Office of the Independent Blogger

It took the Mississippi River 6,000 years to build the La. coast. It took man 75 years to wash away a third of it. Experts agree we have 10 years or less to act before the loss becomes irreversible.

That is the lead in to this story.

The satellite map in Kerry St. Pe’s office shows the great sweep of marshes protecting New Orleans from the Gulf in bright red, a warning they will vanish by the year 2040, putting the sea at the city’s doorstep. Coastal scientists produced the map three years ago. They now know they got it wrong.

“People think we still have 20, 30, 40 years left to get this done. They’re not even close,” said St. Pe, director of the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, which seeks to save one of the coast’s most threatened and strategically vital zones. “Ten years is how much time we have left — if that.”

That new time frame for when the Gulf could reach New Orleans’ suburbs sharply reduces projections that have stood for more than three decades. Unless the state rapidly reverses the land loss, coastal scientists say, by the middle of the next decade the cost of repair likely will be too daunting for Congress to accept — and take far too long to implement under the current approval process. Interviews with the leading coastal scientists, as well as state and federal officials, brought no disagreement with that stark new prognosis. And while the predictions stand at odds with nearly a decade of official optimism, scientists said the death and destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina prompted them to voice private concerns that have been growing in recent years.

One part of me thinks, “This is all just a part of nature and the Earth will survive it, like it always does,” but then I think, “We need to stop destroying our environment just because we can and because it will survive.” That’s just not an acceptable standard. And I’m looking at the President who doesn’t just ponder that but lives it, following Rush Limbaugh’s famed declaration that humanity can not destroy what God created.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).