'The Land is Washing Back to the Sea' | OnEarth Magazine

The Land is Washing Back to the Sea | OnEarth Magazine

This is heartbreaking. I've studied/wrote papers on some of the physical factors mentioned here (subsidence due to oil & gas drilling, Mississippi levees preventing soil deposits, and the accelerated pace of erosion when buffer wetlands disappear, particularly during storms/hurricanes) but I hadn't found anything about the impact on the Tribal lifestyle.

Protecting the wetlands in the Gulf is a more complex issue than protecting the barrier islands of the Outer Banks or the Waddenzee. Mostly because of the major influence of the Mississippi and how many different states it crosses, all of which would have to agree to a sediment management plan that would put probably billions of dollars of development and infrastructure at risk upstream, in order to save the Gulf wetlands.

It's one thing when someone who's lived on the Banks for generations to see their house get swallowed by the ocean - that's a way of life, it's how things have always been. Same in the Waddenzee islands. But here, where the land was fairly balanced for generations, only to have it disappear within a single lifetime because of the ignorant, selfish or poor decisions of others, must be frustrating to the extreme.

I read part of an excellent book about the early history of the Army Corps of Engineers and the single man whose stubborn ego and bitter personal feud created the massive problems we have today. It was borrowed, so I couldn't finish it, but I'll be adding it to my next Amazon purchase: Rising Tide: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America, by John M. Barry.

The sad thing is, even if they had the money and policies in place, the rate at which the land is disappearing and the time it would take to institute the changes make it impossible to save what's there. With appropriate changes to land use and some hard engineering solutions, it could be possible to rebuild it and resettle it, though. Just ask the Dutch.