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When Fat Tuesday rolls around on Mar. 7, the faithful hordes will congregate once again in New Orleans for the annual Mardi Gras celebration. With the high purpose befitting a ritual, society bands will march, jazz will reverberate down Bourbon Street, and tons of crawfish and oysters from local waters will be washed down with various libations. But the days of this popular rite of spring may be numbered. Within a hundred years, scientists say, New Orleans could be under water.
USGS animation shows Lake Ponchartrain swelling as wetlands retreat
The city is already an average of eight feet below sea level. And it has been sinking ever since the rich territory was purchased from France for $15 million in 1803, inspiring General Horatio Gates to congratulate President Thomas Jefferson: "Let the land rejoice, for you have bought Louisiana for a song." Levees, the big berms of earth lining riverbanks, have held back the mighty Mississippi so far. But the Crescent City's rate of descent is now three feet per century -- eight times faster than the worldwide rate of 0.4 feet per century. "New Orleans will likely be on the verge of extinction by this time next century," predicts Chip Groat, director of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Groat's unwelcome pessimism is based on more than just land subsidence. The world's seas are also rising. A report from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change notes that the average global sea level has risen by 4 to 10 inches over the past century and projects it will be about two feet higher by 2100. Making matters even worse, the fragile wetlands and barrier islands that protect New Orleans from the sea are disappearing at a frightening rate. Many of the low-lying barrier islands will disappear by 2050, scientists say.
DWINDLING SHIELD.
Indeed, a significant portion of Louisiana has already been claimed by the sea. Despite its relatively small size as a state, Louisiana's grassy marshes and the flooded forests of the bayou country comprise 40% of U.S. coastal wetlands. But those marginal areas are threatened: 80% of all wetland loss occurs in Louisiana, mostly due to the sprawl of human habitation. From 1930 to 1990, the Mississippi River Delta lost more than 1,000 square miles of land, an area the size of New Jersey. Land-loss rates accelerated from 10 miles per year to 40 miles by the 1970s, with the present rate being about 25 square miles of wetlands a year.
If current trends hold, the dwindling shield of coastal wetlands could eventually turn New Orleans from a bustling river port into a Gulf Coast city. That would leave it vulnerable to devastating tidal surges caused by tropical storms. Scientists estimate that every 2.7 miles of wetlands absorbs one foot of storm surge.
The close encounter with Hurricane George in 1998 may have been a harbinger of things to come for New Orleans' residents. When officials ordered the evacuation of the city and low lying areas, 1 million people took to the roads. Bumper-to-bumper traffic crawled for miles and hotel rooms were scarce as far away as Memphis, Tenn. "This is more than a serious problem...it's a catastrophic one," says University of New Orleans coastal geologist Shea Penland. "We're living on the verge of a coastal collapse."
FISH NURSERIES.
According to the Louisiana Coastal Restoration Web site, in peril is more than $150 billion in infrastructure alone. Moreover, the Louisiana
wetlands are nurseries for 28% of U.S. fisheries' annual catch. New Orleans and other port cities handle 400 million tons of waterborne commerce annually and serve as a harbor and provisioning center for the multibillion-dollar-a-year oil and gas industry.
Penland and others are part of an aggressive research effort aimed at
finding ways to preserve the coastal wetlands and restore those that have
been destroyed. Funding for the 80 projects that have been initiated so far
comes from the Coastal Wetlands Planning Protection and Restoration Act of
1990, which was spearheaded by Louisiana Senator John Breaux. A task force,
comprised of representatives of the Army, Commerce, Interior, and
Agriculture Dept., the Environmental Protection Agency, and the
Louisiana governor's office, administers about $50 million a year in state
and federal money reserved for wetlands-restoration projects.
Efforts so far have been aimed at finding ways to restore wetlands and reverse the effects of humans, such as building levees that prevent fertilizing floods of wetlands in the springtime and digging channels that allow saltwater to move inland. The task force just announced its selection of nearly 20 projects for the coming year, which include attempting to rebuild offshore wetlands destroyed by Hurricane George by planting hardy aquatic grasses and diverting more river water to marshes. The group also agreed to adjust the process used to select next year's list of projects to ensure they fulfill the goals of the state's Coast 2050 plan, a $14 billion proposal for reducing wetland loss prepared with local and regional participation.
30-POUND RATS.
Yet such attempts to stem the tide have been criticized as being too little
too late. A statewide group, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, charged that the task force has chosen easy demonstration projects. "There was a recognition we were not doing the difficult projects," says Denise Reed, a University of New Orleans geologist and consultant to the coalition, who believes the current list is a step forward.
Without question, some past efforts have left critics with a bad taste in their mouths. Consider nutria. These giant rodents were introduced in the 1930s as a fast-growing source of fur. But nutria never achieved the cachet of mink, and many entrepreneurs went bust and booted the beasts out into the marshes. These semi-aquatic pests, which look like 30 pound Norway rats, can best a dog in a fight and breed like cockroaches. In the wild, they have devastated marshes by devouring the roots of plants that hold in the soil.
So the Geological Survey's National Wetlands Research Center in Lafayette, La. -- which conducts major coastal wetlands research -- came up with what it thought would be an appetizing solution to ridding the state of this voracious pest: eat it. Hoping to take advantage of the Cajun penchant for culinary creativity, it launched a joint campaign with the Louisiana Wildlife & Fisheries Dept. called "Save Our Wetlands -- Eat Louisiana Nutria." It proudly sponsored a competition called "Cookin' Alive" in which five well known Louisiana chefs vied for trophies and cash prizes of $100 to $400. Like frogs legs and snake meat, nutria was said to taste just like poultry and be every bit as nutritious.
When the contest was over, the winning recipes were offered to ambitious cooks on the laboratory's Web site. (If you go to Mardi Gras, be sure to sample Chef Enola Prudhomme's Nutria Chili.)
NEW ATLANTIS.
But the threat remains very real. And New Orleans is hardly alone. Nutria are also gnashing their way through the tidal swamps of Chesapeake Bay but have yet to show up on the menu among the exotic fare at Washington's trendy Dominics restaurant. Meanwhile, Houston is also sinking, as porous land settles after extracting billions of barrels of oil. And swelling seas threaten the 70% of the world's population that live on coastal plains. Entire countries, like the low-lying atoll nation of the Maldives could go under. Manhattanites might find themselves bobbing for the Big Apple.
But if New York is destined to become the U.S.'s Venice, New Orleans stands more likely to become America's Atlantis. If Coast 2050 manages to obtain the $14 billion in funding needed to carry out some 500 projects, it
estimates that 90% of existing coastal land could be preserved. But faced with the additional double whammy of subsidence and rising seas, all that money could turn out to be nothing more than a finger in the levee.
By Alan Hall in New York EDITED BY PAUL JUDGE
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