John Edwards: Getting Rid of the Wires
by Andrea Boll

Local engineer John Edwards is convinced that going green is the answer to the problem of rebuilding New Orleans.

John Edwards is not a politician. He is an engineer who believes the current state of Louisiana politics and New Orleans rebuilding is just a poorly executed equation, a non-linear quagmire, which at this point, no politician, no matter how savvy, is going to be able to fix. It’s beyond politics or maybe it’s much simpler. It’s math, a cold equation that needs to be re-thought with new variables and different functions. And of course, John Edwards argues he is the candidate who can do this.

One of these new variables Edwards wants to change is to make New Orleans go “Green.” Going Green is not, for example, banning Styrofoam to go containers like the city of Berkeley, California. It is not putting worms in trash cans to compost the coffee grinds and orange peels of offices like they have started doing in Los Angeles. It is not even about making it easier to recycle your newspapers. (These are all things I thought “Going Green” meant.) Going Green means that in the rebuilding of New Orleans, we must become an example of sustainable and reusable energy by using the technologies to do so. Something, he argues none of our current elected officials are advocating during this “pivotal point.”

When I ask him if he could be more specific, he discusses how, for example, we could be rebuilding all our hospitals, city buildings, and even homes with solar panels to avoid the breakdown into chaos that followed the loss of power during and after Hurricane Katrina. “We’re going back to the same old stuff,” he says. “Really, we’re not even rebuilding, we’re re-patching. Re-patching Louisiana. Re-patching New Orleans. That should be the motto: Re-patching New Orleans.” He pauses. “Right now in New Orleans,” says Edwards, “we can serve vodka faster than we can serve drinkable water.” He laughs. “It’s true.”

But going Green will do more than make us more energy efficient; it is, in fact, one of the only ways Edwards believes we can continue to convince Congress and the rest of the United States to support and fund the rebuilding of New Orleans. Edwards believes that “we need to be a pioneering city for other countries and other cities to follow… incorporate what the future has that everybody is going to have to adapt to—that kind of research and technology. It’s an investment. Let’s let New Orleans go Green and see if it really works.”

So then I ask how he will bring the idea of reusable energy to a city where most people find it perfectly acceptable to throw their trash out the car window.

Edwards is unfazed. “We got to move people forward,” he says. “Motivate and encourage. Some people you got to bring things to.”

He then points to the distance where power lines slither around a pole and in the air.

“Look at these power lines,” he tells me, shaking his head. “You can’t even ride a cargo truck through the streets because they’re all hanging, house to house. We got to change that. The aesthetics got to be something on top of our agenda. Solar panels or put those wires under the ground. Those are our real challenges. But that’s what engineers do: we sit and get the best experts from all across the lines and people from all walks of life to sit in a room and have educated dialogue to solve these problems. Your typical politician doesn’t do that.”

I ask him if they put the power lines above ground because New Orleans is a swamp. Possibly they would rot under ground. He snorts. “If they can build an airport in China, in the middle of the ocean, we can rebuild New Orleans the right way.”

I hope John Edwards is right. I hope there is an airport in the middle of the ocean and that one day, the wires of our city will be nicely tucked in beneath fixed roads, electrified by solar panels.

Andrea Boll is a regular correspondent for NOLAFugees.com.