Saving coast a long battle
Advocate Opinion page staff
Published: Jul 16, 2007
The recent death of Mike Dunne, a longtime reporter for The Advocate, marks the passing of a great champion of Louisiana’s endangered coastline. This past spring, Dunne received the first America’s Wetland Conservationist of the Year award for his stories on threats to Louisiana’s coast. He was also the co-author, with Bevil Knapp, of “America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast.”
The week that Dunne died, the continuing urgency of Louisiana’s coastal problems was underscored in a roundtable discussion of the issue on the public affairs show, “Focus on Louisiana.”
Louisiana is in a race against the clock to preserve its coastal marshes, the show’s panel of experts agreed. The coastal restoration episode of “Focus on Louisiana” was the sixth in the nine-part public affairs series, sponsored by the Council for a Better Louisiana and Cox Communications. Information about the series is available on the Internet at
http://www.cabl.org or at
http://www.cox.com/batonrouge.
Experts estimate the state loses a football field of marshland every 38 minutes. Since 1930, the amount of wetlands lost in Louisiana has been greater than the entire land mass of Rhode Island. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone wiped out 217 square miles of wetlands.
Sidney Coffee, executive assistant to the governor for coastal activities, told fellow panelists that the state’s comprehensive plan for coastal restoration and protection will take at least 30 years and as much as $55 billion to complete.
University of New Orleans geology and geophysics Professor Denise Reed said a lot of mistakes made during the past century helped create the coastal land-loss problem. Levees were built to stop flooding from the Mississippi River, which limited the river’s ability to bring land-replenishing sediment to coastal areas. Channels were carved into the marshes to accommodate commercial fishing boats, and oil and gas barges and tankers.
“The marshes are hanging on by their fingernails at the minute,” Reed said. “We have to change that. We need to get the river back replenishing the system so they don’t have to hang on by their fingernails — so they can be healthy, vibrant systems for generations to come.”
The economic and ecological case for preserving Louisiana’s wetlands is compelling.
Louisiana’s wetlands produce more than 30 percent of the nation’s commercial fisheries, and they support the production of more than 25 percent of all the oil and gas consumed in the United States. Ninety-five percent of all the marine species in the Gulf of Mexico spend at least part of their life cycle in Louisiana’s wetlands. Louisiana’s coastal marshes host more than 5 million migratory waterfowl, as well as 70 rare, threatened or endangered species.
But beyond the statistics, the loss of coastal areas also exacts a deeply human toll. Panelist Stephen Smith, an environmental engineer from Houma, said the land loss already is affecting the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.
“Frankly, it’s heartbreaking, when you leave Baton Rouge and you drive to Montegut to see a guy like Roland Pitre,” Smith said. “He’s a guy I was with two days ago who’s walking in water in the parking lot of his business, literally, on a daily basis, because the wind is blowing out of the south. How does it feel? It’s heartbreaking.”
Reed said scientists have concluded that there’s a future for Louisiana’s coastal marshes, but action must be taken now.
Recent advances in federal funding for coastal restoration are a good first step. But Louisiana must make coastal restoration a consistent priority. Otherwise, there might come a day, quite soon, when the cause will be irreversibly lost.
http://www.2theadvocate.com/opinion/8521542.html