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The following is from a paper given by Suzanne Turner at the National Building Museum, November 14, 2005.

I want to thank all those design and planning professionals who have shown such concern for our region. The first thing that I realized after the storm was that a disaster immediately shows people for who they truly are-either selflessly generous, or opportunistic. Fortunately, there were many more of the former.

Clearly any discussion of recovery from Katrina needs to be grounded in landscape issues, although some planning in another state is well underway with little grounding in the sensitive ecological systems that are at the heart of the storm's impact in both the urban and rural landscapes.

I want to speak about the perspective that landscape architecture brings to the challenge of rebuilding New Orleans and its regional landscape, but it's just as well that you know the other lenses that color the way I see things:

• our only child was to have begun her freshman year at Tulane this fall, I had just put the sheets on her bed in the dorm room when we were told to evacuate. Only yesterday were we allowed to return to retrieve her belongings from her dorm room where they had been since the Saturday before Katrina.

• I am the daughter of an industrial contractor for whom the oil and gas industry is key, and my mother's family grew sugar cane until it became economically unviable thirty-five or so years ago; they have large land holdings where virgin cypress timber was a principal source of income for a century, now replaced by oil and gas leases;

• I have spent most of my academic career studying the history of the landscape of south Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, particularly that of the New Orleans French Quarter and the sugar plantations along the Mississippi River; It is my belief that good planning and design must be informed by the past of a place, and that means the history of how people have interacted with place-not just series of events. It is the story of the interactive process of how place shapes culture, and culture shapes place.

• And I am co-founder of a local non-profit that runs farmers markets and promotes sustainable agriculture in the region.

These pieces of who I am also explain in part how I ended up in the profession that I have practiced and taught for a quarter century.

Landscape architecture is perhaps the broadest of the disciplines that shape the built environment, and in facing a chal