Elizabeth Kolbert has an excellent piece in the latest New Yorker about the tragic destiny of southern Louisiana.
I know that most of you won't be able to read it, but I thought I would pull a few paragraphs out:
Five thousand years ago, much of southern Louisiana did not exist. A hundred years from now, it is unclear how much of it will remain. The region, it is often observed, is losing land at the rate of a football field every thirty-eight minutes. Alternatively, it is said, the area is shrinking by a large desktop's worth of ground every second, or a tennis court's worth every thirteen seconds, or twenty-five square miles a year. Between 1930 and 2000, some 1.2 million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, disappeared. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita stripped away an estimiated seventy-five thousand acres--a loss as big as Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a map illustrating the process. Areas that have already vanished appear in red, and areas that are expected to vanish by 2050 in yellow. On the map, the southern coast looks as if it were on fire. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, "The rate at which Louisiana's land is converting to water is probably the fastest in the world."
Over the years, a great mnay plans have been drawn up to protect the Louisiana coast; these range from building up barrier islands with pumped sand to digging an alternative route for the Mississippi River--the so-called Third Delta Conveyance Channel. Katrina and Rita have inspired a whole new generation of proposals...All of these plans rest on the same assumption, which is that something can be done to halt, or at least dramatically slow, land loss. If this can be acccomplished, there are many possible futures for southern Louisiana. If it can't, there is only one.
And one great quote from Roy Dokka, a geologist at LSU, who is sounding the alarm bells about the rates at which the area is sinking:
"I don't want to be the person who pulled the rug out from under southern Louisiana," Dokka said later, as we walked back to the car. "But ultimately it's going to get so bad over her--in fifty to a hundred years, maybe sooner--that this is going to go under water."
Although I haven't made it through the whole piece yet, Kolbert does a great job of chronicling the successive communities and towns that have been dispersed or washed away completely. I can't figure out whether it is an inspiring testatment to human endurance that we have continued to rebuild and reinhabit the area or a monumental dose of stupidity that we haven't moved on.