Levees Not War

Courtesy of Dirty Coast

Despite decades of warnings and activists’ efforts, the serious work isn’t even close to happening.

Our name is Levees but we dig wetlands too because Louisiana needs a Multiple Lines of Defense Strategy. That’s why we urge everyone to read Mark Davis’s Times-Picayune op-ed, “Rebuilding Coast Requires Hard Choices” (full text below).

Davis, founding director of Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy and former director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, is responding to some bad news reported by Mark Schleifstein: A federal-state task force has “voted to close the West Bay diversion on the Mississippi River—the most effective existing sediment diversion in fighting coastal erosion—unless an alternative source of money is found to pay for dredging sediment from anchorages [essentially parking spots for boats].”

Mark Davis uses this crazy-but-true development to explain the bigger picture: “Protecting a handful of anchorages cannot be more important than restoring our coast, and by extension protecting the social, economic and ecological life of the region. . . . We don’t really have a coastal restoration program, and we won’t have one as long as the only projects we can do are the ones that don’t actually affect anyone or bump into any previously authorized projects.” Everyone knows that coastal restoration is a matter of life and death for Louisiana, and our state’s territorial integrity cannot keep being made to take second place behind oyster leasing conflicts and oil and gas projects and private development projects.

(more…)