Bayou Farewell

I bought a copy of this book. It is a must-read to understand one of the worst environmental catastrophes in the great US of A.

News: The Louisiana Bayou has been sinking for years, and now it's almost gone—taking New Orleans and Cajun culture with it.

Mike Tidwell
Interviewed By Erik Kancler

October 3, 2005

Mike Tidwell knew nothing about the environmental perils facing the Louisiana Bayou when the Washington Post sent him down there, in the spring of 1999, to write about Cajun culture. Yet, having hit on the idea of “hitchhiking” the shrimp and crab boats of the Bayou, he soon came upon numerous and puzzling signs that something was seriously awry in Bayou Country: groves of sun-bleached and leafless Oak trees, half-drowned and hundreds of feet from land; lines of telephone poles planted in swampland; cemeteries where only the tops of graves remained visible.

Bewildered, he asked the locals for an explanation, and everywhere he heard variations on the same theme---from shrimpers, crabbers, and fishermen, no less than from local scientists and conservationists. In the words of a local shrimp-boat captain, upon whose vessel Tidwell first hitched a ride, "All dis land around us, as far as you can see, is droppin' straight down into de water, turnin' to ocean. Someday, Baton Rouge, one hundred miles nort' of here, is gonna be beachfront property."

As Tidwell recounts in Bayou Farewell, the book that emerged from this experience, the problem had begun in 1927, when massive flooding of the Mississippi River prompted the U.S. Government to direct its Army Corps of Engineers to construct a massive levee system, designed to keep the river from ever breaching its banks again. Although this had the intended effect of keeping cities, towns, and farmland dry, all the sediment carried by the mighty river, instead of fanning out and settling throughout the Bayou, creating land as it did so, was now swept straight over the edge of the continental shelf and down to the bottom of the ocean. Stripped of its supply of fresh sediment, the Bayou began a relatively swift descent into the ocean.

Edit, Snip to interview:

MT: The best way to learn about this is to visit www.crcl.org, which stands for Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. They're leading the fight in Washington. There's already been a $60 billion emergency supplemental appropriation to deal with the disaster of Katrina. It's going to pay to rebuild the levees to a safer level, its going to pay to clean up the streets of New Orleans, to provide comfort and support to people who are homeless, to provide medical care, and to help the cities like Houston and Baton Rouge deal with evacuees.

But not one penny of that money is earmarked to prepare for the next Katrina. There's going to be probably one more big supplemental emergency appropriation from Congress to deal with the Gulf, and this $14 billion restoration plan has got to be in that package. If it's not, and if we do not commit as a nation to a full coastal restoration program to rebuild the barrier islands and wetlands then we are in effect committing an act of mass homicide by rebuilding the city. It would be criminally negligent to send people to go live in New Orleans or the other parts of that coast.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005/09/mike_tidwell.html

PS, this is a great interview and Tidwell ties global warming in with Katrina and really nails it.

nt

I do an enviormental page for our company's website and will include this in the book section.

Let's see if we can get a thread from this forum onto the front page. If not, this should be reposted in another forum. It needs to be seen.

(Of course you could say the same thing about every thread here.)

In the book, he uses an analogy of a foreign army taking acres of California's beachfront land every day. Would we not stop this?

BTW, this is my fave forum. Enjoy most all posts here.

Looking at Bayou Farewell: a review of the book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Paperback) from Library Journal:

(emphasis mine)

In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
- Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Thanks for that - I heard of that book but forgot about it while reading Bayou Farewell. I'll have to order this on from bn. Funny how that 17th St canal wall failed right in that particular neighborhood. I remember seeing that canal & that neighborhood from the elevated highway coming in from Mississippi while going to the NO airport. Right around the Elysian Fields exit if memory serves correctly?

:hide:

They have everything they need where they live(d). They lived off the land. Caught shrimp and speckled trout and crabs. Even gators.

The description of the flood waters was awesome. I remember a segment about a train on a bridge and what happened to it when the flood came roaring through. S-C-A-R-Y!

If the planet is warmer and if the ice melts quicker than they thought, will New Orleans go underwater like Atlantis?