The media rush to cover Vilsak and the New Iberia Primates buried Landrieu's tour of New Orleans with cabinet secretaries in charge of housing, FEMA officials, and representatives from Levees.org under a mountain of monkey dung. The planned high profile media tour included FEMA Administrator nominee, Craig Fugate.
It is well documented that FEMA not only criminally failed in providing immediate response to Hurricane Katrina, but also continues almost four years later to impede the flow of federal reconstruction money.
Who in the Obama administration will take the protection of humans in south Louisiana seriously? The barometer is not rising in favor of human rights in the White House. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has already capitulated to the Chinese, the worst human rights abusers on the face of the earth as Obama begs for financial support from Beijing.
Bourg can tell stories of the days in the 1970's when Patsy Sims documented a community of impoverished workers behind southern Louisiana's "cane curtain" in the book "Cleveland Benjamin Is Dead!" the cane plantations were "curtained" by rows of densely grown stalks that obscured the lives of the blacks who lived, worked, and died there.
Travel the back roads and bayous of Louisiana and it is not impossible to find people living in conditions that remind one of village life in Africa. In as many years, the delta region has experienced four major hurricanes. Traditional family fishing is in danger of losing access to waterways and environmental degradation may destroy the fisheries before the access vanishes. Many Cajun farmers are now sharecroppers to the multi-national sugar industry, and the people who support the oil and gas industry live in shacks a few blocks away from billion-dollar infrastructure.
SMHA has observed that millions in rural economic development dollars designed to be spent for economically distressed communities in Louisiana have virtually no impact on those communities.
Image: Human housing supporting oil infrastructure, Morgan City, LA
The same thing can be said for billions of dollars that have been pumped into African aid and the millions spent on conservation initiatives for the welfare of animals that has not reached the human population of conflict areas.
So, while the NYT signals that all is well in Congo because the mountain gorilla is well fed, a woman places her newborn baby on a tattered piece of cloth covering a bed of grass on lava rock. She has no cloth to cover the baby and no milk in her breasts to feed the child.
In New Iberia, cameras focus on elaborate caging and play areas for non-human primates while animal rights advocates are apoplectic hysterics, worrying about whether a research procedure might have caused distress to a baby monkey.
Image: Bourg and Delta Impact Area
Bourg sees pain everywhere. "There is a lot of pain to go around in our rural communities that have experienced four major hurricanes," Bourg said in a phone conversation. "Unless we are able to take care of our human family as well as animals, we will not have evolved as a civil society."
Ten thousand miles away, in the forests of Virunga National Park, Emmanuel DeMerode head of the Virunga Park, spoke with journalists about the need to balance human and wildlife needs. He had agreed to allow access from the Kibati IDP camp to Virunga so that women could gather firewood.
After being appointed as chief warden in August last year, we removed the charcoal barrier at Kibati. We are still trying to a solution to the considerable damage that is being inflicted on the park as a result of my decision to abandon the barrier, but please understand that I do not believe that the wildlife should take priority over people's needs.Across the street from the entrance gates of the New Iberia Research Center where chimps romp in state-of-the-art "primadomes", an old trailer home and dilapidated playground equipment mark the location for the local daycare facility for the human primates that inhabit this forgotten area of the United States.
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