Can We Save New Orleans? - Tulane Environmental Law Journal

Tulane Environmental Law Journal
Volume 19
Spring 2006
Issue 1
By Oliver Houck*
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D. Can We Save New Orleans?

* Professor of Law, Tulane University. The research assistance of Todd Campbell, Rina Eisenberg, Machelle Lee, and Elizabeth Nagelin is acknowledged with gratitude, as are the comments and criticisms of my colleagues in other disciplines, several of whom are cited herein.

[A]ny calm person who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three quarters long, and Cairo [Illinois] and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding along comfortably under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. —Mark Twain, 1883¹

I. FANTASY ISLAND

On Sunday, November 20, 2005, the television program “60 Minutes” aired a piece on New Orleans in which a geology professor from St. Louis predicted the unthinkable: that at current rates of subsidence and land loss, the city had about 80 years to live.² It would at that point be about 15 feet below sea level, and protected by gigantic levees 50 feet tall, and more. Hurricane force rains could even alter the course of the Mississippi River.³ It was time to think about a gradual retreat.

Unhappy timing. The city and state were having difficulty (much of it of their own making) persuading Congress to spend heroic sums of money to save them, and the message could not have been more unkind. The governor’s office quickly denounced the program for not airing a brighter side.⁴ The Times-Picayune conducted overnight interviews with Louisiana coastal scientists who, variously, attacked the geology professor’s credentials and his conclusions.⁵ He wasn’t from here. Nor had he done any serious research here. The rates of coastal subsidence were lessening. He had overlooked “lots of things” between New Orleans and the Gulf which “were not going to go away.” He hadn’t factored in the successes and potential for coastal restoration.

Fair enough (although the lots of things that protect New Orleans from the Gulf and that are not going to go away remain a little opaque). But one of the scientists interviewed, Joe Suhayda, went on to make a recommendation that he had made on public television NOVA less than a year before: the city itself should harbor a super-levee inside, to protect its most vital parts—the inner keep of the castle.⁶ The recommendation was not exactly a vote of confidence (who, among other things, would get to come inside the keep?). Suhayda was hedging his bets. So were others whom “60 Minutes” had apparently interviewed to vet the piece.

Sensing, accurately, that the urgency of the moment was federal funding rather than nuanced analysis, the Times-Picayune followed its reporting with a lead editorial entitled “Fantasy Island,” taking “60 Minutes” head on.⁷ Its “logic was absent,” the editorial concluded, more in line with pop television than “sound science.”⁸ As a matter of politics, the paper was correct: if this thesis got traction it could doom the expenditures necessary to save New Orleans and the Louisiana coast.

On the other hand, for the City That Care Forgot to call anything “fantasy” is a bit bold, and everything about the run-up to the Katrina disaster had fantasy written all over it: on slab development, on fill development, subdivisions in wetlands (protected by wooden fences), condos on beaches (protected by nothing), canals as senseless as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), oil and gas channels by the thousands, coastal mitigation programs that failed to work (failed even to materialize), disappearing levee money, tinker-toy levee plans, what-thehell levee construction, drive-by-and-when’s-lunch levee inspections— and we haven’t even gotten to FEMA yet. Detailed reporting in local papers, science colloquiums, National Geographic, NOVA, and government planning sessions predicting this very storm in this very way with these very results were tossed away like so many Mardi Gras beads. So there is plenty of fantasy to go around.

Here is what we also know. New Orleans is an island. I have a map in my office captioned “New Orleans and Vicinity” prepared from Landsat satellite data taken in 1992 (we can wind the clock back on land loss by 13 years) from an altitude of 400 miles.⁹ It shows the city in white, compact, not that big, bleached out by roads and buildings. On two sides are the river and the lake. To the north and south are ribbons of dry land along the Mississippi. Everything else is green and blue wetland and open water. It is a beautiful photo. It is not exactly an advertisement, however, for investment in real estate.

We know a couple of things more, going in. For openers, we are short on land building materials. We live on a sinking delta, and the silts and plant mass that created it and offset its natural rate of subsidence are down to a fraction of their volumes a century ago.¹⁰ We have a lot less to work with than Mother Nature did. Even within the city, we are sinking. Post-Katrina surveys are finding many buildings about half a foot lower than they were thought to be, and down by two feet in the East.¹¹ Which is not good.

We also know that we are terribly late to the restoration game, about 1,900 square miles late,¹² what is left is largely sick, and what we’ve managed to recoup over the past few years couldn’t stand up to the latest storms. The newly restored marshes of the $80 million Canaervon diversion project ended up on rooftops in St Bernard.¹³

We know, worse news, that hurricanes are coming more frequently now and with greater anger, that our levees are subpar, and—although it still seems to escape the grasp of the President and the Louisiana congressional delegation in Washington, D.C.—that the seas are rising and that global warming will raise them by more than a foot within the lifetimes of our children.

Lastly we know that, in their short history, some of America’s great cities have taken tremendous hits—the Chicago fire, the San Francisco earthquake—and recovered. But others, particularly ones on the wrong lip of floods, cities as celebrated and full of promise in their day as Galveston and New Madrid, did not make it back. Then again, there is the case of the Netherlands. Then again, there is the case of Humpty Dumpty. The challenge of South Louisiana is to move away from one model towards the other. But not, as we will see, all the way.

I have invested my life in New Orleans. I started working down here in 1971, raised two boys here, came back after Katrina as soon as the lights came on and could not bear the thought of leaving. I hope “60 Minutes” was wrong, and I have spent a lot of time with others trying to stave off exactly what it predicted will happen. But I am not ready to kill the messenger. The professor may have gotten his data points wrong, jumped to conclusions and been seduced by a few minutes of fame, but his question hangs in the air like the smell of mold and bad refrigerators. We’re going to have to deal with it on the merits.

II. REALITY ISLAND

A. Prologue: The Pelican Bill

It is Tuesday afternoon and we don’t know a thing. The storm has blown through, some trees are down, poles, wires, pieces of roof. The only station we can get on the radio is a call-in and they begin Oh Jerry I’ve Always Loved Your Show and then they say something about water coming up to the front steps. I go stand outside. A couple comes down the street with plastic bags in both hands, full of clothes, picking their way over the branches. I say, just making conversation, where’s the water? He says, its about four blocks up. Then she says, and there’s a body in it, shot through the head. Then he says, and they ain’t coming to pick him up. Then I say to Lisa, ok, you win, I think we’d better go.

Here is a very Louisiana story. It’s just that most of it took place in Washington, D.C. In September 2005, the body count from hurricanes Katrina and Rita not yet in, the cream of Louisiana’s lobbyists began confecting an astonishing piece of legislation.¹⁴ They were all interconnected, and they were coordinated by the staffs of Louisiana’s two sitting senators (somewhat independently; the two senators don’t get along very well). What they all knew was that Louisiana was a hot issue, it had overwhelming national sympathy, and they would get one good shot on Capitol Hill.

They formed working groups composed entirely of lobbyists: former Louisiana senators and representatives, former legislative aides, and the wives of former aides, some put on industry payrolls only days before. They included lobbyists for timber companies, Entergy, Cleco, leading corporate law firms in New Orleans, and business coalitions behind a half-dozen highway projects across the state. Above all, they included lobbyists for an aggressive set of water projects, several of which had been red-lined by the Bush Administration as economic losers, including the $748 million Industrial Canal Lock.¹⁵ In their ranks were some of the most generous donors to both of Louisiana’s current senators (Vitter slightly ahead). They saw their chance and they took it.

What emerged was something called the Louisiana Katrina Reconstruction Act, aka the Pelican Bill.¹⁶ The pelicans should sue. There was not much in there for pelicans. But there were billions of dollars in there for timber companies, energy companies, highways to everywhere, and a cornucopia of canals from Calcasieu to Port Fourchon, including the Industrial Canal Lock.¹⁷ Also tucked in there were $25 million for a sugarcane research lab, $35 million for the Louisiana Seafood Marketing Board, and $25 million for dairy cattle.¹⁸ The totals were impressive, a quarter of a trillion (this is not a typo) dollars in one swoop.¹⁹ The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ $40 billion for flood control was ten times the Corps’ annual budget for the entire country.²⁰ It was a Christmas list, much of which had absolutely nothing to do with flood control or attending to the victims of the storms.

It got better. The bill also created a new entity to advance the fortunes of these projects unlike anything on the American scene. A nine-member board, six of whom would be Louisianans (imagine their selection; the levee boards come to mind), would decide what to approve and fund.²¹ Cost-benefit requirements were waived. Public information and sunshine laws were waived. Environmental impact assessment and clean water laws were waived, by name. School was out; this was as good as it gets.

Scrambling for a little credibility, the lobbies recruited LSU professor Ivor van Heerdin, formerly head of the Governor’s Office of Coastal Affairs, and the author John Barry, whose history, Rising Tide, took the Corps to the woodshed for its blinders-on management of the Mississippi River. According to Van Heerdin, he was shut out of the process early on, after objecting to the warmed-up-old-beans nature of the projects.²² Barry’s insistence that the planning include the National Academy of Sciences was dropped as well.²³ No need to muck up this party with outsiders.

Within days, the wheels came off. “Louisiana’s Looters” read the lead editorial of the Washington Post, which went on to liken our congressional delegation to thieves who “seize six televisions when their homes have room for only two.”²⁴ Other media chimed in. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich authored an opinion piece in the Washington Times entitled “Pork, Pelicans and Louisiana,” and subtitled “Landrieu’s Bill is a Category 5” (somehow the Republican participation in drafting it dropped out).²⁵ The Governor of Mississippi subsequently complained that, but for the evident overreaching of this bill, his state needs would have received a more welcome reception in Washington.²⁶ Everyone saw it as another Louisiana hayride. Bushels of goodwill went down the drain.

The Pelican Bill is history. Within days Senator Vitter was saying that he never intended it to pass as written, and Senator Landrieu was insisting that she never intended to waive public and environmental laws.²⁷ It is hard to blame them; they were relatively new hands as seniority goes in the upper chamber, and they were surrounded by an old guard of mentors with a tried and true game plan. To the current delegation this collection of their predecessors, former Corps officials and industry lobbyists was real expertise, and free. For their part, the lobbyists had doubtless convinced themselves that their clients’ projects were just what was needed to save Louisiana. One of them subsequently told the L.A. Times that they were “not intending to stuff pork in a barrel”; instead, they were “looking for creative outside-the-box ideas.”²⁸ Kind of a funny way to go looking for them, though.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the whole episode is that it was not unusual, just a little exaggerated. It is the name of the game, and in particular the water resources development game, and that is a problem. The game is not about flood control.

B. Flood Control: The Bridesmaid

At about 5 on Tuesday morning we get a call from our younger boy. The phone still works. He is out in California glued to the television. We know absolutely nothing. He says, get out, the levee has broken. I say, Gabe, calm down. I say, when the Corps builds levees they don’t fall down.

You would think that flood control and the protection of the City of New Orleans would be job one for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And you would be wrong. It isn’t, and it never was.

The Corps grew out of the need to float flatboats and steamboats down the shoaling, snag-filled stretches of the lower Mississippi River and its bayous back in the early 1800s.²⁹ Mark Twain’s descriptions in Life on the Mississippi make pretty harrowing reading. The Army’s field engineers were the only government entity around with the ability to blow things up and move dirt around, and so this became their job, to maintain navigation on the navigable waters of the United States.³⁰ Navigation was interstate commerce, the means of interstate commerce, and it made money for people. Flood control, by contrast, was seen as a form of land use, a local affair, cemented in place when the federal government ceded lands to local levee boards in the 1850s, in part to persuade them to stay loyal to the Union.³¹ That part didn’t work so well, but it set a mold for local levee boards that we have yet to change. It also further cemented the mindset that navigation comes first.

Case in point: In 1999 Congress appropriated money for a $12 million study to determine how much it would cost to protect New Orleans from a Category 5 hurricane. When Katrina came in 2005, the study had not yet been launched.³² Old habits die hard.

Old habits did, however, facilitate a colossal amount of navigation. The coastal zone was turned into a navigation complex that only begins with major port facilities on the Mississippi at New Orleans and Baton Rouge.³³ No fewer than 18 other deepwater ports and port commissions are sprinkled up and down the River and across to New Iberia, Houma, Abbeville, Morgan City, Mermentau and Lake Charles. The names of the yet smaller ports make Cajun music—Petit Anse, Tigre, Lacarpe, Dulac, Grand Caillou, Segnette—and yet additional facilities serve the Atchafalaya, Pearl and Vermilion Rivers, Pass Manchac, and the Franklin Canal.

Take home: it’s all ports and canals out there, each one rivaling the other for traffic and money to expand. The Mississippi River delta below the City of New Orleans alone is cut by more than a dozen commercial waterways averaging at least 8 feet deep (some up to 20 feet), about 100 feet wide (some up to 300 feet), and totaling more than 300 miles. Nobody ever really thought about what, in the aggregate, they were doing to the future of the delta, and the future of New Orleans. In terms of floating boats, however, what we had done to the Louisiana coastal zone was an unblemished success.

Meanwhile, rising flood losses along the lower Mississippi River in the late 1800s prompted repeated calls for federal intervention. In 1879, Congress relented,³⁴ creating the Mississippi River Commission to “prevent destructive floods,” through the Army Corp of Engineers. From the outset, and with dogged determination, the Commission’s approach to the River was to put it in a box, the “hold by levees” system.³⁵ Building ever bigger and longer levees, the Commission stiff-armed an alternative, “outlets,” approach that would let floodwaters escape through natural distributaries and floodways.³⁶ When the legendary civil engineer, James B. Eads, won his famous bet with the Corps and proved that levees at the mouth of the River would help maintain its channel and reduce the need for dredging,³⁷ the levees-only strategy seemed confirmed.³⁸ The Corps would keep the River in its box. A memory worth holding onto.

The floods, however, continued. So in 1917, Congress detailed the Corps to build the ultimate levee system along the lower Mississippi, protecting the river parishes and the Crescent City.³⁹ Ten years later, the Corps reported back with confidence: mission accomplished. That following spring 1927, the River jumped its box and wreaked the greatest disaster on Louisiana until Katrina, hundreds of lives lost, entire parishes of land and property.⁴⁰ In response, and once again, the battle raged between bigger levees and the use of natural floodways, only this time the outlets won their due and have proven their effectiveness since, many times.⁴¹ We use the Bonnet Carre Spillway about every four or five years to take the immediate pressure off of New Orleans at high-water time. We have used the larger Atchafalaya floodway once, back in 1973, when river stages were even more threatening, and it did what it was supposed to do. Ceding nature its space worked.

But the 1973 flood surfaced another unhappy fact. We had given nature its space, but we were now taking it away. The Atchafalaya floodway remained privately owned and people were beginning to settle in with towns, schools, churches, the whole nine yards.⁴² As the Mississippi waters raged down on Louisiana in the spring of ‘73, dangerously high and still rising, the Corps faced the unenviable choice of whether to open up the full floodway and drown these towns—shades of Plaquemines and St. Barnard—or to open only a part of the floodway below them and hope for the best.⁴³ The Corps opened part, hoped, and lucked out. At which point, blinders-on, the Corps marched forward with a channel project that would dry up the floodway and invite wall-to-wall development along the entire length of the Lower Atchafalaya from guide levee to guide levee, fifteen miles wide and sixty miles long.⁴⁴ I remember a New Orleans District official telling me at the time, stars in his eyes, “Oliver, this is going to be another Ruhr Valley!”⁴⁵ I said I couldn’t wait for him to pull the plug on all that new investment the next time the Mississippi rose.

The idea of drying up the Atchafalaya basin kicked up a hornet’s nest of opposition from fishing clubs and hunting groups, but those kinds of hornets rarely deflect the Army Corps of Engineers. What changed the Atchafalaya project, and it changed massively, was the realization by a series of New Orleans district engineers, over the protests of their theway- we’ve-always-done-it civilian staff, that the increasing habitation of the flood zone ran exactly contrary to the idea of using it for a floodway, on which they were spending over a billion dollars.⁴⁶ The answer, they came to realize, was not to dig deeper ditches and build higher levees. It was, rather, and far more simply, to let the natural flooding happen and that flooding, along with easements, would keep human development at bay. Not all development: landowners still harvest timber, lease oil and rent camps in the Atchafalaya, quite profitably, to this day.⁴⁷ It is a very successful multiple use flood zone. Minus roads and towns. That’s also a thought worth holding onto.

Meanwhile, along the lower Mississippi River, the Corps of Engineers had little problem coupling flood control with its main navigation game. The same levees that kept the river flowing fast and deep protected the surrounding landscape. It would be decades before we realized what those same levees and navigation canals were doing to that same landscape, and at this point the rates of land loss were soaring and the responses were puny. Meanwhile, the Corps of Engineers water resources development program had morphed into a multiple use mishmash, driven by one of the most unique and unalterable political systems in America. Flood control was about to get more competition.

C. Working To Please Hill Commanders: The Congress Takes Over

We have picked our way down Freret Street and over the bridge and up Route 1 towards Baton Rouge. Curious, some people on the bridge are walking, carrying clothing and sheparding children, back into the city. Why would they be doing that? They were turned back by the Gretna police, but we don’t know a thing. We find a radio station and it is saying that people with boats are being asked to come to the I-10/I-12 split first thing in the morning. We pass some trucks hauling boats coming the other way. Up in Mississippi we begin to hear about the drownings. I think, Jesus Christ, I have a fourteen foot flat boat in the back yard with a 15 hp motor. It stayed there, every day. People died in their attics and my boat stayed in the back yard.

The Flood Control Act of 1936 opened a huge candy store, something like the discovery of gold at Sutters Mill, only this time the miners were in Washington and wearing suits. Ostensibly authorizing the Corps to pursue projects for “flood control and related purposes,”⁴⁸ the other purposes quickly took over and by the 1960s the country was being dammed, drained, pumped, and leveed by hundreds of Corps projects feeding real estate development, energy production, soybean crops and right on down to recreational lakes with wave machines and the McCurtain County Catfish Farm.⁴⁹ The Act’s one caveat, that the benefits of these projects “to whomsoever they may accrue,”⁵⁰ was turned into a weapon of mass destruction, with the Corps discovering benefits so chimeric that they became legend in the fields of government and political science, the object of ridicule in the press that the government should participate in these projects “if the benefits to whomever they may accrue are in excess of the estimated costs,”⁵¹ and recurrent calls for Corps Reform.⁵² Not to worry; the Corps had the ally that mattered, the Congress of the United States.

Early on in the spree, the state of Oklahoma brought a lawsuit challenging a Corps project that would supply electric power to Texas by flooding some 30,000 acres of good Oklahoma farmland.⁵³ Whatever Denison Dam was, Oklahoma argued, it wasn’t about flood control; it was more like theft, covered with a thin veneer of flim-flam. Indeed, the Corps’ own calculations showed the project reducing the flood level at New Orleans by about 1 inch.⁵⁴ That was enough for the Supreme Court, however, which went on to say that the calculation of the costs and benefits of these projects was solely up to Congress.⁵⁵ There would be no judicial review.

The effect of the case was to remove the burglar bars and take the cops off the beat. It produced a new and strange beast in American politics, a federal agency housed within the United States Army that worked directly for the United States Congress. It is described in the literature as an “iron triangle,” composed of your local congressmen, your local Corps, and your local shippers, real estate developers and other beneficiaries who contributed generously to these same congressmen, and received generously in return.⁵⁶ The courts were out of the picture. Even the White House was on the sidelines, as Presidents from Truman to Reagan found out, kibitzing, but not in control.⁵⁷

And so it is that, twice a year in South Louisiana, the Corps hierarchy boards its barge and floats the lower reaches of the Mississippi, attracting suitors with project proposals from every port and stop along the way like some combination of Cleopatra and Santa Claus.⁵⁸ The flood control proposals come in pieces, like everything else. A levee from here to there. A drainage canal. If the drainage means building another levee downstream a few years ahead, all the better; we’ll do that, too. The Corps proposes these projects to Congress, which then authorizes the Corps to build them, creating a cycle of happiness across the region. Happiest of all are those whose names grace some of the most expensive and uneconomical public works monuments in the American south: the Richard B. Russell Dam, the Tom Bevill Lock and Dam, and the J. Bennett Johnston Waterway. The rise of the water project bonanza has had several large consequences for flood control in south Louisiana. Basically, it eclipsed it.

The first consequence is that flood control has no head. Unlike every other federal activity in the country, this one is overseen and directed by the Corps, members of Congress, local levee districts and lobbyists among which are found some of Louisiana’s most illustrious power brokers: Bob Livingston, Bennett Johnston, John Breaux, Jimmy Hayes, just to start the list. Congress determines budgets, and promotion from Colonel to General. For Colonels heading the New Orleans District, it has been a trial by fire that has made and ended careers. It also produces conformity. When project funding for hurricane protection along Lake Pontchartrain dwindled in the 1990s, nobody squawked out loud: a former director of the Corps Waterways Experiment Center in Vicksburg explained to the New York Times, “I don’t think it was culturally in the system for the corps to say ‘this is crazy.’”⁵⁹ Whatever the merits of this diffusion of authority, it does not produce coherent flood control.

All of which works, as long as there are no floods. Then, they become somebody else’s fault. They didn’t fund me. Well, you didn’t ask. So it goes, and so it went after Katrina.

The second impact is that the program is not based on the completion of a few major projects but, rather, on spreading construction money and benefits around as many projects and about-to-be-madehappy constituencies as possible. This is true at the national level, where water resources bills are passed in “omnibus” fashion, meaning that they are approved in one big lump with something inside for everyone’s district.⁶⁰ Those brave or fiscally minded souls who object to a particularly sad entry end up ostracized or worse; one year the leadership announced the “Pinocchio award” for members who stuck their noses into other members’ water resources projects.⁶¹

Case in point: Representative Bob Livingston opens his last session as Chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee wielding a hatchet. We will cut the fat, he announces, waiving the instrument. We will cut down to the bone. Within a few weeks he was asking (read: telling) the Corps to dredge the Pearl River for the budding port of Bogalusa.⁶²

Case in point: the New Orleans District recently, and with some courage, found two dredging projects for ports in New Iberia and Morgan City, unjustifiable. A quick bill by the Louisiana delegation directed the Corps to go out and find new benefits.⁶³

So it is at the Louisiana level as well. Every cycle there is something in there for everyone, your new port, my new waterway, their pumps and drainage upstream. In this mix, New Orleans is just one more open beak among the chicks. It is not in the Corps’ political interest and it is not in the Congress’s political interest to satisfy one beak at the expense of others. The political objective is to spread the food around as widely as possible, and if that takes more time it also keeps more contractors working in more parts of the state. Inviolate Rule of Politics: More happy people is better than fewer happy people. Inevitable Effect of Rule: Short change for hurricane protection for the City of New Orleans.

Case in point: Louisiana has received nearly $2 billion for Corps water projects over the past 5 years.⁶⁴ It has for time immemorial received the lion’s share of water resources funding, with California, Texas, Illinois and Florida distant seconds (around $1.2 billion each over the last 5 years), and no one else even close.⁶⁵ It’s not a question of getting money down here.⁶⁶ It’s where it goes.⁶⁷ In 2002, the Bush Administration rejected a Corps request for $27 million for additional hurricane protection along Lake Pontchartrain, of which the Congress only restored $5.7 million in its appropriations.⁶⁸ Meanwhile, Congress was boosting funding for the $780 million Industrial Canal Lock (the most expensive on record), a $194 million dredging project for the New Iberia, and tens of millions more on canals like the MRGO.⁶⁹

A third consequence of the game is that flood control for developed urban areas comes in last. The sad fact is, it doesn’t make money for anyone. But leveeing off wetlands for new development makes lots of money in real estate (set aside the fact that the homes and streets will subside and begin to flood from spring rains). Floating boats also produces identifiable payouts (albeit they are calculated by asking shippers if they would like to use the canal once it is built, which is a little like using Monopoly money; very few Corps waterways live up to their traffic predictions, and some are ludicrously underused). Even converting cypress swamps to soybeans has a market price. By contrast, lives saved by levees don’t receive economic benefits in the decisions that justify Corps projects and determine their funding priorities.⁷⁰ Nor do they attract powerful lobbyists. The Industrial Canal lobby can afford to put ex-senators, congressmen and entire law firms on its payroll. The City of New Orleans, on the other hand is broke, and one doubts that St. Bernard and Plaquemine even field full-time representatives in Washington. Money talks.

A final and most perverse effect of the water resources game is that it produces projects that not only conflict with flood control for money and fame, but that cause floods as well. Big ones. The role of the MRGO in the Katrina and Rita flooding is by now undeniable.⁷¹ What remains impressive, however, is the tenacity with which the Corps and the Louisiana congressional delegation hung on to this project—indeed, continue to hang onto it⁷²—against the pleas of the St. Bernard Police Jury, the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, and coastal scientists who have been complaining that it had destroyed 20,000 acres of the Parish, was killing much of the lakeshore, and was going to bring major hurricanes right into the city. These claims were never rebutted. They were simply ignored.

What we have here, then, is a game that is not focused on flood control, and never has been. It has been focused on making money first for people with boats and then for as many people as possible, even when that has meant increasing hurricane risks and putting other people right into harm’s way. It has been in denial about its impacts, and remains largely in denial. And it has been accompanied by a similar series of body blows to the coastal zone from another source which is even more powerful and more difficult to turn around: the oil and gas industry.

D. Oil and Gas: Death by a Thousand Blows

We left the cat. Couldn’t find it when we left. Didn’t even think to leave food behind. Just fled. Lisa tells a friend named Charlie in Mississippi that she misses her cat. Then we move on to the north. One night we get a phone call. Ollie, he says, it’s Charlie, we’re going in to get your cat. You’re going in to get arrested and there aren’t any courts, I tell him. They’ll send you to Guantanamo. I got a pass, he says, and an AK-47. True, about the gun anyway; I’d seen it, jumping up turf on his country lawn. Next night we get another call. Ollie, says Charlie, put Lisa on. She takes the phone. I hear a loud meow. Lisa starts crying.

Here is the elephant in the room. It is sitting very quietly. We have an understanding. We don’t make it mad. We’ll get along just fine.

Oil was first discovered down in Plaquemines in 1902, but it took three decades to figure out how to drill in water.⁷³ By the 1940s we had the submersible drilling rigs and barge-mounted draglines were excavating access canals through the wetlands and laying pipelines when a hit was scored. As the big play moved offshore, it was supported by more canals for crew boats, mud barges and equipment.

By the 1970s, Louisiana had over 600 producing oil fields surrounded by a massive network of canals, which, with their associated spoil banks constituted “the dominant geomorphic features” of the landscape.⁷⁴ Drive by them on a coastal road and you see the butt end of one, and then more marsh. Fly over them and they look like a roadmap of northern New Jersey: it’s all canals and open water, bordered by patches of marsh.

The impact of oil and gas extraction on the natural systems of the Louisiana coast is hard to exaggerate.⁷⁵ The initial space of the access canals is relatively minor. It’s what happens next that matters. The canals erode, exacerbated by wave wash from passing boats. In 10 years the widths have doubled; then they double again. While intact, the spoil banks cut off the natural drainage for hundreds of yards around, impounding half of the marsh and drowning the other half. Up the canal comes saltwater from the Gulf. The grasses go belly up, the root masses die, the soils are released, the whole thing falls apart. Recent studies by the United States Geological Survey discover a related phenomenon.⁷⁶ The industry has excavated billions of gallons of brines, salts and minerals from under the wetlands, much of it close to the surface, following which—surprise!—they caved in. Marsh erosion or subsurface extraction: pick your weapon, they both kill.

The sum is daunting. Apart from the major navigation systems across the coastal zone, we have another 8000 miles of canals and pipelines and they are all eroding.⁷⁷ They are all speeding salt water into freshwater systems, which are already on life-support and imploding. It’s hard to find your fishing spots these days out of Hopedale, Delacroix and Yclosky. After Katrina, it’s even hard to find the towns. Every scientific study available places the cumulative impacts of oil and gas activities ahead of even the Mississippi levees as a leading cause of land loss in Louisiana, with responsibility above 50% overall,⁷⁸ and up to 90% in heavily exploited fields.⁷⁹

And here is the mystery: nobody talks about it. It’s like this big secret. Daddy’s got a drinking problem. We walk quietly around him. After all, Daddy is very big. And he is also paying the bills.

It’s a matter of attitude. Years ago I represented the Florida Wildlife Federation, which had problems with some oil drilling permits near the Everglades. Exxon rushed its A team up from Houston to persuade us that there would be no environmental problems. We’re doing everything by the book, they assured us, board access roads, run-off controls, waste disposal. Seeing a little skepticism remaining, they took their best shot: “This is in Florida,” they told us, “and they have strict regulations over there. They’re not . . . Louisiana!”

Louisiana could have required that the canals be backfilled after their time was up, but industry resisted and so we never did.⁸⁰ Louisiana could have required them to spray dredged material over the marsh, rather than piling it on spoil banks, but industry resisted and so we didn’t do that either.⁸¹ Louisiana could have required that the industry access its sites by over-marsh vehicles, which have been available for decades.⁸² No such requirement was even proposed. We could have had our oil and our marshes too. But frankly, my dear, we didn’t give a damn.

Today, we tell Congress that we “sacrificed” ourselves for the national good.⁸³ Never has there been such a willing, complicit sacrifice. We made a bundle of money, wasted most of it, and blackballed anyone who questioned what it was doing to the Louisiana coast.

About 70 years ago, Louisiana made a deal with the oil and gas industry. The industry would get what it wanted; the state would get a piece of the take.⁸⁴ In Plaquemines Parish the industry took nearly everything, save what it paid back to Leander Perez.⁸⁵ The state’s near slavish defense of the industry since that time is a matter of legend; Bennett Johnston was commonly referred to as the Senator from Oil, and his successor was one of three Democratic votes to open the arctic wildlife refuge to oil and gas and to remove the rights of states to decide on drilling off their coasts.⁸⁶ It’s in the genes. As Louisiana moved forward on its coastal restoration plan, it would ask the federal government for massive amounts of money. Part of the rationale, no small part, was to protect the oil and gas industry’s pipelines and infrastructure through the coastal zone. Nowhere, however, did the state ask the industry to pay a penny for the restoration that would save its base.⁸⁷

Over 10,000 miles of canals are now eroding and the marshes are caving in and somebody big is walking away from the table.

E. The Development Game: Easy Money in the Hit Zone

We have moved on to Virginia, near Richmond, the only city in the country unquestionably farther south than New Orleans. We are in a town called Crozet, maybe 300 people with a sidewalk café with a single waiter. We say we’re from the hurricane. He says, did you see the President on television that week? We say we didn’t. Oh my yes, he says, New Orleans style, the President said that he was going to ask everyone to pray for those people in the city and I said right back to him Mr. President those people don’t want you to pray for them, they want you to get them off their fucking roofs!

It starts with another attitude. The next time you drive over the Mississippi River Bridge, take a turn down Route 45 towards Lafitte— which also got clobbered by Katrina and Rita—at the edge of Lake Salvador and Barataria Bay. Properties along 45 rise only a foot or so above water level and quickly slope back into bogs, sloughs and cypress swamps. About two miles above Bayou Lafitte a cluster of live oak trees struggles to survive, its root systems several feet above the ground, which continues to sink beneath them. During Hurricane Juan, a Category 1 that simply hung around for a while, this area was covered by water so deep that television camera crews were shooting down on the roofs of houses and parked cars. Now take a look at the street names of the subdivisions on both sides, “Oak Ridge,” Highland Street,” and (my personal favorite) “Mount Rushmore Drive.” What are these signs telling us?

There is something special about Louisianans when it comes to flood control. We could call it courage. We could call it denial. Or we could call it anything in between and probably all of them and not be wrong. But Louisianans settled a state that flooded regularly from the north and from the south, from rivers and the Gulf, and some of its most gripping stories—Lanterns on the Levee,⁸⁸ Last Island⁸⁹—are scenes of tragedy from high winds and waters that no book or film could fully capture. And yet we built, and built again. For a long while, we tended to build elevated homes, on ridges, and kept the boats handy for what we knew would come. Then we raised levees. When they didn’t work we got the federal government to raise levees and built out back into the swamps and put in pumps. Before long we were building on slab. And still we flooded. We lead the nation in flood losses.⁹⁰ No reason not to. The federal government pays us for it.

One of the federal government’s new loss leaders is the flood insurance program,⁹¹ which is running post-Katrina deficit rivaling welfare.⁹² The program seemed like such a good idea at the time. Its premises were as undeniably true then as they are now; from a report to Congress 40 years ago: The customary sequence of events generally continues to be (1) flooding, (2) flood losses, (3) disaster relief, (4) flood control projects attempting to modify the flood potential through provisions for storing, accelerating, blocking, or diverting flood waters, (5) renewed encroachment and development onto the floodplain and upstream watershed, (6) flooding, (7) flood losses, (8) disaster relief, (9) more projects, (10) more encroachment and development, ad infinitum.⁹³ Has anything changed?

To this extent, yes: Now we provide insurance at (way) below market costs so that everyone can rebuild more easily. The idea was— and it continues to stick like old wrapping tape—that communities would flood-proof themselves in order to get the insurance. Basically that meant building above base flood elevations, purportedly the 1-year frequency flood line, but in reality something of a bargain number whittled down by political compromise. Every foot up costs developers money. Now add the pressure of rebuilding post-Katrina. The City of New Orleans has announced that, with FEMA’s blessing, it will ignore new readings of actual building elevations—down from a few inches to a few feet—in favor of maps dating back to 1929.⁹⁴

If the federal standards for community programs have been weak, actual compliance with them has been weaker, finally provoking a lawsuit by FEMA against several Louisiana parishes for having welched on the promises they made in their ordinances, in order to get the cheap rates.⁹⁵ The courts finally agreed that Louisiana was ripping off the system—in fact we were leading the country in federal payouts—but ruled that the federal government had no recourse short of proving outright and intentional fraud.⁹⁶ Which, once again, took the cops off of the beat.

And so we had a cozy game of build-flood-and-get-paid going until coastal erosion weighed in, and the onset of an awesome and unanticipated season of hurricanes that, apparently, has only just begun. Louisiana towns that used to sit well inland were finding themselves on the front line with the Gulf of Mexico, which has been coming north at about 10 to 30 meters a year.⁹⁷ A 1990 report by the National Academy of Sciences recommended mapping the erosion zones and moving new construction away from them through the flood insurance program.⁹⁸ There were no takers. Five years later, FEMA recommended that the government at least chart the zones. No takers either.⁹⁹ Nor on its almost annual pleas to raise the flood insurance rates to something close to real life. Louisiana knows a good thing when it sees it. The northeast gets its railroad subsidies, the far west gets grazing and timber subsidies; this one is ours.¹⁰⁰

Then the hurricanes came. They have, of course, always come, and when Betsy and Camille came ashore in the late 1960s the nation gasped. These were record storms, record damages, record loss of life, we must do something. What we did was go back on the same beaches and vulnerable strips of coastal wetlands and build the same stuff, only more expensive. There was a lull while it all came together—the casinos, the highrises, a building boom on Grand Isle, ditto Holly Beach, ditto a boomlette that was just starting down in the marshes of St Bernard, ditto all around Lake Pontchartrain—all subsidized by people who don’t enjoy houses on the shore. No longer quaint low-end bungalows. Some very expensive housing for our wealthiest fellow citizens who get below cost flood insurance and income tax deductions for their second home mortgages.¹⁰¹ Another hayride.

Let us remember their names: Opal, Danny, Juan, Georges, Frances, Isadore, Lili, Ivan, Katrina, Rita—and these are only in the Gulf, within the last 10 years.¹⁰² Seven of history’s most damaging hurricanes have come ashore in the last 10 years.¹⁰³ Two years ago, we set a record for hurricane damages. Last year we doubled it.¹⁰⁴ The first year the federal flood insurance payouts topped a billion dollars was 2001.¹⁰⁵ Last year some 50,000 claims hit two billion.¹⁰⁶ This year some 200,000 claims will hit $22 billion easy, maybe up to $30.¹⁰⁷ We’ve broken the bank. But hey, it’s somebody else’s money. And it’s only the beginning of the subsidies we’re paying.

Case in point: A few years ago I did a study of federal benefits to the residents of Grand Isle, which has seen some of the most continuous, expensive, bizarre and fruitless attempts at storm protection of any spot in America.¹⁰⁸ They include: rock jetties (washed away), sand levees (washed away), cement and rock sea walls (washed away), large boulders dropped directly into the sea (washed away), and old automobile tires strung together on steel cables (the cables broke, the tires ended up on the beaches and then the parking lot of the municipal building where they drew massive amounts of mosquitoes and complaints). There was even a plan to run electricity through a chicken wire fence to precipitate out sea salts (the chicken wire rusted and fell apart).¹⁰⁹

Disclaimer: I love Grand Isle, was friends with its legendary Mayor Andy Valence, have birded and wade-fished and hung out at the tarpon rodeo there and cracked beers in the late day light. But here are some numbers, before Katrina and Rita:¹¹⁰

Major storms in last century: 18
Major storms in last ten years 10
Total federal investment $800 million
Investment per residence: $439 thousand
Investment per permanent residence $1.2 million

So, naturally, back into the hurricanes we go.¹¹¹ Who wouldn’t? About half the buildings on Grand Isle were swept away by Katrina and Rita. But “[w]e’re not about to leave,” said one resident, sweeping up the cement pad below his dwelling, nothing left above but the pilings. “If we have another hurricane that does the same thing, we’re not leaving.”¹¹² Mississippi is poised to rebuild a $200 million six-lane bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs, fueling new beachfront development. The casinos are rebuilding in Biloxi, too, about 500 feet in from the beach this time.¹¹³ Not much refuge; Hurricane Katrina wiped out virtually every standing structure inland for half a mile. Gulfport’s mayor enthusiastically told the L.A. Times that he had just gotten off the phone with a condominium investor who was “just very, very excited, very anxious to get going right there on that beachfront—actually in one of the lower elevations.”¹¹⁴ The executive director of the Biloxi chamber of commerce assured the same newspaper that they would be rebuilding businesses right on the beaches, but “they’ll just be built smarter.”¹¹⁵

It is interesting to contemplate exactly what building “smarter” means against a wall of water three stories tall. The federal flood insurance program version of smart is elevations, the bigger the threat the higher you build. But stilts don’t work so well either. One of the more vigorous, if parochial, projects of the Louisiana coastal restoration program has been to construct rock jetties in Cameron Parish. Katrina didn’t affect the town of Cameron with its houses perched safely on piers, but Rita did. From the photos, there is nothing left.¹¹⁶ Not even the roofs and the sidewalls remain. Only a few pilings sticking up in the air. It looks like Ozymandius. And the eyewall of Rita went by 100 miles offshore.

Oh, there is one more fact. Within this century, EPA has predicted relative sea level rise at over 40 inches along the Louisiana coast. It predicts the rise at Grand Isle at 55 inches.¹¹⁷ Part of it is subsidence. Part of it is climate change and rising seas.

F. Global Warming: The Other Elephant

The cat lost all of its hair. Probably hadn’t eaten in two weeks. Charlie and his friends nursed it back to health on warm milk. It ended up sleeping on the family bed, up by the pillows. Got its hair back. Got fat. Walked out into the street one day and got run over by a car.

There is yet another elephant in the room, and the problem with this one is that it is still growing. It is hard to say which is more impressive about the phenomenon of global warming, its particularly harsh consequences for Louisiana or the degree to which it is stonewalled by the Administration and Louisiana’s congressional delegation. Granted, we are an oil and gas state and never did cotton much to new-fangled ideas, but the mindset has gotten absurd. The state with the most to lose in the western hemisphere is out there pumping business as usual and calling climate change fantasy. As the rest of the world knows, though, it is coming and we are indeed bringing it on.

Global temperatures rise and fall over geologic time. As they rise and fall, they produce sea changes in life history, species go extinct, civilizations advance and disappear. There is a normal range of variation. But the current climate is warming at a rate without precedent for the last several hundred thousand years.¹¹⁸

It doesn’t take much. Over the past century, global temperatures rose by only one degree, which doesn’t sound too bad.¹¹⁹ But that’s quick work, geologic time. The last Ice Age was only 7 degrees cooler than today, and that was 18,000 years ago.¹²⁰ Over the next century—and we are thinking here in terms of New Orleans and coastal protection projects that will last perhaps 10 centuries—temperatures could go up from 2.5 to as many as 10 degrees more, depending on location.¹²¹ By all prediction, U.S. temperatures will go up on the high side.¹²²

So what? Here in Louisiana we will be warmer in summer (think, maybe, 103 degrees at Jazz Fest), warmer in winter, and considerably drier (think about sugar, soybeans, rice and other wet-soil crops).¹²³ Without winter freezes we’ll have a lot more insects—mosquitoes, termite and cockroach numbers soared between 1990 and 1995 when there were no killing frosts—and the bayous will be blanketed with algae blooms.¹²⁴ We’re tough. We can handle that. Pass the pesticides.

What will be a little harder to handle is sea level rise. A heated ocean expands, and—according to the most definitive international panel on climate change yet assembled—the oceans rise will rise from a half a foot to three feet, absolute.¹²⁵ That’s before we get to subsidence in places like Louisiana, where the relative rise could go to four feet.¹²⁶ And that’s before adding increasing snowmelt and the run from polar glaciers. For which we add another half a foot.¹²⁷ It’s already happening. Rocky Mountain peaks are going dry. The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have about disappeared. Temperatures around the North Pole are rising so rapidly that a new sea route is opening between the oceans, expected to be clear even for unarmored ships within the next 30 years.¹²⁸ Native Inuit report seeing warm weather birds, beyond anything in the legends of their people.¹²⁹

Four feet is a killer for South Louisiana. On a landscape as flat as the coastal zone, and where building elevations are in the single digits, relative sea rise of only a few inches covers an enormous amount of ground.¹³⁰ Worse for New Orleans, which is buffered by coastal systems, for coastal towns that fish, trap and work their natural resources, and even for the oil and gas industry whose wells and pipelines lie increasingly exposed in open water above sinking bottoms, a few inches of relative sea rise will be enormously hard to match with coastal restoration programs. The game is not static. It's like trying to score touchdowns but they keep moving the goalposts back. Way back. Think about trying to devise a way to rebuild 1,000 square miles of Louisiana wetlands already lost and another 20 to 30 each year, against the relentless pressure of the Gulf of Mexico. Now add this: you will have to build and maintain the whole thing several more feet into the air.

And now we add this. An increasing body of data shows a strong correlation between warmer seas and violent hurricanes.¹³¹ And more frequent ones. It makes sense: warm waters are hurricane food, which is why the season comes at the end of the summer. The doubters have since weighed in with their list of unprovens—which is the way science works, healthy science anyway—and the case is not ironclad.¹³² But there seems to be good evidence that global warming is not only destroying Louisiana’s defenses, it is also fueling what could be, any year, its ultimate storms.

Here is the sad fact. Global warming and sea level rise are no more natural calamities than Katrina and Rita were. They are natural consequences of human actions, short term profits and to-hell-with-therest. They are produced by excessive emissions of carbon, primarily in the industrialized world, primarily from motor vehicles and fossil fuel power plants.¹³³ And these two heavyweights would rather fight than switch. The Administration has weakened the emission requirements for power plants. It refuses to sign a treaty setting targets for greenhouse gas reductions (which Europe is already putting into effect).¹³⁴ When California and other states established more responsive carbon emission and fuel standards on their own, the industry sued them, joined by the United States Department of Justice.¹³⁵ Detroit continues to build cars that burn gas like wildfires. We get fewer miles per gallon today than our parents did. It’s considered progress, freedom, whatever. Any mention of it brings angry denial.

Case in point: “Could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.”¹³⁶ This is not Rush Limbaugh. (Although it might have come from Rush). This is the Chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Case in point: In a press briefing following Katrina, the director of the National Weather Service described the record number of hurricanes that had hit the Gulf this year, and even more record number in very recent years.¹³⁷ It was part of a “multidecade cycle,” explained retired General David Johnson, whose credentials are apparently that he once headed U.S. forces in Bosnia.¹³⁸ He went on, “It was not related to greenhouse warming.”¹³⁹ How would he know? And if he knew differently, and said differently, would he still have his job?

Now we come to the anomaly. Pre-Katrina, Louisiana was asking the federal government to spend $14 billion for coastal restoration. Bigsounding money at the time. Post-Katrina we can add one more zero to that sum. But there is no way even the most ambitious of those plans would offset the relative rate of sea level rise in coastal Louisiana for the next, say, 500 years.

You would think, then, that Louisiana’s representatives would be in the forefront of efforts to reverse the trend. And of course you would be wrong. Senator Landrieu was instead on the floor of the chamber urging her colleagues to open the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas drilling so that our boys would not have to go fight for it in some godforsaken country,¹⁴⁰ despite the fact that the most optimistic prospects up there would supply U.S. demands for less than half a year, would not come on line for a decade, and could be easily offset by upping the MPGs of the American vehicle fleet.¹⁴¹ In November 2003, both Louisiana Senators voted against Senators McCain and Lieberman’s bill that called for a national plan to reduce climate change, and for an increase in fuel efficiency standards.¹⁴² In more than 30 years, I do not believe I have heard a Louisiana politician say the words “energy conservation.” By some gap in the neurons, the fact that reversing climate change will save coastal communities and the oil and gas infrastructure in Louisiana doesn’t seem to reach the head.

As long as these neurons fail to fire, New Orleans and south Louisiana will be running hard towards goal posts that get farther and farther away.

G. Are We Serious Yet?

We say we’re from New Orleans and they won’t charge us for the shirt. I ask directions and the fellow comes out to the street with a map and marks the route on it and then gives us the map. We are walking on the tow path in Washington, D.C. and Lisa has a hat that says New Orleans and we pass a couple, middle-age-plus, and she says are you from New Orleans and I say yes and she says do you need a place to stay? Everywhere we go, it’s the same.

Because we certainly haven’t been serious up to this point at all. Katrina and Rita have to be the most well predicted and publicized disasters in history, and we did next to nothing to stave them off or to prepare for the hits. In August 2005, a couple of weeks before the storms, a Homeland Security brochure came in the mail on hurricane preparedness.¹⁴³ It consisted of a map marking evacuation routes out of town, with major revelations like the existence of I-10 and I-59.

Meanwhile, we continued to treat flood control as the stepchild of navigation projects that were in large part boondoggles, and in full measure drained monies and attention away from the hurricane protection needs of the Crescent City. We treated the whole water resources effort more like a re-election machine than a serious program, run by local interests, lobbyists, congressmen and ex-congressmen who are glued to the status quo. We let the largest party in coastal destruction walk away from the table without paying, while we in turn pay no end of public subsidies for people to build and live in the hurricane hit zone. We turn our back on the pall of jeopardy that global warming and rising seas throw over the future of the region; worse, we advocate against doing anything about it. And that’s just in Washington.

Back home, the scene is little more encouraging. We have a dysfunctional system for building levees, an even more dysfunctional one for maintaining them, aggravated by a Byzantine arrangement of levee boards, port authorities, and other bodies that so fragment the process that it seems primarily directed towards maintaining political alliances and local perks. Post-Katrina down here has been like the Wizard of Oz. When the curtain is finally pulled back, there are a couple of flood control guys in suits and uniforms and they haven’t a clue. If they are not protected by sovereign immunity, they are facing the largest negligence verdict in history.

And dead bodies. As of early December we were still discovering a few. And all of those dead houses. And all of those dead dreams. Including the dream we all have of bringing back New Orleans, writ large. It can be done, but it will require changing things we have yet to dream about changing. To which we now turn.

III. RESURRECTION

Our story begins in the 1960s at two stations, miles (and mindsets) apart. Leaving from one was a project to protect New Orleans and the surrounding parishes from hurricanes, and to maximize the development of the wetlands between the city and open water. The other was a series of projects intended to address the opposite phenomenon, the disappearance of wetlands between New Orleans and open water. On August 28, 2005, amended, failed and weakened versions of both efforts would collide at the city gates and break them in.

A. From Barriers to Levees: Protection on Short Rations

The night before Katrina I get a call from a reporter in public radio. You’re still there, he says. I say yes. He says, will you talk about the storm when it comes? I say ok. Then he says, what is it about hurricanes you don’t get? I have no answer. He says, don’t you believe what you have written about these things? I have no answer to this either. He says, are you still on the line? I say, this is going to be a difficult interview.

Hurricane Betsy brought a rude awakening to New Orleans and the Army Corps of Engineers. For more than a century they had been putting bigger and better locks on the front door, against the high spring floods of the Mississippi River. Now it was plain that the big one would come in the back door, with the capricious, violent, and increasingly frequent hurricanes of late summer and fall. And so, in 1965, Congress authorized the Corps to proceed with a plan to protect the city and the region from the east and south: the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project.¹⁴⁴ It would defend against a Betsy-type storm, winds up to 100 mph, waves at maybe ten feet.¹⁴⁵ It would take about 13 years to complete, with an estimated price tag of $85 million.

The Corps had two basic options, a high-level plan relying on levees fronting Pontchartrain along New Orleans and Jefferson Parish, or a lower set of levees, fronted by barriers 40 miles out at the inlets to Lake Pontchartrain across the Rigolets and the Chef Menteur pass. Initially, the barriers prevailed. They were seen as less costly, quicker to build (higher levees would require more time for the fill to settle), and—what many considered to be the driving factor at the time—they would allow for the drainage and development of wetlands in St. Charles Parish and New Orleans East where, in the Corp’s words, “protection would not be incrementally justified.”¹⁴⁶ Indeed, some 79% of benefits came from protecting new wetland development;¹⁴⁷ protecting New Orleans came in a distant second.¹⁴⁸

Developing the wetlands was in high swing at the time. New Orleans itself had just finished expanding over marshes and swamps to the edge of the lake. (The streets and houses hadn’t started to crack open yet.) President Lyndon Johnson was partner (with his wife and Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison) in a project to develop New Orleans East (a Lenin’s tomb-like monument along I–10 still bears the name), and had managed to finesse federal highway regulations to build three interchanges for the venture.¹⁴⁹ A similar venture along the St Charles lakefront advertised scenes of upland development complete with contented dairy cows so obviously deceptive that it was shut down after protest by the Louisiana Attorney General.¹⁵⁰ What these developers wanted, of course, was exactly what environmentalists feared. The barrier plan looked like a stalking horse for wetland development, New Orleans piggybacking the scheme.¹⁵¹

The plan had another problem. It would block off most of the Rigolets and Chef passes, which were the migration corridors for the aquatic life of the interior lakes.¹⁵² Lake Pontchartrain had been the seafood market for the city, and crabbing along its banks was in the family memory of thousands of local families. Commercial fishers were worried as well and, despite Corps statements that gates in the barriers would maintain necessary flows, a groundswell of opposition grew on both sides of the lake. A poll by Congressman Bob Livingston showed his constituents doubting the barriers, causing him to express reservations as well.¹⁵³ An environmental lawsuit challenged the impact statement on the plan, which the Corps later admitted was a cursory job.¹⁵⁴ Like so many such lawsuits at the time, the court found the statement inadequate and required the Corps to write a new one. Most of the time the Corps did just that, and then proceeded with its original plan. In this case, though, the Corps changed its mind.

In 1982, its review completed, the Corps announced for the high levee option.¹⁵⁵ It would turn out to be less expensive after all, they found, less harmful to the environment and more protective as well. (Among other things it would guard against waves kicked up by hurricane-force winds across the lake itself). And so the project marched forward, its costs ballooning to an estimated $757 million, towards a pre- Katrina estimated completion date of 2015.¹⁵⁶ At that point the Corps had thrown up 125 miles of levees around the city, in various stages of readiness. The all-important interior canal walls—the ones that failed— were parts of the project declared to be complete.¹⁵⁷ Appropriations for the project were declining, however, from some $15-20 million annually in the early years to about $5-7 million in recent years.¹⁵⁸ The monies were going elsewhere.

So when Katrina and Rita hit the fan, it was a little surprising that two former Corps employees, high level ones at that, told the L.A. Times that environmentalists had drowned the city with their lawsuit.¹⁵⁹ The Wall Street Journal, ever eager for news like that, and a pack of right wing blogs picked up the cry, which carried to Washington DC and the House Resources Committee.¹⁶⁰ The Committee, in turn, ever eager for news like that, held hearings on it, absent the benefit of witnesses who had participated either in the project or the case.¹⁶¹ The United States Justice Department, ever eager for news like that, even asked its field offices to report any and all environmental cases that had obstructed Corps flood projects.¹⁶² None were ever disclosed.

In the end, the story flopped. The Chief of Engineers and the Government Accounting Office, which had been bird-dogging the project for years, both testified before other committees that the barrier plan would not have protected New Orleans any better than functioning levees, and in fact could have worsened the flooding by trapping the storm surge against the city.¹⁶³ As serious investigations proceeded, it became clear that the problem was not the high levee plan. Category 3 levees would have kept the city dry. Instead, the city got tinker toys and they fell apart.¹⁶⁴

B. The Restoration Game: Ideas on Short Rations

I am in the check out line at Rite Aid, buying flashlight batteries and last minute stuff. The fellow ahead of me has a huge bag, getting ready for Katrina, he says. He empties his bag on the counter, one by one. A fifth of Jim Bean. Another fifth of Jim Bean.

The coast is sinking. We have known it for a long time. Only the rates have changed. When I first came to Louisiana in 1971, Sherwood Gagliano, the leading coastal expert at the time, was estimating land loss at about 10 square miles a year.¹⁶⁵ By the 1980s the rate had soared to close to 50, and then dropped back to what appears to be a steady 20 to 25.¹⁶⁶ It’s not that we’ve offset the losses yet in any major way. But oil and gas dredging is down, and there is less marsh to lose.

We have also known that the coastal marshes act just like a levee, only a flat one.¹⁶⁷ They knock down storm surges, and over the 80-some miles between New Orleans and the Gulf that amounts to the height of a tall man, 6 feet or more.¹⁶⁸ That’s a lot of free levee. All we had to do is nurture it and leave it alone. Instead, of course, we starved the marshes from the main River and then started cutting them up with canals. The combination was devastating.

The first impetus to do something about it—beyond the scientific and environmental community, regarded at the time as two flakes off of the same snowball—came from the oyster industry.¹⁶⁹ Oyster beds depend on just enough salinity to grow spat but not so much as to attract the oyster drill and other predators. With the marshes eroding the saltier Gulf waters were taking over and killing the value of the leases. In the 1960s, Congress asked the Corps to look into it.

All answers depend on what you think the problem is, and in this case the problem was identified as the Mississippi River levees, shutting off fresh water to the leases. The Corps’ answer, strongly supported by federal and state fish and wildlife agencies, was to build diversion structures to let the Mississippi back out.¹⁷⁰ These diversions, for these modest purposes, would later become the main restoration game.

Difficulty with science: it moves. By the time a theory is proven and accepted, it is also often no longer fully true. But meanwhile it has become dogma, and highly resistant to change. The freshwater diversion structures would prove beneficial, but fresh water would not solve the problem. At best, it would keep salinity at bay.

The diversion projects went through an odyssey of controversy, back burner funding and on-again-off-again development. A diversion into Lake Pontchartrain was blocked by commercial fishers.¹⁷¹ A diversion into Breton Sound ran into a $2 billion damages verdict from the very oyster growers who had asked for it in the first place, undone only by order of the Louisiana Supreme Court.¹⁷² A later diversion, on the west side, is limping along at about 20% capacity.¹⁷³ A mini-diversion into the dying cypress swamps of Lake Maurepas has yet to see daylight, although it will only protect a minimal amount of habitat.¹⁷⁴

Difficulty with environmental projects that depend on humans for management: they will get compromised by politics and the environment loses out.

Meanwhile, federal and state authorities were beginning to raise the ante. In 1981, the Louisiana legislature appropriated $35 million for coastal protection.¹⁷⁵ Eight years later the state established a wetlands trust fund from mineral revenues providing from $15 to 25 million a year, earnest money for the federal funding that would be the prize.¹⁷⁶ In 1990, the United States Congress came through with the Breaux Act, partnering the state with the Corps and other agencies, and the upshot was Coast 2050, a conceptual restoration plan that divided the coast into four hydrological basins, each with its set of goals and projects.¹⁷⁷ At last, we were down to site-specific projects, meeting local conditions.¹⁷⁸ As a process, it was transparent and science-driven. Below the science, however, it also turned on meeting local expectations and whiffs of the same I-get-mine-and-you-get-yours decisionmaking that has plagued the water resources development game.

Coast 2050 is an ongoing process, with new projects vetted annually by panels of experts, open to public comment, and then set into motion.¹⁷⁹ The basic document is impressive, the work plans are targeted and their particulars are for the most part unimpeachable. But not all. There is a distressing amount of armoring and rip-rap which, as any coastal engineer (or fisherman) knows, last about as long as it takes for the land behind it to subside. The same could be said for beach nourishment, which is a more elaborate form of sand castle building, nice in the short run, then you have to do it again. And at the bottom, it continues to rely on large freshwater diversion structures that may—or may not—do the job.

But there is a more fundamental problem with Coast 2050, its mission, stated as “to sustain coastal resources and provide an integrated multiple use approach to ecosystem management.”¹⁸⁰ Who could object to that? Only someone familiar with the practice of multiple use management in the United States. The term first appeared in federal legislation attempting to insert environmental protection into rangeland and forest decisions, and it was shortly chewed to pieces by its very vagueness.¹⁸¹ Landscapes as vast as southern Alaska could commit 99% of the Tongass National Forest to clearcutting and still be “multiple use”;¹⁸² large and biologically unique areas of the California Desert could be turned over to off-road vehicle races.¹⁸³ The concept of “multiple use” failed so utterly to protect the environment that more recent laws have imposed specific environmental baselines (e.g., regeneration within 5 years) instead.¹⁸⁴ In short, multiple use has become a code word for let’er rip and Katy-bar-the-door.

The same inherent conflict can be seen in the Louisiana coastal management statute, which seeks both to “protect” and to “develop” the coastal zone.¹⁸⁵ So what comes first? According to one of its first administrators, it is a “resource management” program that “practically precludes the Secretary from stopping any activity per se in the coastal zone.”¹⁸⁶ At which point we know very well what comes first, and it will not be coastal protection. So when Coast 2050 also states its intention to provide a “clear vision” for the coast, it is calling for something that it can’t deliver.

A second problem with Coast 2050 is its inability to deal with projects that run counter to its objectives. The Breaux Act directs the Corps and other federal agencies to ensure that all of the activities are “consistent” with the “purposes of the restoration plan.”¹⁸⁷ Some activities are clearly not. But rather than calling for closure of the Mississippi Gulf Outlet, for example, the current 2050 work plan calls for—with an alarmingly straight face—the placement of rocks along its eroding banks. They are called “environmental improvements.”¹⁸⁸ Nor has 2050 insisted on accessing oil and gas deposits by means other than dredging, or raised a peep over government permitting for new wetland development. Indeed, 2050 has yet even to develop a process to determine the consistency of any of this stuff with coastal restoration.¹⁸⁹ It is still, like the rest of the state, in the mitigation-based, we-can-haveour- cake-and-eat-it-too mode that has presided over the destruction of the coastal zone for more than three decades. Are we serious yet?

The most obvious shortcoming of 2050, however, is that, even under the best of circumstances—its projects fully funded and the adverse consequences of new levees, canals and urban development magically wished away—it would not restore the coast. It would reduce the rate of loss. Not by all that much. About 500,000 acres would be lost without 2050’s restoration projects, and about 400,000 acres with them. Under 2050, three of the four coastal regions would continue to experience a seriously disappearing landscape.¹⁹⁰ The one that gains is next to the Mississippi and the subject of a new diversion project.¹⁹¹ This is before Katrina and Rita came along and took out 100 square miles in a single blow.¹⁹² Post-Katrina, a goal of reducing loss is no longer sufficient.

These shortcomings noted, Coast 2050 was still a credible game plan until it had a terrible accident, and barely emerged alive. In the summer of 2005, it ran into a highly skeptical Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C., and, after much haggling, its $14 billion asking price was whittled down to $250 million.¹⁹³ Worse, the monies would be restricted to projects that could be implemented in the near term, the next 5 to 10 years, and to studies of “long range feature concepts.”¹⁹⁴ Rome is burning. They sent a fiddle.

Katrina and Rita, in turn, had several impacts of their own on Coast 2050. On the positive side, they highlighted the relationship between coastal restoration and hurricane protection for all the country to see. Case in point: One evening this November, I was walking my dog down on the levee and met a group of workers from Minnesota (it was already cold up there). One of them began telling me about the river and how it was carrying all this silt and the coast was collapsing at three football fields an hour—seven football fields, said another—and so they argued about it. A bunch of twenty-somethings from 1,000 miles away had the message.

Second, Katrina and Rita opened the money faucet. Unimaginable sums will now be pouring into South Louisiana, much of it for the coast. For good or ill.

By the same token, the two hurricanes exploded the rate of loss. The Lake Pontchartrain basin lost 50 square miles (they’d been averaging 4 square miles a year).¹⁹⁵ Southeast Louisiana, below New Orleans, may have lost 100 square miles, 40 years worth by current rates.¹⁹⁶ Two months after the storm more than half a million acres of the coast were still under water.¹⁹⁷ These were tremendous hits. More hurricanes are coming. So what do we do?

C. So What Do We Do?

So how’d you do? The guy who is asking me lost everything and his family is somewhere in Oklahoma. The only people I see on the street are Mexican roofers and the National Guard. Out in Gentilly there are two guys throwing destroyed stuff out of their living room window, a mattress, tangled underclothing, kids books. The water line’s at the roof. They are the only people I see in ten blocks.

Here is what we know. It is not just the tire, it’s the car. And it’s not just the car, it’s the driver. Nothing in the system has made a numero uno priority either of protecting New Orleans from hurricanes or to restoring even hanging onto—the Louisiana coast. We have a flood control program, a navigation program, a permitting program, a coastal management program, a flood insurance program, a coastal restoration program—just for openers—and they do not talk to each other. They are riddled with conflicts, basically headless, basically goal-less, weakened by compromises and refuse outright to deal with first causes and first needs. So, this is a tall order.

We also know this. As they came ashore, there were really two Katrinas. One blew through the levees into New Orleans and St. Bernard, and topped the ones further south. The other smashed into coast-front development in a wide swath from Alabama to Texas, wiping out the first half-mile or so of Pass Christian, Waveland, Gulfport, Biloxi, half of Grand Isle, and all the way over to Holly Beach. Same set of storms, but the run-up for one was negligence, and the run-up for the other was arrogance. Building behind levees is one thing; you have (some) reason to think they’ll hold up. Building on the edge of the Gulf and thumbing your nose at it is another.¹⁹⁸ Which opens up a different set of questions.

1. Two Visions

Here is a surprising truth: we have never decided what we wanted. There is no book, no report, no agency and no law that maps what we think South Louisiana will be in 50 years, or several hundred. The question is less urgent in other parts of the country where we are not literally making, and losing, the landscape as we go along. In Louisiana we are. We will change South Louisiana entirely by what we do and don’t do in the next decade or so. And for this, there is no guide at all.¹⁹⁹ There are, however, competing visions. On them hangs much of the future of New Orleans.

The vision for New Orleans is relatively clean. The city is a given, fixed in its history, architecture, economy and culture and these contributions call for maintaining it, as is, for as long as we can. Nobody needs to reinvent New Orleans: we simply need to get it back. Its protection will cost a fortune, and will take more than anyone wants to concede (and no small amount of luck, as we race the clock against the near-term hurricane seasons). But at least we know what we are driving at. Whether we succeed will depend on levees, flood gates, rational storm water management within the city walls, conservative building elevations, levees and one thing more: a viable coastal zone to buffer them, without which the system will not hold over time.²⁰⁰

Eighty miles of wetlands and associated ridges, bayous and estuaries extend from New Orleans to the Gulf in a wide arc from the Pearl River to the Sabine, from Mississippi to Texas. The numbers vary with the type of terrain but, generally speaking, a couple of miles of these marshes will knock down a hurricane storm surge by a foot. You can do the math. In effect, we have a horizontal levee. We also have the richest ecosystem in North America, mother lode for the New Orleans seafood, the backbone of Acadiana, money in the bank spinning off dividends, as long as we do not destroy the bank.²⁰¹ Which is of course what we have been very busy doing.

So here is the starting point: exactly what we do want the Louisiana coast to look like, to do for us, for, say, the next century? Here is Answer A. We can dedicate it to navigation, to oil and gas extraction, to as much urban expansion as lenders will bankroll, to new highways masquerading as hurricane evacuation routes (case in point: the proposed Lafitte- LaRose highway, cutting across the marshes of Lafourche Parish, an evacuation highway, I was told; for whom? I asked; for the people who are going to build down there, I was told); to golf courses and subdivisions and castles on the sea (recent homes on Grand Isle sold for a half million dollars and up), and supported by more levees, more drainage canals, more pumping stations, more dredge and fill. It is called “a working coastal zone.”

Here is what is not working. The fisheries are getting squeezed out. The mouth of the Mississippi harbors a “dead zone” of oxygen-starved water larger than the state of Delaware.²⁰² The oyster beds are so contaminated with fecal coliforms that about half of them are closed for health standards at any given time, every day of the week.²⁰³ Commercial fishers are shutting down. The processing plants are shutting down. The interior marshes are collapsing. The natural storm buffers are disappearing. Cypress forests along the MRGO, Des Allemandes and in Terrebonne are now open lakes with dead sticks poking up in the air. Boat docks are separating from dry land. Every coastal community inland 50 miles or more is now threatened by coastal storms, even mild ones.

Earth to Louisianans: you really can’t have this cake and eat it too. With all due respect, it is not just a matter of doing everything we want “smarter.” It is a matter of getting straight what we want, and what comes first.

There are really two choices. One is to continue to squeeze every short-term dollar we can out of the coastal zone, to include a relentless press of industrial and residential development. And to throw up whatever protections for it the federal government will give us. Basically, pumps and levees. In this view, the natural environment may not be the enemy but it is at least an impediment. We wall it off, and then feed it through the bars of diversion structures like some beast in a zoo. At best, a century from now, it will not take five centuries, we will look something like Metairie extending down to somewhere like route 90, flanked by a huge wall, subsiding continuously on our side of it, and on other side are some collapsing deltas and the Gulf of Mexico. The walls, including those around the City of New Orleans, will have to be made more huge about every 5 years or so. Lest the doomsday predictions start coming true.

The other choice is to decide that perpetuating the coastal zone itself over the long term is the goal. Then, we tailor what we do to that goal. But there is no hiding the scale of the question. It would be one of the largest land use decisions in U.S. history, and the most consequential. It may also be the only way—as a matter of economics and sustainable engineering—that New Orleans and the major communities of South Louisiana can survive. It is certainly the only way that the coastal zone as a living system will survive. Problem is, it requires the almost unthinkable.

2. Vision by Default

What comes next is the hardest step for any American community to take, and all but heresy in South Louisiana. A plan. The mere mention of planning raises blood pressures and brings on cries of Godless Communism. The property rights movement is nowhere stronger than on the American coastline, stoked by folks who are either constructing, selling or occupying condos on places like Hilton Head, Pensacola and Padre Island, and it loves insurance payouts and second home mortgage deductions and it hates planning. Now we add the prevailing attitude of a state like Louisiana where most towns do not even have zoning, and a city like New Orleans whose tout ensemble is absolutely critical to its economy but which has spent the last 10 years avoiding the preparation of a master plan. To this we add the very human fact that everybody wants to live everywhere, most of all where they always have. And as close to water as possible.

What we have had in the city of New Orleans and along the entire Gulf coast is planning by default (local attorney Bill Borah calls it “planning by surprise”). Planning takes place. It’s just that we haven’t taken part in it. Where water resources are concerned, it starts with real estate developers, port authorities, levee boards and other outside-theballot- box enterprises, their projects facilitated and funded by the Army Corps of Engineers. In their minds, the only question is a technical one: what kind of engineering do we need to get our project done? The system has produced the expected results: more rip-rap here, more drainage there, and levees to the horizon. The goal is—although it is never stated anywhere—to develop as much of the coast as possible. When you add the projects up, they determine the destiny of the city and South Louisiana.

Case in point: There are three, mind-blowing maps in South Louisiana right now.²⁰⁴ One shows how Katrina and Rita came into New Orleans (wide arrows pointing in at the city, it looks like the Blitzkrieg). A second shows what these same storms did to the coastal zone south of New Orleans (it goes from a green carpet of grass to a hole in the ground).²⁰⁵ The third map hasn’t gotten much play. It shows a levee stretching from the Mississippi border to Texas, cutting across the belly of South Louisiana like a tourniquet.²⁰⁶ About half the wetlands of coastal Louisiana are above it, the other half below. The first piece of this levee to move forward is called Morganza to the Gulf.

The Morganza project loops down from Larose to within a mile or so of the open Gulf, and then back up to Houma.²⁰⁷ It is a considerable undertaking, with 72 miles of levees, gates and other structures, at a cost of $40.5 million (probably twice that, if history is any guide).²⁰⁸ It will destroy 3,743 acres of wetlands outright in construction and enclose the greater part of another 270,000-plus wetland acres in its study area, along with three good-sized lakes.²⁰⁹ Gates will be provided in an attempt to maintain the hydrological connection between the wetlands within the system and those to the south—but you have to perform a kind of autolobotomy not to see the consequences over time.

Natural History: widespread natural flows do not do well through culverts and passes. Neither do fish and plankton. Neither do sediments, large volumes of which are provided to the interior marshes from the south, by the very coastal storms that will close the gates and keep them out. And that’s just the surface water. Water is moving underground as well, and the levees press down on that circulation like a boot on a rabbit. The rabbit doesn’t fare so well.

Human History: the day a levee goes up is the day before large machines are in draining wetlands and laying slab behind it.²¹⁰ When real estate possibilities are on the table, what is behind a levee is going to get developed and no human institution will stem that tide. Indeed, the approved Louisiana coastal management program writes off wetlands behind levees as “fastland,” fair game for development and beyond the reach of the permitting program.²¹¹ When you look at this last map, the first thing you notice is 270,000-plus acres of wetlands behind the levees. And no one is thinking about a little venture in real estate?

Now we can think about the rest of it. The Morganza to the Gulf project logically does not stop at Larose and Houma. It is part of an imagined Maginot Line of levees that begin at the Pearl River and end up at Morgan City.²¹² At least for now. No reason comes to mind why they should not continue on Lake Charles. Or for that matter, west to Brownsville, Texas. Or east to Tampa, Florida.

What is apparent is that these levees, designed by engineers and approved by Congress, are the basic planning documents for the future of South Louisiana. What is north of these levees will be developed. What is south of them will be anyone’s guess, although not for long; the map on global warming shows these coastal marshes gone within a century. De facto, we end up with a wall. Not all that adequate a wall, by the way. Only Category three, if that. Can you imagine the costs of maintaining even a Category three levee system winding back and forth to the Gulf from New Orleans to Texas? Can we imagine what will happen when development piles in behind it, and then gets flooded? Do we already know, from Lakeview and New Orleans East, what happens to land elevations behind levees once they are drained and paved?

Our choice is to start this process from the other end. If we do, another range of options open. There are a dozen major towns across the southern tier with thousands of homes and residents, and they deserve protection. But the way to provide it may be with the same kind of ring levee systems that protects (or should) New Orleans and its surrounding parishes, supplemented by flood gates at the mouths of the main canals. Or, it may mean peninsular levee systems down the historic ridges of the bayous, protecting what has always been the high ground. That doesn’t mean Louisianans can’t live outside the levees. It doesn’t mean we can’t elevate and meet FEMA standards (inadequate as they may be) for flood insurance. It doesn’t mean we can’t live in town and drive 20 minutes down the bayou to the boat dock in the morning either. It just means that there is no need, and no way over time, to make a ring levee around all of south Louisiana and hope to retain the coastal zone.

Problem is, we have lacked the process—we have lacked even the language—for such a discussion. In addition to scientists and engineers, we may need some social workers. In saying this, I am most serious.

3. Alternative Future 1

We have two points of departure, then. We know what the first one looks like. The goal is to maximize human development in the coastal zone and protect it with a complex of levees, gates, drainage canals and pumping stations for the ever-subsiding lands behind them. We may add to these structures, as we wish, if monies are available, some environmental amendments. Holes in the levees for water flow (the current term is “leaky levees”), movable gates. But there is no doubt what comes first, and what will come next: maximum development.

One piece of this vision emerged in the 1960s with the barrier hurricane protection plan across the Rigolets, four-fifths of which was about new development in the wetlands.²¹³ It will doubtless surface again. Another piece has surfaced with the Morganza to the Gulf project.²¹⁴ There is no grand plan. It will happen by increments, by default. What is behind these barriers will, over time, turn agricultural, then into strip malls, cul-de-sacs and urbanization. Whatever is outside the barriers will live on borrowed time.

The Netherlands offer a more systematic approach to this same end. The Dutch have been fighting the North Sea for a thousand years, and their historic methods—dikes, drainage canals and pumps—look quite familiar, as does their continuing and accelerated rate of subsidence.²¹⁵ Parts of the coast are now 23 feet below the level of the sea.²¹⁶ The temporary successes of this engineering look familiar too, always followed by greater, catastrophic losses. Finally, in 1953 a major hurricane blew in and left 1,800 bodies in its wake, 50,000 destroyed homes and 350,000 acres of flooded land.²¹⁷ In a country half the size of Louisiana.

Vowing “Never Again,” the country devised a new plan. Back in 1932, they had dikes off the Zuiderzee, an estuary twice the size of Lake Pontchartrain, with a barrier more than 20 miles long.²¹⁸ Their new Delta Plan would apply that same strategy to the entire Atlantic Coast. They dammed every one of their major rivers, some of them multiple times.²¹⁹ They diked off their estuaries, diked off entire seas,²²⁰ and reduced their coastline by more than two-thirds.²²¹ “[T]he water is the enemy,” explained a professor of engineering. “You don’t let the enemy, before the fight starts, penetrate your territory.”²²²

They won. At a cost of about $18 billion over some 40 years, they completed their first rounds of the Delta plan and they haven’t flooded since.²²³ They predict their strategy to hold for the next 500 years. At the same time they moved aggressively to fill lands behind their coastal barriers, “polders” created literally from the sea.²²⁴ The polders produced fruit and vegetables. So far, it was all win-win.

Then another bill came in. Over half the estuaries disappeared, and those remaining were in trouble.²²⁵ Coastal fisheries were hammered. At the mouth of two of Europe’s major rivers, the Meuse and the Rhine, the Grevelingen was the largest and most productive estuary on the Atlantic Coast.²²⁶ Within two weeks of completing the barrier across it the mussels and shellfish were dead.²²⁷ The government tried to turn what is now a lake behind the barrier to tourism, but the water was, and remains, so contaminated that it is unfit for human contact.²²⁸ It is covered with toxic algae and more than 5 billion feet of polluted sludge has settled on the bottom.²²⁹ They had made a dead zone.²³⁰

The story repeats up and down Holland’s coastline, dying estuaries outside, dying lakes inside, and a series of costly and difficult remedies.²³¹ The most dramatic adaptations have been the construction of movable gates at the mouths of several estuaries.²³² The gates have restored part of the tidal interchange. But they have so reduced sediment loads that islands are disappearing, and now scientists are calling for one of the largest gates to be removed entirely.²³³ “Interfering with natural processes and natural systems is always a bad thing,” says one. “Mother nature is the best engineer.”²³⁴

The transferability of the Delta Plan to South Louisiana is an open question. The floodgates solution seems readily adaptable to passes the size of the Rigoletes and the Chef Menteur, but gating off rivers the size of the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya would be a larger challenge. The Dutch Coast is not, further, abutting a subsiding continental shelf, and its soils are composed of harder stuff than Louisiana marsh and muck.²³⁵ Fixed structures, like levees, will hold up there; we have seen what they do here. We have also seen the risks they present to the environment, and that’s before we factor in an environment like that of coastal Louisiana which is already on a lose-lose trajectory.

There is also a question of commitment. The Netherlands is a small country, and it has dedicated itself to fighting the sea. It cannot afford not to. Sixty percent of its land is below sea level.²³⁶ Louisiana, as valuable as it is to the nation and to those of us who live here, is only one piece of America, and America’s attention span for this or any other endeavor is limited. So will be federal funding, and we are still in the heyday of a petroleum economy that cannot and will not, last. Unless Louisiana goes in a direction that is more self-sustaining over the long term, it could up with a large white elephant on its hands.

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Netherlands experience is how it has since evolved. As noted, Dutch engineers nave tried to retrofit their structures to accommodate natural process, to recreate natural processes, with mixed success. Easier to do that from the start. As a matter of engineering strategy, they have now explicitly rejected bitlevee and big-drainage solutions as unworkable.²³⁷ They have instead come to rely on multiple layers of defense, redundant in the safety they provide, and none designed to provide full protection on their own.²³⁸ Most significantly, they have changed their philosophy from “flood control” to “water management,”²³⁹ and are tiptoeing to the next logical, indeed the only logical step: people management. It is rather remarkable.

Delegations of enthusiastic Louisiana engineers, politicians and media reporters are now visiting the impressive water works of the Netherlands Delta project. They see big gates and levees and come home dazzled and inspired for heroic works of engineering. Meanwhile, in its most recent report, under the title “Lessons Learned,” the Netherlands Water Partnership says: “The Netherlands is changing its approach to water.”²⁴⁰ The country will have to “make more frequent concessions.”²⁴¹ The report explains, “We will have to relinquish open space to water, and not take back existing open spaces, in order to curb the growing risk of disaster due to flooding.”²⁴² Giving space does not mean “the height of ever taller levees” or depth by “channel dredging.”²⁴³ Rather, “space in the sense of [flood plains].”²⁴⁴ The report concludes—in words one hopes that its Louisiana visitors will also read and understand– “Only by relinquishing our space can we set things right; if this is not done in a timely manner, water will sooner or later reclaim the space on its own, perhaps [in a] dramatic manner.”²⁴⁵

This is the director of the most modern, complex and successful flood control project in the modern world.²⁴⁶ Is anybody listening?

4. Alternative Future 2

Suppose, now, we were to start from a different point of departure. We aim to maximize the sustainability of the natural systems of the Louisiana coastal zone. We accept that hurricanes and major floods are going to come, and that attempts to confine them are as self-defeating as those of Persian King Xerxes, sending his sailors down to the beach with whips to beat down a stormy sea. Better to cede the waves some space. The goal here is not maximum human development but a coastal zone that will maintain itself and its inhabitants for generations to come. The mechanism is to use the coast as a first line of defense. And to cede it, including the violence of floods and storms, the space it needs to protect us, and thrive.

Fact is, there are many lines of defense out there, starting with the barrier islands and moving inland to ridges, natural land bridges, estuaries, interior roads and railroads, locks and floodgates, then levees, and then things we always did and then forgot how, like elevating houses.²⁴⁷ The point is that no one defense has to do the whole job. New Orleans might live quite safely surrounded by valid Category three levees, if over time its buildings were raised a few feet, as they historically were, and far barriers, both natural and manmade, served to knock down wave heights before they arrived. If the danger points for maximum storm surge are the Rigolets and the Chef passes, they might be gated in ways that do not require a continuous levee from the Pearl River to the Mississippi. The same incremental protections would be gained from closing the MRGO. We have a mix of options in which structures do not come first, they come last.

Here is a problem. With all the attention of coastal scientists, engineers and federal and state agencies to this question over the years, we still have no idea how much of the coast we can save, and where.

Instead we have Coast 2050 which, despite its price tag, is a losing game plan, nearly half a million acres in the next few decades.²⁴⁸ We are entitled to know more. If a sustainable coast is the goal, we need a map of what we can sustain.²⁴⁹ That map, in turn, should drive what we do for restoration and for human development, and for its protections.

Here is the second problem. If we are not going to try to protect everything with large structural works, then we are going to have to give water its space, as the Dutch themselves have concluded.²⁵⁰ The idea is not revolutionary. We routinely take space for highways and other public works, with compensation, but with no greater rationale than the public good. The Supreme Court has recently approved takings for such dubiously public ventures as shopping malls,²⁵¹ which makes taking private property to protect the general public, and the private owners themselves, from hurricanes seem like a no-brainer. Truth is we rarely buy space for natural processes, but there is no reason not to. In fact, always in response to disasters and never without pain, we have actually gone in this direction several times.

One story starts on the upper Mississippi River, and with another record storm. It rained, rained again and then raised more from May to September 1993, across the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin and Illinois.²⁵² Nearly 150 major rivers went into flood, and they stayed that way for half a year. All interstate highways were closed at one point or another that summer, as were the railroads and commercial airports. Sewage treatment plants washed out. Barge traffic on the Missouri and Mississippi was stopped for two months. Eighty people died, 54,000 homeless, 100,000 houses destroyed, $18 billion in damages. The magnitude of the disaster provoked a new response.

FEMA, a new and not-yet-co-opted agency at the time, moved quickly with response relief. It also moved quickly with offers to buy out properties next to the rivers. By the time the water receded, FEMA and state and local governments had moved 13,000 houses and businesses out of the floodplain. Two years later, another heavy rain season produced flooding, but no flood losses. People were out of the hit zone.

In 1997, almost in miniature, the story repeated on the Red River flowing north towards Canada.²⁵³ Out of its banks and out of control, the floodwaters covered 80% of the largest cities in the area, Grand Forks, South Dakota and East Grand Forks, Minnesota.²⁵⁴ No deaths this time, but huge financial losses.²⁵⁵ As with the Upper Mississippi floods a few years earlier, the Red River was already confined by levees; they simply couldn’t hold back that much water.²⁵⁶ The Corps had predicted flood height at 49 feet.²⁵⁷ It topped 54 feet.²⁵⁸ Graffiti on an abandoned refrigerator read, “49 feet my ass!”²⁵⁹ There is something about words on refrigerators that speaks truth to power.

Same solution. FEMA and the Corps proposed to buy people out of the floodplain and move the levees back, giving the river more room. The residents were badly divided, but the mayor of Grand Forks persevered, taking the unpopular step of supporting the buyouts. Her successor, who ran on a platform of opposing the buyouts, now acknowledges that they saved his city. Land purchases started within four months. When they ended, 1,700 homes and businesses had been moved out of harm’s way. “If you try to do a recovery by consensus,” said a participating engineer, “nobody will agree and nothing will happen. So you do what’s right, and it may not be popular.”²⁶⁰ Over time, though, what was controversial became popular. It just took some fortitude at the beginning.²⁶¹

Stepping back in time, the Corps of Engineers came to similar conclusions itself, twice, on the Lower Mississippi River. Not easily, of course. To the engineer mind, a solution that concedes anything to Mother Nature is conceding first downs to the other team. But as we have seen earlier, after decades of pursuing a levees-only strategy to confine the Mississippi River, only to bring disaster, the agency was finally embarrassed into the idea of a floodway that would give the river space.²⁶² Three floodways, in fact, at the Atchafalaya, Bonnet Carre, and New Madrid. The Bonnet Carre was small in scope and never presented a conflict, but the New Madrid was prime farmland and so quickly occupied to the point that it was almost never used.²⁶³ Soon, all that investment was clamoring for more drainage pumps and levees to protect it. No flood water ever passed down New Madrid.

It was the Atchafalaya, however, that bought the point home. As seen earlier, the Corps ultimately conceded that in order to give the floodwaters their space, it would have to restrict human development in the floodway.²⁶⁴ Dredging and walling off the Atchafalaya River at its banks was counterproductive; it simply encouraged more people into the hit zone. And so, about 15 years ago, the corps begin purchasing nodevelopment easements across nearly half a million acres of the lower Atchafalaya Basin.²⁶⁵ They will be a bargain. When the next big Mississippi River flood comes, the Corps will be able to blow the plug on the Atchafalaya, place no one in there at risk, and save New Orleans.

Here, then, are some things we can learn. If we start from the position of protecting as much human occupation and investment as we can, we can probably do it, at least for a while, at enormous economic and environmental cost. With enough money we can grow tomatoes on the moon. The question should occur whether that’s a good way to grow tomatoes. The question should also occur whether the country is going to want to continue to spend heroic sums of money to grow those tomatoes over decades, as the Gulf moves in and the oil runs out. And the question should also occur, even if we go for tomatoes and even if the federal monies will flow like water from a permanent spring, what do we want to look like? A region of cul-de-sacs and strip malls behind floodwalls, or an open, viable coastal zone? After all, New Orleans restaurants can always import seafood from Maryland and Vietnam.

If, on the other hand, we start from the position of maintaining as much of the coastal zone and its natural storm barriers as we can, we meet a different set of possibilities. We interfere with natural processes as little as possible, remove barriers to them, and over time move to the traditional places Louisianans have always lived, the ridges of the natural bayous and distributaries leading to the Gulf. We protect those zones. We also protect critical infrastructure for oil and gas, fisheries and essential navigation canals. For the rest, we let nature have the space it needs to rebuild and it will protect us in turn.

5. Reconciliation

We start with the map. In fact, two maps. One shows the ecosystem we can restore and maintain over time. The other shows the human development we will protect within it. They may be entirely reconcilable, but the restoration map comes first. Together, they drive the engineering. The first drives the second, and the second drives the third, and without the first two we are flying blind.²⁶⁶

These maps do not exist. What we have are engineering drawings like Morganza to the Gulf. The Corps has hundreds, and together, de facto, they plan South Louisiana. Now the Corps is preparing more. By default we will end up with a maximum development scenario, heroic engineering and some environmental accommodations (think: leaky levees). Coastal restoration is invited to the party, but it is not the host.

We also need new mapmakers. We have always thought of coastal management in terms of engineering, and engineering agencies are well funded at every level from the Corps to local levee districts, politically supported from top to bottom, and largely autonomous. Even Coast 2050, the state coastal restoration plan, operates under the baton of the Army Corps of Engineers. Coastal scientists, on the other hand, are found in universities, small consulting firms or environmental agencies, on short political leashes and tied to research on particular sponsored projects (often funded by the Corps). One challenge, then, is to elevate science to the role of map-maker. A challenge within that challenge is to get scientists on the same page.

The nice thing about engineering is that it seems so certain. It may be faulty and the building may fall over, but it responds to numbers and rules of physics. We are comforted by it. Usually, it works, or we would never take an airplane ride. And so we like engineering solutions. Among other things, they made living in this part of the world possible. They also look impressive, big dams and canals. And, down inside, they allow us to move dirt and water around which we have all done and enjoyed from early childhood. Hard structure engineering has a great deal of history, money and human nature going for it. Which is why we have lots of engineering maps.

The most unnerving thing about science, on the other hand, is that it is a moving target. The very nature of the discipline is to posit a thesis and then everyone else tears it apart. Once they can no longer do that, the thesis stands until later revelations require modifications. There was a time in Louisiana, not very long ago when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was contending that oil and gas canals benefited the environment.²⁶⁷ We also thought that impounding coastal marshes was a good idea.²⁶⁸ There was a time, just a little longer ago, when we believed that cigarettes were good for your “T-zone,” and not much longer still when scientists were proclaiming that “rainfall follows the plough,” just before the ploughed-over grasslands of Kansas and Nebraska blew away in the great dust bowl. For this reason, science is a difficult standard, and it is not easy to arrive at a consensus on what is and what should be done.

So it has been with the restoration of coastal Louisiana. Doing a necessary injustice to the gamut of scientists involved—who include some of the best in the world—there are two ways of looking at the coast and they can lead to different outcomes. Over-simplifying at high risk, some see the coast as soil; others see it as plants. To coastal geologists, hydrologists and a majority of others, the Mississippi River made the Louisiana deltas by depositing phenomenal levels of silt and sediments over long periods of time.²⁶⁹ Those deliveries have offset the natural rates of subsidence and built five million acres of land, an impressive feat. To this school, the basic remedy for coastal restoration is to open up the rivers and restore that function, while there is still time to do so.²⁷⁰ Granted, vegetation is also necessary, but without the river silts the coast will disappear.

To other coastal scientists, however, the coast is a complex of vegetation growing on its own; the complex is largely self-sustaining and holds everything else together.²⁷¹ The marshes, as known by anyone who has stepped out on them from a boat can attest, are a tangle of root systems that sink under foot and float in a dense mass above muds largely composed of centuries of their predecessors, reef-like accretions of vegetation. When the plants die, the soil disappears. Whatever kills the marshes—be it canal dredging or high loads of nutrients—kills the coast. And if the delivery system for that pollution is the Mississippi River, then we have a problem. The Mississippi is famously heavy in industrial discharges of heavy metals and highly complex, persistent toxins.²⁷² It is heavier still in fertilizer run-off from as far north as Ohio and the Dakotas, and its nutrient levels have created a semi-permanent dead zone of oxygen-less water the size of Delaware at the mouth of the river.²⁷³ Within which virtually nothing lives.

Seemingly, then, this conflict in science leads to opposite conclusions: keep the river out, or set the river free. It also leads to different priorities for restoration, the delivery of sediments, hydrology and vegetation.²⁷⁴ The conflict is real, but unnecessary. It is also resolvable in a post-Katrina climate that recognizes the need for greater commitments, from many players, to save the Louisiana coastal zone. The answer is not to deny the necessary role of the river. After all, the Mississippi helped make this place, and when it changed course the deltas it had created began to degrade, long before humans began intervening. On the other hand, the contamination of the river is a clear and present danger to the survival of the coastal marshes. We can all agree on is that the danger is real and that it has to be removed. What we need is a good river to work with. We don’t have one. That, too, becomes part of the new plan.

6. Coast 2100

We can now put the puzzle together. In a post-Katrina world of greater urgency, funding and public awareness of the plight of New Orleans and the Louisiana coastal zone, we have the opportunity to go beyond Coast 2050, take it off the leash and see where we can really go: Coast 2100. Before suggesting a few principles for that new plan, let us reach two understandings.

The first is that restoring coastal Louisiana is a national issue and will require remedies beyond this state. We lie at the receiving end of a large watershed, and some of what we need has been turned off and other stuff that is hurting us has been turned on. The Corps districts need to talk to each other, the EPA has to step up to the plate, upstream states have to change some habits too. If the nation’s taxpayers are going to be asked to spend more money than America spent of the Marshall Plan to fix all of post-war Europe,²⁷⁵ then they have a right to expect a national effort.