Monday, March 05, 2007
Bob Marshall Tones it Down
As frightening as the Times Picayunes series on coastal erosion has been, it no scarier than the warning Bob Marshall* gave almost exactly a year ago:
To which I could only say, "that ain't gonna happen," and remember what I had read about Anicca and Dukkha (I won't even pretend to have any real grasp of Buddhism until I can come to terms with that Anatta thing).
In a similar vein Polimom asked:
at the start of a thoughtful piece on South Louisana and the ancient Kingdom of UR.
There's not much that I can add, other than to recommend that anyone who cares about Louisiana read all the links on the Picayune's website and look for tomorow's wrap-up. I should also point out there are two salient facts, or sets of facts, to remember when arguing for federal funding of coastal restoration. The first, from today's main article:
I must confess to wondering if Morwen was quite sure what she was talking about when she said that in a conversation at Kimberly's post-Rising Tide party. Since at least the early eighties, the oil companies have sucessfully changed the subject from canals and navigation channels to levees and hurricanes. I knew it was largely smoke screen but was unaware of just how much it obscured. Only a few years later, the oil companies sucessfully used the same tactics for delaying any action on global warming. I'm sure that other people have noticed the similarities in the scripts -- downplay the danger and change the subject from the causes you can do something about to the causes you can't do anything about. I can say from personal experience that most people in South Louiana have always thought controlling the river was the main culprit and that the offshore activity merely accelerated things. I doubt that one person in a hundred was aware of just how much it accelerated things. Not that we would have summoned the will to actually do anything.
For the second set of important points, I'll refer back to one of my earliest posts::
From the same post, referring to another year's revenues:
As da po' boy said:"That ain't right."
*Last year's Bob Marshall article was titled "The River Wild" and ran on March 10, 2005. I haven't been able to find it online.
Jeffrey has a good synopsis with most of the key points, for those who don't want to wade through the whole thing. Keep scrolling and you'll see his recap of the first two days of the series.
What many coastal scientists know, but are afraid to say publicly, is that we are almost out of options. The Gulf has moved so much closer to our back doors that there now remains only one real hope for a long-term future on the delta of the Mississippi River: Let the river go.
The federal government must claim eminent domain on everything south of U.S. 90, then begin managing it as an ecosystem with one priority: Rebuilding land faster than it's being lost to the Gulf.
This can only be done by opening large sections of the levees. River-borne sediments could then begin reconstructing the 1,900 square miles of wetlands that provided us some safety from the Gulf and its storms.
To which I could only say, "that ain't gonna happen," and remember what I had read about Anicca and Dukkha (I won't even pretend to have any real grasp of Buddhism until I can come to terms with that Anatta thing).
In a similar vein Polimom asked:
Wow. Does anybody but me think there’s absolutely no chance that such a thing could happen? Imagine the uproar and outcry!
at the start of a thoughtful piece on South Louisana and the ancient Kingdom of UR.
There's not much that I can add, other than to recommend that anyone who cares about Louisiana read all the links on the Picayune's website and look for tomorow's wrap-up. I should also point out there are two salient facts, or sets of facts, to remember when arguing for federal funding of coastal restoration. The first, from today's main article:
Still, the Louisiana coast might have survived another 1,000 years or more, Louisiana State University scientists said. But the discovery of oil and gas compressed its destruction into a half-century.
By the 1980s, the petroleum industry and the corps had dredged more than 20,000 miles of canals and new navigation channels from the coast inland across the wetlands. The new web of waterways, like a circulatory system pumping poison, injected saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico into salt-sensitive freshwater wetlands. Fueled by the advance of big business on the coast, the Gulf's slow march northward accelerated into a sprint.
I must confess to wondering if Morwen was quite sure what she was talking about when she said that in a conversation at Kimberly's post-Rising Tide party. Since at least the early eighties, the oil companies have sucessfully changed the subject from canals and navigation channels to levees and hurricanes. I knew it was largely smoke screen but was unaware of just how much it obscured. Only a few years later, the oil companies sucessfully used the same tactics for delaying any action on global warming. I'm sure that other people have noticed the similarities in the scripts -- downplay the danger and change the subject from the causes you can do something about to the causes you can't do anything about. I can say from personal experience that most people in South Louiana have always thought controlling the river was the main culprit and that the offshore activity merely accelerated things. I doubt that one person in a hundred was aware of just how much it accelerated things. Not that we would have summoned the will to actually do anything.
For the second set of important points, I'll refer back to one of my earliest posts::
Advocates in Louisiana argue that inland states split oil royalties from federal property 50-50 with the federal government. But Louisiana receives relatively little from oil-and-gas drilling occurring in the Outer Continental Shelf in federal waters far offshore.
For instance, Louisiana received less than 0.5 percent of the $5 billion in oil-and-gas royalties generated in federal waters off its coast in 2001. According to the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the state brought in more royalties than any state -- $7.5 billion.
From the same post, referring to another year's revenues:
While inland states enjoy 50 percent
of the tax revenue from drilling on their federal lands, Louisiana gets back a mere $35 million of the $5 billion it contributes to the federal treasury each year from offshore drilling, or less than one percent
As da po' boy said:"That ain't right."
*Last year's Bob Marshall article was titled "The River Wild" and ran on March 10, 2005. I haven't been able to find it online.
Jeffrey has a good synopsis with most of the key points, for those who don't want to wade through the whole thing. Keep scrolling and you'll see his recap of the first two days of the series.
Comments:
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"'Still, the Louisiana coast might have survived another 1,000 years or more, Louisiana State University scientists said. But the discovery of oil and gas compressed its destruction into a half-century.'
...
I must confess to wondering if Morwen was quite sure what she was talking about when she said that in a conversation at Kimberly's post-Rising Tide party."
I felt the same way. Not that she wasn't "sure", but that she had a fact wrong or exaggerated. No, she was precisely right, which means the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for coastal erosion is... almost incalculable.
...
I must confess to wondering if Morwen was quite sure what she was talking about when she said that in a conversation at Kimberly's post-Rising Tide party."
I felt the same way. Not that she wasn't "sure", but that she had a fact wrong or exaggerated. No, she was precisely right, which means the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for coastal erosion is... almost incalculable.
I'm always amazed that people are late to recognize the contribution of the oil and gas industry to coastal erosion. Although I have to admit I had to have the "subsidance due to extraction" bit pointed out to me, any guy who did any fishing in the marsh in the 70's and 80's could see that the areas of marsh cut up by pipeline canals were the parts that were disappearing the fastest. One year the points and shorelines you'd fished were there...and a few years later all you saw above the water was the spoil bank. I remember the first time I went looking for Snake Island, expecting to see what was shown on the chart. I later had it pointed out to me that when guys say they were "fishing Snake Island" they now meant they were fishing the reef where the island used to be.
# posted by 
: 11:18 AM
: 11:18 AM
I've never been much of a fisherman, but the few timess I have been fishing around Shell beach, I thought the obvious acceleration of the erosion was primarily caused by MRGO. I think that's what most people thought, and that also makes support for some of those prjects mentioned in Monday's side article all the more unfathomable. I think that most people have always thought that, if freshwater diversion and other restoration projects didn't work, in the long run we had a choice between New Orleans and the coast and that the oil activity merely sped things up. That's true, technically speaking, but the oil companies did a good job of obscuring just how much they sped things up.
I remember there was some talk 20-25 years ago of at least making the oil companies fill in the canals that were no longer in use. That didn't go anywhere, but we did start hearing that hurricanes caused as much wetlands destruction as offshore activity. If I remember correctly, that Sixty Minutes story that used subsidence and erosion interchangeably mentioned hurricanes but didn't mention offshore O&G activity.
I remember there was some talk 20-25 years ago of at least making the oil companies fill in the canals that were no longer in use. That didn't go anywhere, but we did start hearing that hurricanes caused as much wetlands destruction as offshore activity. If I remember correctly, that Sixty Minutes story that used subsidence and erosion interchangeably mentioned hurricanes but didn't mention offshore O&G activity.
For over thirty years we have been warning the Nation about the LA Coast. At conferences that I have been at concerning say, Nuke Plant issues, on the side I always talked about the destruction of my home shores.
The message I gave at Kim's that night, and almost every night since the Flood has never changed during all of those years. I just misjudged the rapidity of the destruction. I was seeing something like 2070 for total damage to occur.
Yes, this is mainly on the oil & gas companies, but never discount the effect the shipping industry has had on our wetlands. They "require" wide waterways. (And that means lots of salt water.)
Maybe some of us could pool resources and produce our own PowerPoint or video of the erosion process in action. It's little folks demonstrating what's happening to our place in this world. I can set things up for the visuals, even re/create little rivers and make it even more real.
Then, we launch a Class-Action suit against the Oil $ Gas companies for the destruction of our land.
The message I gave at Kim's that night, and almost every night since the Flood has never changed during all of those years. I just misjudged the rapidity of the destruction. I was seeing something like 2070 for total damage to occur.
Yes, this is mainly on the oil & gas companies, but never discount the effect the shipping industry has had on our wetlands. They "require" wide waterways. (And that means lots of salt water.)
Maybe some of us could pool resources and produce our own PowerPoint or video of the erosion process in action. It's little folks demonstrating what's happening to our place in this world. I can set things up for the visuals, even re/create little rivers and make it even more real.
Then, we launch a Class-Action suit against the Oil $ Gas companies for the destruction of our land.
# posted by : 3:40 PM
: 3:40 PM
From The Times-Picayune:
http://www.nola.com/archives/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/114197635774230.xml&coll=1
The river wild
Rebuilding our coastal wetlands the old-fashioned way
Friday, March 10, 2006
Bob Marshall
Five years ago, after 25 years of chronicling the loss of our coastal wetlands, I stopped believing a cure was on the way. I became a realist. As a hunter and angler who spends a lot of time on the marsh side of the levees, I could no longer deny what my eyes were telling me: If we hadn't already lost the battle, surrender was only a matter of time.
So when readers and media colleagues continued to hammer me with the question "When will people wake up to what's happening?" my standard reply became this: "When a hurricane puts five feet of water on Canal Street."
Sadly, Katrina proved me wrong. We still live in a state of denial.
I say that because six months after Katrina wrecked our city and killed more than 1,100 of our neighbors, the nation and state still don't get it. Our leaders talk incessantly about levees (bigger, stronger, longer, costlier), and occasionally about wetlands. The implication is that if we build higher mud walls, then add the collection of coastal restoration projects the state has been pushing for 20 years, we can survive here.
That might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today. The loss of coastal wetlands is too severe.
What many coastal scientists know, but are afraid to say publicly, is that we are almost out of options. The Gulf has moved so much closer to our back doors that there now remains only one real hope for a long-term future on the delta of the Mississippi River: Let the river go.
The federal government must claim eminent domain on everything south of U.S. 90, then begin managing it as an ecosystem with one priority: Rebuilding land faster than it's being lost to the Gulf.
This can only be done by opening large sections of the levees. River-borne sediments could then begin reconstructing the 1,900 square miles of wetlands that provided us some safety from the Gulf and its storms.
We can protect critical communities with ring levees, and connect them with causeways that allow land-building fresh water and silt to flow into the marsh. But all other considerations -- property rights, mineral rights, fishing rights, industrial facilities -- must take a distant second seat to the first priority.
That isn't to say we don't need better levees now, as well as pumping stations at the lakefront and floodgates at the passes to block surge from entering the lake. All of that should be done without delay.
But without rebuilding the miles of marsh and swamp that once stretched between New Orleans and Grand Isle, there isn't a levee high enough to prevent the Gulf from consuming us by the end of this century.
What about the state's plans for freshwater diversions and stabilizing barrier islands?
Had we started in the 1970s, they might have worked. But now it's too little, too late. None of these plans claims to put a stop to coastal land loss; they simply hope to slow the process down.
The problem with this approach is that the rate of land loss -- currently running about 25 square miles per year -- is about to accelerate rapidly. Two years ago, research showed our deltas are sinking under their own weight faster than previously thought; we may drop between 2.5 feet and 4 feet by the end of the century. Last year the world's top climatologists agreed that global warming was real and could add several inches of sea level rise over the next hundred years. And last week researchers reported in the journal Science that the Antarctic ice sheets were melting much faster than previously thought and will further raise sea levels.
If you live in coastal communities already below sea level and protected by levees on a sinking delta, none of that is good news. And when measured against these enormous forces, our feeble coastal "restoration" projects are less than sad, they are almost criminal -- because they continue the culture of denial.
Perhaps the most graphic example is the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion project. When it opened a few years ago wetland proponents touted its ability to build as much as two square miles of marsh a year in the battered Barataria Basin. What they didn't talk about was that the basin is losing 11 square miles per year. Do the math.
None of this is news to the scientists trying to address our problems. Privately, many agree we have entered a period of dire emergency. Publicly they can't speak against their agencies' projects. Nor can they afford to be considered defeatist.
But as Tulane law professor Oliver Houck argues so forcefully in a recent Tulane Environmental Law Review essay, the time for this type of honest public discussion is long overdue. Wetlands, Houck states, are horizontal levees, the kind of levees that are the real key to our survival on this delta. And there's only one way to rebuild them fast enough to save us.
If we don't have that discussion soon, five feet of water on Canal Street eventually will be remembered as a dry spell.
. . . . . . .
Bob Marshall is outdoors editor. He can be reached at rmarshall@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3539.
Post a Comment
http://www.nola.com/archives/t-p/index.ssf?/base/news-0/114197635774230.xml&coll=1
The river wild
Rebuilding our coastal wetlands the old-fashioned way
Friday, March 10, 2006
Bob Marshall
Five years ago, after 25 years of chronicling the loss of our coastal wetlands, I stopped believing a cure was on the way. I became a realist. As a hunter and angler who spends a lot of time on the marsh side of the levees, I could no longer deny what my eyes were telling me: If we hadn't already lost the battle, surrender was only a matter of time.
So when readers and media colleagues continued to hammer me with the question "When will people wake up to what's happening?" my standard reply became this: "When a hurricane puts five feet of water on Canal Street."
Sadly, Katrina proved me wrong. We still live in a state of denial.
I say that because six months after Katrina wrecked our city and killed more than 1,100 of our neighbors, the nation and state still don't get it. Our leaders talk incessantly about levees (bigger, stronger, longer, costlier), and occasionally about wetlands. The implication is that if we build higher mud walls, then add the collection of coastal restoration projects the state has been pushing for 20 years, we can survive here.
That might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today. The loss of coastal wetlands is too severe.
What many coastal scientists know, but are afraid to say publicly, is that we are almost out of options. The Gulf has moved so much closer to our back doors that there now remains only one real hope for a long-term future on the delta of the Mississippi River: Let the river go.
The federal government must claim eminent domain on everything south of U.S. 90, then begin managing it as an ecosystem with one priority: Rebuilding land faster than it's being lost to the Gulf.
This can only be done by opening large sections of the levees. River-borne sediments could then begin reconstructing the 1,900 square miles of wetlands that provided us some safety from the Gulf and its storms.
We can protect critical communities with ring levees, and connect them with causeways that allow land-building fresh water and silt to flow into the marsh. But all other considerations -- property rights, mineral rights, fishing rights, industrial facilities -- must take a distant second seat to the first priority.
That isn't to say we don't need better levees now, as well as pumping stations at the lakefront and floodgates at the passes to block surge from entering the lake. All of that should be done without delay.
But without rebuilding the miles of marsh and swamp that once stretched between New Orleans and Grand Isle, there isn't a levee high enough to prevent the Gulf from consuming us by the end of this century.
What about the state's plans for freshwater diversions and stabilizing barrier islands?
Had we started in the 1970s, they might have worked. But now it's too little, too late. None of these plans claims to put a stop to coastal land loss; they simply hope to slow the process down.
The problem with this approach is that the rate of land loss -- currently running about 25 square miles per year -- is about to accelerate rapidly. Two years ago, research showed our deltas are sinking under their own weight faster than previously thought; we may drop between 2.5 feet and 4 feet by the end of the century. Last year the world's top climatologists agreed that global warming was real and could add several inches of sea level rise over the next hundred years. And last week researchers reported in the journal Science that the Antarctic ice sheets were melting much faster than previously thought and will further raise sea levels.
If you live in coastal communities already below sea level and protected by levees on a sinking delta, none of that is good news. And when measured against these enormous forces, our feeble coastal "restoration" projects are less than sad, they are almost criminal -- because they continue the culture of denial.
Perhaps the most graphic example is the Davis Pond Freshwater Diversion project. When it opened a few years ago wetland proponents touted its ability to build as much as two square miles of marsh a year in the battered Barataria Basin. What they didn't talk about was that the basin is losing 11 square miles per year. Do the math.
None of this is news to the scientists trying to address our problems. Privately, many agree we have entered a period of dire emergency. Publicly they can't speak against their agencies' projects. Nor can they afford to be considered defeatist.
But as Tulane law professor Oliver Houck argues so forcefully in a recent Tulane Environmental Law Review essay, the time for this type of honest public discussion is long overdue. Wetlands, Houck states, are horizontal levees, the kind of levees that are the real key to our survival on this delta. And there's only one way to rebuild them fast enough to save us.
If we don't have that discussion soon, five feet of water on Canal Street eventually will be remembered as a dry spell.
. . . . . . .
Bob Marshall is outdoors editor. He can be reached at rmarshall@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3539.
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