A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [126]
It’s tempting to shout, “The marsh is coming back!” But it’s just that the vegetation is regrowing. The marsh is disappearing.
In Shell Beach, Louisiana, a man saw me staring at all the dead trees standing in the marsh. “When I was a kid,” he said, “this channel wasn’t here. And all of this was woods, all cypress and oak and other hardwoods. Everything behind us was cattle pasture. Now it’s water. The channel let salt water pour in. Now you see all these dead trees. Those all died in the last ten years. The road leading up to the bridge you came over? That road was canopied with trees. It was real nice. So it gives me bad memories. Everything tries to live. Two feet above the water, a tree will grow. Everything wants a chance to survive. The land is subsiding. Anyway, yeah, it was a paradise. Everyone got told they were all gonna be rich when the channel came. Look at any other state. Their coasts continue to thrive. This one died.”
“We were anchored,” writes Louisiana outdoor columnist Bob Marshall three weeks after the leak has been stanched, “watching redfish push wakes in clear water as they raced along a bank lined with very green and very healthy Spartina marsh. Shrimp were leaping from the water in attempts not to become redfish dinners. Blue claw crabs were riding the outgoing tide toward the Gulf of Mexico. Pelicans were diving on mullet schools. Mottled ducks were puddle jumping, and sand flies were taking their pint of blood from my ankles.
“One of the planet’s most vibrant and dynamic ecosystems seemed the picture of health. Of course, like most wetlands sportsmen, I knew better. That’s because I know these marshes are turning into open water at the rate of 25 square miles per year.”
The delta originally covered something like 8,500 to 10,000 square miles, and has lost about 20 percent of that area, or very roughly 1,800 square miles of marsh, with recent loss rates around 20 to 40 square miles a year. All these estimates vary, as do the actual loss rates. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita alone dissolved over 200 square miles of marsh to open water, but much of that had been already degraded marsh. The Mississippi River is the main source of the delta’s nourishment, but engineering projects have almost completely isolated the river from its own delta. The projects include levees built for ships and against floods, thousands of miles of channels sliced through the mazes of marshes, and the dredging and deepening done for shipping, and oil drilling, and the ships and traffic buzzing to and fro to service the rigs. The delta is disintegrating because the sediment that washes from the heartland now gets shot straight out into the open Gulf. It never gets a chance to build the marshes. Oil and gas pumping have also helped the marshes subside. The rise in sea level isn’t helping.
A lot of marsh remains, but the amount lost—and with it the lost wildlife, recreation, and fisheries productivity—is staggering. The marshes are one big reason the Gulf produces more seafood than any other region in the lower forty-eight states. But some estimates say they’ll largely vanish by 2050.
A certain irony is not lost on Dr. Felicia Coleman, who runs Florida State University’s Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “There’s a tremendous amount of outrage with the oil spill, and rightfully so,” she notes pointedly. “But where’s the outrage at the thousands and millions of little cuts we’ve made on a daily basis?”
BP has indeed been the subject of national rage all summer. One of the greatest fears was that the oil would destroy a great swath of marsh. Yet the things that are really destroying the marsh are all intentional. They could be fixed.
BP may end up saving more wetland than the oil ever harmed. The new national focus on the Gulf has helped bring attention to the delta’s disintegrating marshes. Some of the billions BP is expected to pay in fines could bankroll restoring critical wetlands and reengineering projects that Congress hasn