Losing Louisiana- How Erosion is Affecting Our Coasts
This year for spring break I did what most college students do, I went to the beach, down to sunny New Orleans. Most might assume that I spent my time partying, walking around the city in a drunken haze but rather my vacation was a little different. For my spring break, I spent my week planting seagrass at the beach to help stop soil and sand erosion. I spent time knee deep in mud in the Bayous of Louisiana, planting cypress trees along with fellow Rutgers students.
Rutgers University Alternative Breaks is run through the Department of Leadership and Experiential Learning and gives students an opportunity to spend their spring breaks doing service work and service learning. For my trip, we were concentrating on the changing coastlines of Louisiana, how our actions could make a difference, and how the loss of land in one southern state was actually affecting the entire country.
According to the New Yorker, every hour and a half, this state loses a football field-sized piece of land. Louisiana is disappearing at a terrifying rate and it is all because of us. To begin, we have to understand how Louisiana came into existence in the first place. “South Louisiana was built by the changing course of the Mississippi River. Sediment was deposited by the River and reworked by tidal- and wave-driven forces to build the Delta in the southeast portion of the state and the Chenier Plain in the southwest,” (Roberts, H. H. (1997)). As the Mississippi River flows down the country it collects water from 31 different states which is amazing when you consider it only directly passes 10 states. Along with the movement of water, the river carries sediment which gives the Mississippi its lovely brown mud color. This sediment was then deposited at the end of its journey, onto the lands of Louisiana through flooding, replenishing any soil that was washed away with the tide.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded, submerging 23,000 square miles under water, killing 250 people and displacing thousands more. This natural disaster was labeled “The Great Flood.” The government decided action had to be taken and thus the Flood control act of 1928 was created. “The Flood Control Act of 1928 brought into focus public awareness and advances in flood control theory and production by expanding the policy to include flood control, spillways, and channel improvements. Additionally, it authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to design and construct flood-control projects and emphasized the requirement for local communities to perform post-construction operation and maintenance for flood-control levees,” (FEMA).
With the creation of new and more advanced levees, the Mississippi River finally lessened its flooding, but what appeared to be a victory was actually a huge loss. Flooding was the only thing that was allowing new sediment to be deposited into Louisiana. Without it the land began to erode at a quick rate. Another problem that the loss of flooding presented was the lack of filtration of the river. As the river collected water from 31 states, it also collected fertilizer runoff from farmland. Now, rather than these waters being filtered through the Louisiana bayou, all of this water was being pumped directly into the Gulf of Mexico, leading to the creation of an enormous algal bloom and dead zone.
You might be asking yourself, why should I care? Well, Louisiana is not the only state where soil erosion is taking place and water levels are rising. It is a key example of what will happen to us if we don’t change our attitudes about climate change. As the water rises, and we lose plant life that helps stop soil erosion, we too could find New Jersey to be the next Louisiana.
Lousiana also “provides more fishery landings than any other state in the conterminous United States (USDOC 1996)... In fact, as much as 16% of the nation’s fisheries harvest, including shrimp, crabs, crayfish, oysters and many finfish, comes from Louisiana’s coast (USDOC 1996),” (lacoast.gov). If we lose the Louisiana fishing industry than our country would be at a huge deficit and it would affect our national economy.
Louisiana’s suffering is our suffering, and the loss of land that they are experiencing should not be taken lightly. The land erosion that they are experiencing is a man-made problem, as usual as we tried to fix one thing, we ended up creating another much larger problem. We are responsible for our climate changing, we are responsible for the water rising and warming, and we are responsible for the erosion of 1 football field of land every hour and a half in Louisiana. Our actions have consequences and we have to recognize the mistakes we have made and fix them.
