism (Bullard)
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Services: National Wetland Interactive Map
The Wetlands Mapper is an interactive web tool developed by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in partnership with the U.S. Geological Survey to provide public access to detailed maps of America’s wetlands and surface water habitats. It integrates decades of National Wetlands Inventory data to show the location, type, and extent of wetland ecosystems across the United States, allowing users to explore, query, and download geo-spatial data for research, conservation, and planning. By visualizing changes in wetland distribution and connecting biological definitions of these habitats with GIS resources, the mapper supports education, environmental management, and decision-making while highlighting the ecological functions of wetlands in flood control, water filtration, and habitat provision.
02
The Corporate Footprint — Maps of Extraction & Inequity
This map visualizes how extraction corresponds to racialized geographies. Black and Indigenous communities disproportionately live closest to toxic corridors, flood-prone zones, and unstable industrial infrastructure. These spatial patterns are not accidental—they are products of zoning, corporate lobbying, and historical segregation. Disaster risk is distributed along the same lines as corporate profit.
NOAA Interactive Map Depicting the Restoration Since Katrina
The NOAA StoryMap on Barrier Island Restoration highlights how coastal wetlands once provided natural hurricane protection for Louisiana and how their long-term erosion intensifies storm impacts. Over the last century, Louisiana has lost vast areas of wetlands due to erosion, subsidence, levee construction, and development, reducing the natural buffer that once shielded communities from storm surge. NOAA’s interactive map tracks this loss and showcases restoration efforts—such as rebuilding Pelican and Shell Islands and restoring headlands in the Barataria Basin—to rebuild dunes, marshes, and protective habitats through sediment dredging and careful habitat design. By illustrating both the historical decline and ongoing restoration, the map emphasizes the importance of natural infrastructure in reducing damage from future storms and strengthening resilience in coastal regions.
01.
Rob Nixon – Slow Violence
Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence describes environmental harm that unfolds gradually, invisibly, and disproportionately across marginalized communities. Unlike spectacular disasters, slow violence occurs through decades of erosion, pollution, land loss, and infrastructural decay—violence that is delayed, dispersed, and often denied. Louisiana’s vanishing wetlands, sinking coastline, and petrochemical corridor are emblematic examples, where industry-driven damage accumulates quietly until it intensifies the impact of storms like Katrina. Nixon’s lens reveals how ecological destruction is also a political and social process shaping who is protected and who is left exposed.
02.
Bruno Latour — Actor-Network
Actor-Network Theory (Latour) argues that agency is distributed across networks of human and nonhuman actants—levees, policies, hurricanes, wetlands, engineers, petrochemical companies, zoning laws. Extending ANT to economic systems shows that corporations, markets, regulatory gaps, and privatized infrastructure also function as actants that materially shape outcomes. These “economic actants” do not merely influence the environment—they co-produce it. Understanding Katrina through ANT reveals a web in which natural forces and capitalist decisions are entangled, making disaster a product of both hydrology and history.
03.
James Moore – Capitalocene
Jason Moore’s concept of the Capitalocene reframes the ecological crisis not as the fault of “humanity” in general, but as the outcome of capitalist world-ecology—a system that organizes labor, land, water, and life for endless extraction and profit. Rather than treating nature as a passive background, the Capitalocene reveals how economic power actively reshapes environments, infrastructures, and vulnerabilities. Under this framework, disasters like Hurricane Katrina are not isolated natural events but symptoms of a long history of racialized land use, industrial exploitation, and political neglect. The Capitalocene helps us see how capitalism curates landscapes, producing uneven risks and uneven recoveries.
04.
Environmental Injustice
Environmental injustice highlights the unequal distribution of environmental harms and protections across racialized and economically marginalized communities. In Louisiana, low-income and Black neighborhoods were not only more vulnerable to Katrina’s flooding but also more likely to be located near failing levees, toxic sites, and sinking land. This inequity is not accidental: it emerges from decades of discriminatory planning, resource allocation, industrial zoning, and political neglect. Environmental injustice frames Katrina as both an ecological disaster and a human-engineered one, where vulnerability is curated through policy.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
