Did you know you could fly

So I'm reading this book called Bayou Farewell all about the coastal erosion in Louisiana. It's an eye-opening experience. How is it that no one outside of Louisiana seems to know about this? Here's a few facts to get you started:

• Louisiana currently contains 25% of the total US wetlands.


• Louisiana is currently loosing land at the rate of 35 square miles a year. To put that in perspective, that's 46 football fields a day.


• Louisiana has one of the highest rates of coastal erosion in the world.

See, the way the wetlands work is that the Mississippi river carries all this sediment down and deposits it on the Louisiana coast. This loose sediment sinks as it settles and some of it is carried away by wind and waves, but there is always more being deposited by the river's floods to replace that which is being lost. That is, until people settled here and started building dams and levees. Now the Mississippi doesn't flood anymore, so there's no sediment replacing that which is settling.

And this is a very serious issue because no wetlands means no shrimp and crab fisheries (A significant percentage of the US seafood harvest comes from Louisiana), no nesting grounds for rare and endangered migratory birds coming across the Gulf, and most importantly, no buffer between the heavily populated areas of New Orleans and its environs and the hurricanes coming up the Gulf. After Katrina, the author of this book I'm reading went so far as to say that it's murder to move people back to New Orleans without taking action to build up the coast.

Although this has been on my mind since I started reading the book, today I found another sobering reminder. I was researching LSU history for a patron and found an old 1871 map of Louisiana. I practically didn't recognise the coastline. Whole stretches of land are gone. The bays are so much smaller on the old map than they are on the current one. All the features of the coastline are so much sharper and narrower now than they were then. Lakes that used to be miles inland are now simply bays. It's very scary.