Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Disappearing Louisiana

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has a scary series of articles this week about the rapid loss of wetlands in south Louisiana. According to the wetlands experts interviewed for the articles, it is possible to reverse the devastation of the past 75 years, but it will take time. If nothing is done, the open Gulf of Mexico will be right up against the levees on the southern end of the New Orleans metro area by the year 2020.

BTW, nobody mentions global warming as having anything to do with this problem. I thought I'd mention that in light of the announcement at the Oscars about how Hurricane Katrina brought home the need to do something about global warming. Not that global warming isn't problematic in its own right; it just has nothing to do with our vulnerability to storms.

2 comments:

Ann said...

Flipped me out. We've got less than 15 years. And NO political will to fix it.

Randy said...

That was the most disturbing thing for me too. The engineering isn't such a big deal, but the politicians, landowners, and other interests don't want to mess with their arrangements. Not even basic self-preservation seems to matter to TPTB.