Southern Louisiana. ‘Our Natural History in Verse’
Southern Louisiana
‘Our natural history in verse’
A land shaped in a welter of silt and mud churned from the heart of the continent by the Mighty Mississippi: gouged by rivers, bayous, and canals, and stitched together by the knees of the Bald Cypress. When the floods came they heaped and scoured the swamps into braids of new land, but the Great Flood of 1927 set off a panic. The Army Corp of Engineers walled the river in with a system of levies while the oil and gas companies dredged pipelines and drilled wells ever deeper in search of that black liquid gold. The Delta withered, its waters staunch and now polluted by the factories, refineries, and intensive agriculture upstream — inundated, now and then, by an oil spill, or hurricane…
And the sea continues to rise, and again we hear: walls will protect us…
So reads the opening page of [Jurassic Park Press] jurassicparkpress.tumblr.com/ ‘s newest zine, ‘Antediluvial.’ What follows is a visual essay in prints, every page hand-pressed by artists Mike Maher, Josh Jack, and Tiger Killhour. Together they compose a sort of elegy for the lands we are so swiftly losing, and the lives that depend on them.
We are currently sold out of our first run of copies, but will have more printed in time for the exhibition, Thicker Than Water: Alternatives and Realities of Living with Oil, at the New Orleans Community Printshop on May 13th.
all work © the artists
