by Jennifer Moses
It may not be front-page news in the nation’s capital, but here in south Louisiana, where it still seems as if every other house has a FEMA trailer parked in its front yard, the recent release of the Army Corps of Engineers’ interim hurricane protection plan dominated headlines, and not just because the report cost $20 million. What, after all, is $20 million in a national climate of want more, spend more? No, the real problem is simply this: The report, despite its hefty price tag, is useless.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The genesis of the report was a request made by Congress last fall that the Corps develop an interim report by June 2006 and follow up with a final report, due in December 2007. So far so good. What’s not so good–at least not for anyone who doesn’t want to die in the next storm–is that the report is no more than a rehash of previous reports, without specific recommendations on how to build structures that might actually protect people. Worse, the report lacks a single recommendation for rebuilding barrier islands or doing any other kind of coastal restoration, even though it’s widely accepted in the scientific community that barrier islands are the first line of defense against dangerous storms.
Because specific projects don’t get funded–or launched–without specific recommendations, what this big old puff piece of a report does is delay any long-term protection planning. Louisiana officials and scientists alike are up in arms, alarmed that the report, which in a prior draft had been okayed by state officials and vetted by independent peer review, was drained of science in the final round to make room for decisions to be made by policy-makers.
Even Sen. David Vitter, R-La., a fairly reliable cheerleader for the Bush team, criticized the administration for altering the language of the report in such a way as to gut it of any real hope for Louisiana. But who needs water engineers and wetlands experts to explain things when you have a bevy of high-ranking bureaucrats who can figure things out just fine for themselves?
It’s no secret that the Bush administration has been almost psychotically hostile to the “fact-based community,” including, and perhaps especially, the scientific community. The debate, as it were, about whether human action has contributed to global warming is only the most prominent example of this administration’s war on science, because in point of fact there’s no “debate” about global warming at all, at least not among climate scientists.
Amazingly, the ongoing disaster that is south Louisiana does not seem to be suffering, or at least not primarily, from a lack of funding per se. Rather, there seems to be a complete and profound refusal to look at Hurricane Katrina (and her sister storms) for what they were: the entirely predictable temper tantrums that Mother Nature unleashed, with considerable help from the dramatically warming waters of the Gulf of Mexico and an additional boost from industry, which systematically for years decimated the wetlands in exchange for profitability. South Louisiana loses the equivalent of two football fields’ worth of wetlands every hour, which adds up to a lot of wetlands washed away, and even now there’s a danger that the vast cypress forests that grow south of Lake Maurepas (which feeds into Lake Pontchartrain) will be cut for timber.
In the meantime, as John Woodley Jr., assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “There is no such thing as unlimited resources.” Meaning what, precisely? Is the nation–or at least our leadership–already so tired of the plight of Louisiana that it’s willing to let it literally wash into the sea?
