Since we’re talking about planning an activity with the wetlands and coastal erosion in Louisiana I wanted to do what I can to prime everyone for how incredibly huge and yet invisible this issue is.
Long story short, bits of Louisiana have been falling off into the Gulf of Mexico for the past century. This is happening partly from interference with the natural course of the Mississippi River necessary to settle in Louisiana, but accelerated by dredging of wetlands to build canals for oil and gas and other industry, particularly during the past fifty years. Those bits of land are not only important in their own right as natural habitat and resources, but are protection for all of Louisiana from storm surge during hurricanes.
I moved to Boston two days before Katrina happened, and one thing people were asking me about was coastal erosion. I was shocked about what people not from the gulf coast didn’t know about the issue. When I was in elementary school, we were taught every year about how Louisiana loses a football field of wetlands every forty five minutes. I had just assumed that this is what everyone in America learned about in elementary school. So there I was, twenty years old, after having been told about a national emergency since I was five, and then flying somewhere six hours away and finding out that as a nation,it was in fact an issue we were completely blind to.
National acknowledgement of and action on how and why this is happening is necessary restore these wetlands. The distance a hurricane travels over marsh land before it hits a city reduces how high the storm surge is when it lands. Height of storm surge determines whether or not levees hold. Levees holding determine whether or not people drown in their attics.
I would still like to work with everyone about a way I can talk about this. So, please ask me about it.
For now, I hope everyone will look at these two links: http://www4.nau.edu/tribalclimatechange/tribes/gulfcoast.asp This is a little bit about the effects of wetlands loss. The Biloxi Chitimacha-Choctaw people in Terrebone Parish settled where they live in Isle de Jean Charles in the middle of the 1800′s. They chose this remote place to avoid having their land taken from them and being forced to move to Oklahoma. This past year, they have made the decision to abandon the island because there is literally no longer enough land left to live there.
www.mrgomustgo.org Congress recently approved the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, “MRGO.” Mister Go is a large canal that was built in the fifties to promote industry, but never lived up to it’s economic value. It runs from the ocean through south Louisiana into the Industrial Canal of the Lower Ninth Ward, and is responsible for a huge amount of wetlands loss. Many activist groups have been working to close MRGO for the safety of people in Louisiana and environmental protection.
Okay, and some lagniappe links: http://blog.nola.com/graphics/2008/12/SinkingLand.swf (Great summary and pictures) www.healthygulf.org (Look at their resources for taking political action) www.saveourlake.org (Look at the ‘Coastal Lines of Defense’)
—-Amanda
image: The Times Picayune “Chief Albert Naquin walks with a remnant of his tribe of Biloxi-Chitimacha Choctaw Indians along the Isle de Jean Charles community road, which has eroded to a single lane.”
