EVENING UPDATE: Thanks everyone for your wonderful participation today. Please look for a follow-up diary tomorrow.
Welcome to the first meeting of BooBooks, the online book club sponsored by The BooMan Tribune. We have two goals: to read together and then discuss books that illuminate current events and to benefit this site by purchasing our books from Powells book store. You are welcome here, though, no matter where you got your copy and even if you haven’t read it yet.
Our first book is BAYOU FAREWELL by Mike Tidwell, subtitled, “The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast.”
Let’s get to it.
“Katrina was not a natural disaster,” Tidwell says in a post-hurricane interview. “Human activity set the table.”
Because we have an usual opportunity to view this disaster both from a historical and current perspective-as if we were sitting out somewhere in space/time looking at the last 300 years-I suggest we use his book to approach the whole thing chronologically and work our way forward to the future.
In this first diary, let’s concentrate on pre-Katrina.
Tidwell quotes a friend of his as saying, “Nature always bats last.”
Well, nature always bats first, too. . .
In the same interview I quoted above, Tidwell explains that three hundred years ago, when the French arrived, there existed between the site of New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico:
* Vast hardwood forests. . .and now they are gone.
* Vast freshwater swamps and marshes and saltwater marshes. . .and now there remain only remnants of them.
* A veritable fortress of barrier islands. . .which now are mere strands of sand compared to what they used to be.
All of those things, built up over millions of years, provided hurricane protection for the coast, not to mention also providing an Eden of birds, fish, and plant life.
The French arrived in paradise, albeit a paradise with flooding and mosquitoes
The French brought with them, as Tidwell writes in the book, a corrupted political attitude that regarded “office” as property to be sold or given away as a means to hold onto power. That set the stage for the seemingly never-ending saga of Louisiana political corruption which played its part in the eventual disaster of Katrina. A lot of people, Louisianians included, think the state’s government has always been the poster child for corruption. That corruption hasn’t only sacrificed the coast to development and diverted funds from land and water management, but has also contributed to a fatalistic attitude on the part of people living in the bayous. Government is the problem, they shrug, so how can they turn to the government to solve the problems?
But corruption is only one part of the human activity that “set the table.”
The other part is a tale of unintended consequences. And for that discussion, let’s look at the prologue and first chapters of the book. Allow me to provide some Cliffs Notes for selected chapters. . .and remember this book was published in 2000, so we are reading what he wrote before Katrina was even a gleam in Mother Nature’s eye.
PROLOGUE:
The Situation: The whole ragged sole of the La. boot-3 million acres-is washing out to sea.
The Cause: The leveeing of the Mississippi River, resulting in “a devastating chain reaction.”
The Speed: “Breakneck, with an area equal to the size of Manhattan succumbing every l0 months.” It is “the fastest disappearing landmass on earth.“
CHAPTER ONE:
The Situation: The Louisiana Gulf coast is sinking.
This is a natural process and would happen anyway, but until humans put their hands in, it was balanced by the periodic flooding of the Mississippi which laid down new sediment, which created new land, which kept the land above water.
The Cause: “The Mississippi doesn’t flood anymore” because the Army Corps of Engineers has dammed it up so it can’t. Without that deposit of new sediment, the land is sinking and disappearing under water.” The river “is no longer creating any land whatsoever, (the sediment is) tumbling instead thousands of feet over the clifflike edge of the Continental Shelf.”
The Speed: “Every 20 minutes or so a football field of land turns to water.”
CHAPTER THREE:
The Situation: “Nobody” knows about it, nobody believes it.
Back in D.C.-where they do believe about the problems of the Chesapeake Bay and the Everglades–nobody believed Tidwell when he tried to warn them about what was going on down south. “You can’t be serious,” they’d say. “A Manhattan of wetlands lost every ten months? Is that possible?”
The Cause: Location.
The Louisiana wetlands are so isolated that nobody sees what’s happening. Nobody, that is but the Cajuns, the Houma Indians, and the Vietnamese who live and fish there, and who listens to them?
The Speed: “It’s all slipping away very fast.”
Okay then. That should set us up, though I haven’t even mentioned the dredging of the oil and gas canals or the intrusion of saltwater or the global warming that is raising sea level at the same time that the land is sinking. We’ll get to all of that, too.
Let’s begin.
Mike Tidwell was deeply surprised and shocked by what he discovered as he hitchhiked the bayous. Were you shocked by what you read? Is it worse than you imagined, or just about what you would have expected? What are the images or facts you read that startled, or concerned, or fascinated you the most?
