Please pack your wetlands and go

I hope everyone has been keeping up with this series by WWNO and Bob Marshall on the decaying Louisiana coast.  Only in New Orleans can something like a steady drumbeat reminder that the very land we're standing on is dissolving rapidly into the sea start to seem like a pedantic annoyance after a while.  And this is why Marhsall's writing is so valuable.  He doesn't sugarcoat anything. And this jars the immediacy of the emergency out of the droning of the science.

The Gulf of Mexico, aided by sinking land and rising seas, has been swallowing this region at such a horrifying rate that a coastline that was a long-day’s boat ride away just 30 years ago could be at the city’s back door in 50 years.

What is arguably the greatest environmental and economic disaster in the nation’s history is racing toward a tragic climax that few of the tourists who flock here know about — and that Congress has shown little interest in addressing.

It is a struggle with massive environmental and economic implications for the nation. Yet those involved in this fight now candidly admit two points:

They are losing.

And if they don’t stage a comeback, most of the land in this part of the state will be under water by the end of the century, resulting in one of the largest permanent human migrations in the nation’s history, and one of its worst economic calamities.

Today's installment focuses on the manifold acceleration of the erosion process brought on by oil and gas exploration.

Most of southeast Louisiana, shut off from the river sediment that had built it over thousands of years, was now on a long, slow walk to the graveyard, a process that would take centuries.
It would take that long because sediment-starved deltas have two other ways to offset subsidence: the annual cycle of plant growth provides its own type of sediment, and the high tides — and even storm surges — bring in sediment from near shore deposits.

But even those lifelines were about to be broken.

Around the time those levees were completed a new threat to the region was gaining steam, one that would compress that centuries-long death march into a sprint of just decades.

The oil and gas industry had learned that the layer of wetlands along Louisiana’s coast covered enormous wealth. In a few short decades, more than 50,000 wells would be drilled, thousands of miles of canals dredged, and tens of thousands of miles of pipelines laid.

Soon, the wetlands began falling apart. Ponds became lagoons, which became lakes, which became bays — and the coast began receding northward.

Because oil and gas are the primary culprit in this crime, much effort has been expended in trying to get the industry to assume the cost of recovery (if recovery is even possible at this point.)



But this is an elusive aim since the oil and gas lobby is... well, they're oil and gas. 

Now, with the state urgently seeking $50 billion to fund the master plan it says can save some of what’s left, environmental groups have called for the oil industry, which already pays some fees, to be held more accountable for the damage it caused.

But the industry says its activities were permitted by the state, and besides, it’s already done its share.

“We feel we’re playing our part in this endeavor,” says Lyons of the Oil and Gas Association. “Taxes or things like that, over and above that, I think that would be inappropriate.”

 Fortunately BP spent the summer of 2010 wreaking unspeakable havoc on what was left of the coast. And so now they just very well might be compelled to make a significant contribution to the rebuilding effort. 

For BP, a finding of gross negligence would mean the company might be liable to the U.S. for as much as $17.6 billion in Clean Water Act fines, as well as unspecified punitive damages to claimants who weren’t part of a $8.5 billion settlement the company reached with most private party plaintiffs last year.

Today the state released a list of projects they are ready to fund with this money. How much they see is still in dispute, of course.

Meanwhile, many will recall that there's never been much trouble getting BP to fund a marketing campaign or two.

More than 100 nonprofit organizations and government entities will share almost $44 million in BP funds to promote Gulf Coast tourism and the seafood industries impacted by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the court-appointed oil-spill claims administrator said Wednesday. 

This week we became aware of only the latest application of this money.

State and local tourism offices will pay a total of $375,000 to sponsor the upcoming New Orleans-set season of the Bravo cooking-competition series “Top Chef.” The split: $200,000 from the Louisiana Office of Tourism, $175,000 from the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp.

 The state’s “Top Chef” contribution will come from a recovery fund established by BP after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, said Jacques Berry, communication director for Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, who oversees the state’s department of culture, recreation and tourism.

The NOTMC money, by the way, comes from locally generated tax revenue so there's that as well. But that is and is about to become a huge digression so we'll leave it be for now.

What's particularly saddening about the fact that BP settlement money is going toward bribing television producers while the Louisiana coast is fading away is that the only reason anyone paid any attention at all to it this week is because it became the subject of a celebrity food fight on Twitter.

A report that circulated yesterday via nola.com and Eater National revealed that the Louisiana Office of Tourism money that was part of the deal that got Top Chef New Orleans done was $200,000 of BP cash for promoting Louisiana that was distributed following the the Big Oozy.

(Anthony) Bourdain promptly thought of another idea, and Tweeted it out to Andy Cohen, who doubles as a Bravo exec and host of Watch What Happens Live.

Click the  NOLADef link to follow the blow by blow of the Twitter war. It got goofy. They dragged Wendell Pierce into it. Then they pulled David Simon into it. Then David Simon got mad at everybody. Nothing good came of it.  Rene had a funny way of summing it up. 

So if you are scoring at home. A New York food personality, a Baltimore newspaper man-cum-director, and a St. Louis exile who traffics in human reality are lecturing each other on the proper usage of funds received by Louisiana from a British company. This is either a punchline to the worst joke in history or a set-up for a Mark Twain quote. Now this may sound xenophobic, but it is quite presumptuous of people who don't live here to tell us what we can and can't do with our money. Sure, we may be jaded at the end of tourist season with outsiders, but really can you just leave us alone?

 This should have been an argument between citizens and the tourism racketeers mishandling their money.  But then.. this happened.   Maybe we're the ones being grossly negligent.