Environmental Issues Following Hurricane Katrina

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Environmental Issues Following Hurricane Katrina

Program adapted from New York Times

Total Time: 1.5 hour

Materials: PANIM Issue Guide, sheets of guiding questions, copies of article, paper, pens

Introduction (10 minutes)

The teen leader (TL) waits for everyone to arrive, and then passes out the PANIM Study Unit. The TL asks

for a volunteer to read outloud the sections that are titled “Environmental Injustice” and “Polluted Air and

Water”

After it has been read, the TL asks the group:

Do any of you know of environmental injustices in your home community? What other facts or figures do you know either regarding economic injustice related to the environment or regarding pollution? What have you heard about the effects of the oil spill on the region in the Gulf?

Take a Stand! (30 minutes)

The teen leader will split the group into four smaller teams and explain to the groups that they will take on

the role of advisors to the Louisiana State government. Each group is assigned a different special interest

group. All groups will address the same guiding questions (provided as a handout for easy access). Give

groups 15-20 minutes to conduct their research and prepare a their statements for a “town hall meeting”

that will take place at the end of the program. They should use the article “Louisiana’s Marshes Fight for

Their Lives” as well as the PANIM Issue Guide for guidance.

Town Hall Meeting (20 minutes)

All groups come back together in a town hall meeting, with the TLs and staff serving as facilitators. Each

special interest group gets 2 minutes to present their statements, followed by the opportunities for cross-

fire and debate between the special interest groups.

Ten Commandments for the Environment (20 minutes)

Return to the PANIM Issue Guide and have a volunteer read Part 1 of “Think and Discuss.” Have a volunteer

write on a large piece of paper the group’s 10 Commandments for the Environment. Have the teens

consider the following:

- What would each special interest group add to the 10 Commandments? - How would the Jewish community react to the 10 Commandments? - How might the 10 commandments differ across communities?

Conclusion (10 minutes)

The TL and staff ask teens to share their thoughts and experience with the program.

As the conversation comes to a close, include the following leading questions:

- Why might people choose to live in areas that are prone to natural disasters (such as floods, landslides, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, etc.)?

- Are there any threats (natural or human) to the ecosystem in which you live? How do those threats affect people, animals, plants and/or the general environment of your community?

- What perspectives are presented on the various sides of the issue? What steps have been taken by special interest groups, individuals, the government and/or businesses?

November 15, 2005 New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/earth/15marsh.html

By CORNELIA DEAN

Shea Penland nosed his truck along a mud-covered street, past uprooted trees, cars

leaning crazily on fences, torn-off roofs, and piles of ruined furniture, wallboard and

shingles - the waterlogged evidence that Hurricane Katrina had been through the New

Orleans suburb of Chalmette.

Twice, he turned to avoid streets blocked by brick houses apparently torn from their

slab foundations and dumped blocks away. Finally, he spotted what he was seeking.

"Look at that," he said, pointing to what looked like misshaped bowling balls tufted

with long strands of yellow grass, seemingly thrown onto the porch and through the

gaping doorway of a wrecked brick ranch house. "Marshballs."

For Dr. Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the

University of New Orleans, these clumps of black mud knitted with roots and fronds

are an alarming sight. The marshballs, some as large as a sofa, others as small as a

shoebox, had floated from wetlands to the east. Dr. Penland says they are more

evidence that after decades of human interference, the marshes of Louisiana are in

deep, deep trouble.

"A healthy marsh is pretty resilient," he said. "A stressed marsh - storms will physically break the marsh down."

Now, as Louisiana struggles to recover from the storm, scientists like Dr. Penland are studying this marsh wreckage and the

marshes themselves for clues to what ails them and how they might recover.

The questions are complicated, and the answers turn on a number of factors, including the region's geology, the ways people

have engineered the flow of the Mississippi River, and the marsh-killing activities of the oil and gas industry. These issues

inevitably lead to a far more difficult question: whether some marshlands, even inhabited marshlands, must be given up to the

encroaching Gulf of Mexico.

Louisiana marshes are a nursery for many fish caught in the gulf, and they support the state's rich Cajun culture. Much of the

nation's oil and gas passes through them. And though hurricane damage to New Orleans and other towns drew more attention,

the storms "have caused a significant loss of wetlands and marshes and massive coastal erosion throughout the entire region,"

S. Jeffress Williams, a coastal scientist with the United States Geological Survey, told a Congressional hearing last month.

He said some marshy areas east of the Mississippi River lost 25 percent of their land areas in Hurricane Katrina, which came

ashore more than 100 miles east of New Orleans. A strong hurricane that approached New Orleans from the south, along the

path of the river, would do even more damage, he said.

Over the years, scores of scientists have struggled to determine the best way to approach Louisiana's vanishing wetlands. Last

week, experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported their recommendations in an evaluation of the state's

major marsh-restoration proposal.

Though they praised most of the plan's major components as scientifically sound, they said that it would reduce annual

wetland loss only about 20 percent and that it was time to consider what areas could be preserved and what areas could not.

That attitude is anathema to much of the state's business and political establishment, according to Oliver Houck, a

professor at the Tulane University School of Law who specializes in environmental issues.

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Louisiana's Marshes Fight for Their Lives

He said a large obstacle to confronting wetland loss was what he called the "destroy and restore" philosophy, the longstanding

practice of interfering with the marsh - for flood control, navigation, agriculture, oil or other gain - in hopes that engineering

could restore it.

That, more or less, has been the history of this coastal region since Europeans made their homes here more than 300 years

ago.

Coastal Louisiana is constructed of millenniums of mud, sediment carried by the Mississippi and deposited in its delta. The

mud under the west side of New Orleans is about 200 feet thick; it compacts and sinks under its own weight. But when the

river flowed naturally, regular floods carried silt from the heartland into the marshes, maintaining their elevation.

Levees and other flood-control and navigational efforts changed all that. Deprived of

nourishing infusions of silt, the marshes began to sink, and this subsidence was

accelerated when the petroleum industry began pumping out oil. According to the

Geological Survey, since the 1930's Louisiana has lost more than 1,900 square miles of

wetland, an area as large as Delaware.

will vanish by 2050. Though the loss has slowed since the early 1980's, when a binge of

canal-cutting and pipeline construction by the oil industry accelerated it to 40 square

miles a year, it has not stopped. Dr. Penland, who has spent almost all of his career

studying the coastal islands and marshes of Louisiana, estimates the annual loss at 12

square miles or so; others say 20 or more. The Geological Survey estimates that if things

continue as they are, 700 square miles more will vanish by 2050.

"The whole surface is sinking," said Abby Sallenger, another coastal scientist with the

agency. "It's almost changing before your eyes. It's grassland turning into open water, the

ponds turn into lakes."

In theory, sea level rise from global climate change will only make things worse, although

things in Louisiana are already so bad, Dr. Penland said, that "for us that's insignificant."

Many hope controlled diversions of river water into the marshes, one remedy included in the state plan, will help restore the

natural balance. Others are doubtful.

Mr. Houck cited a project at Caernarvon, on a bend in the river south of Chalmette, where water is diverted into the marsh.

After Hurricane Katrina, "half of that marsh was destroyed outright and half of what remains is iffy," he said. "A lot of it

came off like hair ripped from someone's head" and probably ended up in Chalmette, he continued.

Also, Dr. Penland said, diversion projects small enough to be feasible and locally acceptable are dwarfed by the magnitude of

the problem. For example, when scientists at Louisiana State used computer models to study a diversion proposal for

Maurepas Swamp, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, they said it would take 50 years to restore 5,000 to 10,000 acres

to sustainability.

Efforts like that, however valuable, will not be enough, Dr. Penland said. "We have to not just mirror nature, we have to

accelerate the way nature works. The solutions have to be proportional to the problem."

Much of the sediment that enters Mississippi River tributaries never makes it to Louisiana. By some estimates, 80 percent is

trapped behind Missouri River dams. Plus, over the years the Louisiana economy has come to depend on the river's being

constrained in its channel. Large infusions of fresh water would flood some homes and businesses and alter salt marsh

habitats, with potentially harmful effects on commercially important species like oysters.

"We want the dirt without the water," Dr. Penland said. The only way to get it, he said, is dredging and then transporting the

dredged material to the marsh that needs it, possibly through the kind of slurry technology used to move coal.

This technology has been in use for decades, but it remains to be seen if these kinds of measures can or will be applied in

time. "There should be bolder, long-term projects for sediment delivery in areas in need than were put

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forth in the near-term plan," Robert G. Dean, a coastal engineer at the University of Florida who led the academy panel, said

Wednesday at a news conference.

The panel also discussed making major changes in the state's coastal geography by diverting enough water flow to cause the

river's Birdfoot Delta area to disintegrate, a process that would end up redistributing its sediment along the coast to the west.

Or engineers could construct a "third delta" (the second being the delta of the Atchafalaya River), by diverting it at

Donaldsonville, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and sending it toward the gulf.

Though large-scale projects like these offer potentially large benefits, the panel said, they also come with engineering

challenges and likely opposition from property owners.

As Dr. Dean said Wednesday, progress will require "tiptoeing through the potential minefield of stakeholders." They should

be involved in decisions as early as possible, scientists involved with the report said.

That will particularly be the case, they say, when it comes to deciding which settled areas can be preserved and which must be

abandoned, an approach the academy implicitly endorsed even in the title of its report, "Drawing Louisiana's New Map."

Mr. Houck said it might be possible to "take major towns and ring them - Houma, Morgan City, Thibodaux, places like that."

But, he went on, "if we aren't going to draw a line and try to protect every little town, we would have to do some serious

people relocation, and that would humanely require compensation."

The alternative, he said, "is to build the largest levee system in the world" around the entire southern part of the state. "We'd

cut right through the marsh, a Maginot Line - and about as effective, too," he said, referring to a French line of defense that

infamously failed in World War II.

Where does this leave Louisiana? "Doing the things we can do now," said Dr. Penland, once again behind the wheel of his

truck, but this time en route to Port Fourchon, a major oil installation on the coast. "What was proposed 20 years ago in the

beginning of my career is coming around now."

He was heading south on Route 308, a two-lane strip that barely rises above the acres

of salt-marsh grass and open water glimmering in the sun. Here and there, the

leafless trunk of a dead oak tree rose from the grass. Dr. Penland said these gray

skeletons signaled that this wetland was once a freshwater marsh dry enough for a

tree to grow.

Every now and then, the truck would pass a house or trailer on stilts, marshballs

lodged against its steps or under its porch. In places, piles of them had been pushed

off the pavement onto the narrow shoulder. The beach at Port Fourchon, or what

remains of it, is part of one of the major projects in the state plan. It lost what little

remained of its sand in the hurricane, leaving a row of giant plasticized sandbags,

perhaps 3 or 4 feet in diameter and 12 feet long, called "boudin" bags after the local

sausage. Behind them, a sharp scarp marked the edge of a marsh, broken and buried

under tons of grass and other plant debris.

Dr. Penland got out of the truck and looked around. "I have never seen such an extent

of marsh wreckage," he said.

The Port Fourchon effort, which Dr. Penland is leading, involves pumping replacement sand onto the beach and pumping in

additional sediment to restore the marsh behind. Similar sediment-pumping efforts in 2004 restored 50 acres of nearby

wetland at a cost of about $300,000, Dr. Penland said. "That's cheap marsh."

But this kind of restoration works only when a marsh "just needs to be enhanced a bit," he said, and results are temporary.

"There is no way you are going to fix any piece of coastal real estate forever," Dr. Penland said. "That's the hard fact you just

have to face."

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You are the: Local residents, individuals who live near the Louisiana marshlands. They own

and run local businesses and they are concerned about the sustainability of their homes and

businesses.

What is your special interest group?

What population does it represent?

What are the specific needs of your group in terms of the local environment?

How does your group interact with the environment? (Does it take resources from it, work to protect it, etc.?)

Of the solutions proposed in the article, which meet the specific needs of your special interest group?

Of the solutions proposed in the article, which are directly opposed to the needs of your group?

What are the short and long term repercussions of your proposed solution?

What are the costs related to your solution?

What responsibility, if any, will your group assume in terms of the cost of the solution? If not your group, who do you propose should take responsibility for the costs associated with your solution?

What is the responsibility of my special interest group in balancing the group’s needs versus those of the environment and/or other interest groups?

How do my interests relate to and/or conflict with the needs of the other groups?

Do any solutions address the needs of all the special interest groups?

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You are the Oil and gas industry, a major industry in this area. The oil and gas industry has been

pumping oil out of the Gulf Coast for decades. Although this has caused damage to the marshlands,

the country’s dependency on oil and the market value for oil provides many with employment.














You are the Local fishermen. The marshes are filled with fish caught in the Gulf. These fish

are used across the region to make specialty Cajun dishes.













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You are the Wildlife and environmental agencies. You have worked in the region for 20 years

and have seen the marshlands disappear, and, with them, the plants and animals that once called

the marshlands home.













Documents

Environmental Issues Following Hurricane Katrina