The Biggest Evironmental Disaster in American History!

This will likely be the longest post I have ever written. But I can’t make claim to most of it, or for the inspiration of writing it. Both those go to Mike Tidwell, whose book, Bayou Farewell: The Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast, was an amazing eye opening book, the best travelogue, and the best environmental expose that I have ever seen, ranking at the very top of the best non-fiction books that I have read.  

The problem? The greatest environmental disaster in country is happening, right now, on Louisiana’s coastline, and nobody is doing anything about, in fact, no one, not environmental activists, know about it.

Swampy South Louisiana, unbeknownst to most people, contains a staggering 25% of America’s total wetlands, 40% of its salt marsh. This area contains a massive ecosystem, as Tidwell notes:

Wetland habitats hold the title as the most biologically productive areas on earth, and the great range of plant and animal life found within Louisiana’s coastal zone provides food and protection for no fewer than 353 species of birds residing here at some point during the calendar year.

The area is also one of the nation’s largest seafood producers, thanks to the marsh and swamp.

Before the morning is out, he’ll pull in a respectable catch of 120 pounds, part of annual Louisiana crab harvest that has no equal anywhere outside of Alaska. Indeed, I learn later, that even in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay region where I presently live and where the blue crab industry is a source of great local pride and eating crab cake borders on cult behavior-even there as much as a quarter of all crabs consumed actually come from Louisiana during some months.

Yet crabs are just one small part of the take in this massive estuarine waterscape of fresh, brackish, and saltwater habitats spread across endless bays, lagoons, inlets, and marshes shaped by the Mississippi River. Coastal Louisiana, by itself, accounts for an astonishing 30% of America’s annual seafood harvest, measured by weight.

Tidwell describes the beauty of this vast area:

What’s being lost is an American Treasure, a place as big as the Everglades and just as beautiful, where sky and marsh and wildlife converge, where millions of migratory birds thrive on wetlands that once served as muse to John James Audubon.

What exactly is happening? Well, since the 1930s, Louisiana has already lost an amount of land the size of the state of Delaware. Today, more than fifty acres of land are lost everyday, every ten months Louisiana loses an area the size of Manhattan. An area the size of the state of Connecticut will wash away in the coming decades, three million square acres of barrier islands, marsh and wetlands.

Why has this happened? It is not nature made, this is an entirely man-made conundrum, and, again, allow to use several of Tidwell’s sharpest words here, as they say it best.

Today, throughout the wetlands of lower Louisiana, more than ten thousand miles of such pipe lie underwater-criss-crossing, interlocking, overlapping, going everywhere. And to lay pipe across this ocean of marsh grass, an area so vast it’s often called the “trembling prairie” with its pudding like mud below, requires the construction of canals: straight and narrow streets of water dredged four or five feet deep, knifing through the grass…

“This?” I say. With a girth of about two hundred feet, the water almost as wide as Bayou Lafourche itself, I had simply assumed it was another large bayou meandering to the gulf. But Tee Tim informs me this stretch of water began as a roughly thirty foot canal builtby Texaco in the early 1960s…

“This is happening because the Mississippi River doesn’t flood anymore?” I ask Tim…

Reading up on the subject later, I learn that tattered boot of Louisiana was created exclusively by the mighty hand of the Mississippi…

Then came the worst deluge of all, the Great Flood of 1927, which killed over a thousand people in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Intending to end such outburst once and for all, the U.S. Corps of Engineers after 1927 perfected the construction of massive, unbreachable levees along the entire lower Mississippi. This has frozen the river in its present course, which streams past New Orleans and out into the Gulf where its sediments no longer create any land whatsoever, tumbling instead thousands of feet over the cliff-like edge of the continental shelf.

Adding to the damage is an effect called “intrusion” where salt water moves into freshwater. Driving the oysters, alligators and freshwater fish further inland, and, killing thousands of trees. In Houma, in Terrebonne Parish about eighty to a hundred miles South of Baton Rouge you can drive down certain roads and see the groves of hundreds of dead old growth oak and cypress trees.

I recently learned that oil companies had for decades engaged in abusive practices, including dumping massive amounts of a toxic drilling by-product known as brine into holes dredged into the marsh, the dredging which, of course, weakned the marsh more and made it break up more rapidly and letting this toxic chemical spread out over a vast area. Oil Companies did this until 1990. Then there’s the canal’s they cut in the swamp, ten thousand miles of them. These rapidly speed up erosion so much that a canal that was thirty feet wide twenty years ago is over 200 feet wide today. They also let in salt water into the freshwater estuaries which kills thousands of trees and further weakens the soil by destroying freshwater wetland ecosystems. The canals are the main cause of the massive intrusion seen over the last few decades, leaving it’s haunted mark over all the land. Tree graveyards.

The Louisiana coastline is moving inward at a rate of half a mile per year, per year, in places. One of second cousins in Houma had a no hunting sign up about thirteen feet from the waters edge. Eight Months later, eight months, that sign was five feet out in the water. Eighteen feet of ground gone in eight months. Some people are keeping entire towns and neighborhoods together by dumping tens of thousands of tons of oyster shells where there is no soil or a road has completely disapeared. They even use Christmas trees, thousands of them to break waves and try to create new marsh when all of these programs are very useless and the 2050 plan is the only scientifically proven mass-scale plan to save my states beautiful and extremely ecologically important coastline.

The eventual result would the wearing away of the entirety of Louisiana’s jagged, boot-like coastline to something much further inland that was more resemblant to Mississippi and Alabama.

This is the biggest environmental disaster in the United States today. And, Tidwell concurs with this assessment in his book, though he is an admitted dedicated environmentalist. Look at what he states:

The Chesapeake Bay, of course, was another enormous estuary system in decline…But the bay, I realized, had two major factors on its side: much of America understood it was a threatened gem, and relatively aggressive programs were in place to try to bring it back to health. Most importantly, unlike the Louisiana Bayou region, the Chesapeake wasn’t literally disappearing…

Similar thoughts came to mind as I reached the Great Smoky Mountains where acid rain was poisoning thousands of acres of spruce firs and northern hardwoods at higher elevations…

The same held for the Everglades, which lay a few hundred miles away as I rolled further southward, edging the Florida Panhandle. There, not only was is possible to bring back this huge wetlands complex after a century of abuse, but it was actually being accomplished with a recently passed 7.8 billion dollar federal and state rescue plan…

Meanwhile, coastal Louisiana continued its headlong spring toward a point of no return- unsalvageable, perhaps forever- and virtually no one had an inkling. This despite the fact that it provides…plus the practical benefits of a fifth of American domestic oil, a huge amount of it’s seafood, and hurricane protection for nearly 1% of it’s population. These were all functions neither the Everglades, nor the Chesapeake, despite their many merits, could claim.

Why does nobody no about it. Well, the main ideas tossed around are the fact that south Louisiana is so far away from any major news outlets, it’s not near a massive population like the Everglades and Chesapeake Bay, and it doesn’t get the same tourism. 20 million to South Florida every year, less than a tenth of that to South Louisiana, and very little of that to tour the Bayous and see the beautiful and unique coastline of marshes and barrier islands.

And, this is important, not only because of the environmental impact and natural beauty, as mentioned by Tidwell, but also because every 2.7 miles of marsh grass absorb one foot of a hurricane’s storm surge, and therein lies the real reason New Orleans’ leaves failed. In 1960 more than fifty miles of marsh lay between it and the sea, now that number is twenty five mils. The marsh and barrier islands serve as a major natural buffer for hurricanes for the state’s two million + people, some 1.2 million of them living in the southern part of the state that would get smacked hardest by Hurricanes.

He finds out later along his journey, there is a way to stop this, there is a way to save Louisiana’s coastline but we must get to it. Let me quote his epilogue.

Unfortunately, the marsh almost everywhere else along the coast continues its rush toward oblivion, with land still disappearing at the astonishing rate of 25-35 square miles a year. As if this wasn’t enough, a new threat has emerged. Fishermen and biologists have begun to notice huge areas of previously healthy green marsh suddenly turning brown and dying all along the coast…

Whatever the cause, the vast and sickening new swaths of marsh began to die at such a rate that Louisiana Governor Mike Foster, as avid duck hunter across the wetlands, finally became alarmed. Foster organized an event that restoration activists had been seeking for years: a summit of state business leaders, conversationalists, scientists, civic leaders, and government officials designed to fully commit the entire state to saving the coast.

The bill they came up with is the Coast 2050 plan, designed to cure all the problems, by instituting a massive rebuilding of barrier islands, and an equally massive controlled artificial diversions of the Mississippi River. In several, small areas, (30-40 thousand acres), have been done already to remarkable success. In those areas not only has the erosion stopped, there has also been a gain of new land and new marsh. It also calls in for the filling in of all oil pipe “canals”, which are an abusive environmental practice that has caused intrusion and rapidly sped up the natural erosion. It even plants thousands of acres of new marshland.

The full scale project could be done with 14 billion dollars, the cost of six weeks in Iraq to save three million acres of wetland that are more than worth it. It hasn’t been done yet though, pressure needs to be put representatives to sponsor and bring this bill to the floor and get it passed. Quickly. Rita and Katrina did a great deal more damage and sped up the process. Old groves of trees are dying faster, and, if we do not get started on the project in the next decade, (it is a long-scaled project), we may not be able to save and rebuild Louisiana’s coast.

This is so important. I’m glad we’re spending billions to clean up Chesapeake, I’m glad we’re spending billions to repair the Everglades, but Louisiana needs fixing soon, it’s a bigger environmental disaster than either. It will completely cease to exist very soon if we do nothing. This cultural landmark and beautiful area. It would destroy one of the last truly unique individual American cultures, displaces hundreds of thousands of people and leave two million more much more vulnerable to hurricanes.

Also, I would so strongly recommend Mike Tidwell’s book. It is a great expose and travelogue, giving a fascinating insight into the Cajun culture and world, where there are no malls, Wal-Marts, franchise stores. It’s a moving read full of vivid people and descriptions I can vouch for myself, (having been to the areas quite often and seen many of the places he describes myself).

Please help me spread awareness of this problem. Please help me get people involved with this.

P.S. Please vote in poll. There are no counters, so I use the poll to see how many people have read a given post. So, again, please vote so I can satisfy my own curiosity. Thank you.