Look at this

photo/al.com 

What do you see? Well, the oil slick, of course, but wander left. Take a gander at Louisiana for a moment. Notice anything?

Well, if you’ve been looking at maps of the Bayou State for more than three decades, you see something that used to look like a peninsular delta looking more like Swiss cheese these days.

While we’ve currently got our eyes trained to the Gulf wetlands, we need to consider south Louisiana getting wetter and wetter as it slips into the sea. The conundrum of settling that part of the continent was that when they tamed it, they condemned it. Hemming in the Mississippi River stopped its tendency to meander or overflow its banks with regularity. It kept the alligators out of the pastures.

But what they stopped was a constant cycle that created and maintained a necessity. That peninsula was the product of eons of flooding from the river, a relentless conveyor belt that rolled 400 million metric tons of silt southward each year, outpacing the rate at which the fine sediment sunk or washed away at river’s end.

Dams, locks and levees eventually choked the silt down to 125 million metric tons annually. Without those floods, the coast began to retreat.

What was once farmland are now marshes, pools and lakes. The Gulf is advancing on New Orleans and, should it continue at this rate, the Crescent City will be in trouble by the end of the next century. Its exposure to hurricanes will grow. Something has to be done but the scale called for would seem unaffordable in the current economic climate.

There’s also the matter of the wetlands, the delta and marshes so vital to so many species in the region. Breaking that portion of the ecological chain would have its own effect, slick or no slick.

An article published in Nature the year after Katrina said satellites discovered portions of the Crescent City are sinking faster than anticipated, some at a rate of an inch a year. Combined with sea level rise anticipated from climate change, it puts New Orleans in a precarious spot.

It’s a tragic Catch-22. Without the river floods, it sinks. With them, it’s almost uninhabitable.

I hated the way this fact was used by some as a rationalization that we should just let the city die post-Katrina. To me, that would be like letting any other vital organ wither on the body. America needs New Orleans.  

As a resident of the Gulf Coast for the last three decades, I can tell you that New Orleans is undoubtedly the capital of the region. It’s a cultural jewel, a quintessentially American place with something not found anywhere else on the globe, our essence of “unique.” I’ve often said its two-hour distance from Mobile is, by far, the Alabama port’s best feature. I remember too well the funk I was in after Katrina, when the Crescent City was decimated and its future uncertain. The reality of a Gulf Coast without New Orleans was beyond redemption. What would be the point of living down here without the only place that seemed like an honest-to-goodness cosmopolitan city in the region?

Sadly, its demise appears inevitable at this point. Maybe not within my lifetime, but that doesn't ease the heartbreak.