Rebuild, perhaps, but can we — will politics allow us to — learn from our mistakes? Hurricanes will always taunt the Gulf coast, and the Mississippi will rise every spring. If we would rebuild New Orleans, we must listen to the living history of natural systems. Or maybe we should listen to blogfriend Richard Lawrence Cohen, who paints a vision of New Orleans, 2025. Simulated reality trumps reality, and his future tourist, a youngster traveling with his family, takes it all in stride:

This is the greatest city! Our hotel room is on the 40th floor, right on Bourbon Street, and I can look down over the whole French Quarter and see what?s going on without even going down there. We have in-room VR, so this morning I put on the helmet and there I was, back in old New Orleans the way it was before this flood or something that they had about twenty years ago. It was okay, but it was small and dirty and nothing much interesting was happening, just a lot of people eating seafood and getting drunk and watching other people take off their clothes

We think Richard’s definitely onto something. They’ve already got stuff like that at the Grand Canyon, where most tourists just say no to the real-life adventure and relative discomfort of a muleride to the bottom, opting instead for the wide-screen video version in air-conditioned, couch-potato comfort at the top.