Global Warming Makes Saving Louisiana's Wetlands Hard By Glynn Wilson AVERY ISLAND, La., Jan. 2, 2004 — Out past the Vegas Style Truck Plaza and Casino and the Popeye's fried chicken on Highway 90, on past the sweet-smelling fall fires in the sugar cane fields of Iberia Parish, the homeland of Tabasco pepper sauce sits in the cypress woods on a precarious island surrounded by canals. In the long run of geologic time, maybe sooner than the largely Cajun population suspects, Avery Island may be destined to disappear in the rising waters of the Gulf of Mexico along with dozens of islands and the surrounding swamps. "We're losing so much of our wetlands every year to erosion, we're not going to be here if we keep losing it," says Linda Clause, a native Cajun and manager of the Tabasco Country Store. "It's a severe problem." Global warming, and along with it drastic changes in the planet's climate, more violent storms, rising sea levels -- and the Mississippi River's tendency to find the shortest route to the Gulf -- make staying here a matter of living on borrowed space and time. The interest on that borrowing for the rest of the nation is enormously expensive and about to get more costly no matter which way the fiscal winds blow in the nation's capital. So the folks at Tabasco recently joined the campaign to save the wetlands with an advertisement on 3 million boxes of one of America's most recognized name brands. "I'm just proud my company has taken an active interest in this," Ms. Clause said. "Hopefully, something can be done. If we get a big hurricane, or another flood, whoo-ey, I don't want to think aboudit." Even the most conservative local politicians are teaming up with environmentalists in the attempt to educate the public, mainly certain federal workers and officials in Washington, D.C., about the plight of Louisiana's wetlands, why the fight is important to the nation. The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana is lobbying for $8 billion to $12 billion from U.S. taxpayers over the next few years to stop the Gulf's advance. It would be a public works project on a scale of the Everglades restoration in Florida. If something is not done now, they argue, by the year 2050 Louisiana as it is known today will not likely exist. Much of it will be under water. Studies indicated wetlands are disappearing at a rate of about 25 to 30 square miles a year. As a result, the Gulf itself laps closer to the port cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, threatening the public and the economy. Since 1930, a landmass the size of Maryland sank into the Gulf. One solution is to divert fresh water from the river into the marshes to build wetlands, and to rebuild the land in other ways. If the money is not approved by Congress soon, they say, it will cost more like $100 billion to rebuild and relocate the infrastructure that supports the seafood business, the oil and gas industry and other shipping. About 25 percent of all the nation's commercial seafood and 40 percent of the country's recreational fish are caught in the Gulf of Mexico, much of it spawned in Louisiana's wetlands. The value of the commercial fishery alone is estimated at $900 million a year, while the seafood industry in the Northeast is on the verge of collapse. Offshore operations in the Gulf produce a quarter of the U.S. domestic natural gas and one-eighth of its oil, providing jobs for about 55,000 workers. The main road for all this seafood, oil and gas is Louisiana Highway 1. It routinely floods now during minor storms and weak hurricanes. Experts say a major flood or a direct hit from a powerful hurricane would render the highway useless, and flood the city of New Orleans, potentially trapping and killing 25,000 to 100,000 people. Controlling Nature Much has been written about the Corps of Engineers' attempts to control nature, including how the agency nearly failed during the flood of 1972 to prevent the "Mighty Mississippi" from breaking free of the Old River control structure north of Baton Rouge, and taking a shorter route to the Gulf down the Atchafalaya River. If the river took its natural course, the new location for a major port would most likely end up in Morgan City. Places like the French Quarter would become relics of the past, perhaps a tourist attraction for scuba divers. The corps is still in many ways the gung-ho agency Pres. Thomas Jefferson created in 1802, agents admit, although they say it is a wiser and more humble agency that now employs an army of biologists as well as engineers. Over a Cajun buffet lunch in St. Charles Parish, after a fall morning airboat ride to survey the levees around the Davis Pond fresh water diversion -- the latest corps pride and joy -- project manager Jack Fredine talked about the corps' continuing role in controlling one of the world's great rivers. "We've got a good grip on the river," Mr. Fredine said. "It's not going to get away from us, barring a new mad route situation where everything goes nuts on you." One of the first tasks of the corps in the early 1800s was to tame the river for commerce by keeping it navigable and preventing floods on the site where Jean Baptiste Lemoyne and Sieur de Bienville first established New Orleans in 1718. Visitors today may marvel at why anyone would build a port city in a swamp mostly below sea level, but the explanation is quite simple. On their way up river, French explorers first encountered dry land where the French Quarter sits today. It was a good place to dock a boat and already had trading posts for trappers dealing with local Native American tribes. The first settlers did not possess the wealth of information we have today about the area's geography. They had no inkling of the river's natural tendency to migrate west and "spray around" in south Louisiana, says Sue Hawes, a marsh biologist and 32-year veteran of the corps. While watching the egrets feed on the levee walls overlooking Davis Pond, she marveled with awe and pride at the 6,000 cubic feet per second flow of fresh water into the marshes of the Barataria Bay estuary. It took decades to plan, fund and build. The corps takes the position that the best way to save wetlands is to divert massive amounts of fresh water from various locations along the river into the marshes, although other agencies have different ideas. "It will build land," Ms. Hawes said. "But sometimes you think you know how to control nature and you find out you don't." Davis Pond is a prime example. For $107 million, the agency built four iron-gated box culverts into the levee north of New Orleans, creating a channel 535-feet long and 85-feet wide. It directs river water into the marshes, building land from the sediment and forcing back encroaching salt water, which kills marsh plants and contributes to land loss. The problem is the design included a channel for water to drain back into the river when rising too high. Evidence shows the marshes rose 2.3 feet since David Pond opened. That would be great evidence of land building, except for one thing. The water is trapped under floating marshes and cannot drain back into the river. So the corps is cutting additional outflow channels, costing millions of dollars more. A chunk of the money went for building levees to protect the new Willow Ridge subdivision, another problem. The developer was fined $620,000 for not obtaining the proper permits to fill wetlands and a canal to build hundreds of homes in the wetlands. Activists say this is a perfect example of how local governments, developers and residents are not doing their part to save wetlands, a major sticking point in the negotiations for money in Washington. Almost everyone here agrees spending the money is worth it, since the economy and the environment depends on it. Although if the problem of global warming is not addressed, some activists and scientists say, all the money requested to rebuild Louisiana's wetlands may not save them in the end. "Global warming is raising sea levels and making hurricanes more severe, which threatens the wetlands and the city of New Orleans," said Daniel Becker, an expert on global warming and energy for the Sierra Club. "The Bush administration's failure to combat global warming makes it even more difficult." But the inevitability of nature's advance will not prevent the fight. "We cannot keep losing this battle as much as we have," Ms. Hawes said. "We're never going to really know enough to control nature, but we have no choice but to fight it." Glynn Wilson is a free-lance journalist. An edited version of this story first appeared in the Dallas Morning News, Jan. 2, 2004.
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