In 1993, a dredging boat named the Katrina - really, that was its name - started a six-year project south of Morgan City, La., to restore destroyed coastal wetlands. The dredging project cost us federal taxpayers $2.6-million, and it helped only a fraction of the ruined wetlands south of New Orleans.
The Katrina was employed to build up wetlands that had been wiped out from a different dredging project - one that was supposed to maintain a shipping channel in the Atchafalaya River. The federal government realized the first project was an environmental mistake and set about fixing it. Who knows what has become of the dredge Katrina's mechanical wetlands repair now that the other Katrina, the hurricane, has shown brutally that nature is boss?
Hurricane Katrina ought to show us, graphically, that wetlands are worth a lot more than their property values might suggest.
Everyone from governors standing at lecterns in Mississippi and Louisiana to scientists e-mailing frantically from their university cubbyholes agrees: If we hadn't destroyed so many coastal wetlands, the hurricane's impact would have been much less devastating. And if we hadn't allowed houses and casinos and shopping centers to go up in the wetlands we destroyed, we'd have fewer people dead and a less expensive rebuilding tab.
People died because government let developers build in wetlands. And we're still building in wetlands, more and more each day. Wetlands are a sort of free hurricane insurance. They slow hurricanes down and absorb storm surge. State and federal officials have estimated that every 2.7 miles of wetland absorb a foot of surge. Governments don't factor that in when they weigh whether a developer should be allowed to fill marshes and put in buildings.
When it's time to rebuild, we should ask whether people ought to live in houses that sit on spits of land where the government had no business letting them build in the first place.
Louisiana (like Florida) has been trashing wetlands in a big way. Before the dredges and cranes built the levees around New Orleans, the Mississippi River would top its banks during floods and wash through bayous and swamps. The river water carried silt to feed plants and build up new wetlands.
When engineers contained the river, it stopped flooding and the wetlands started disappearing. It's a lot like what happened when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned Florida's Kissimmee River into a straight-sided ditch and ended up hurting Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, miles southward. Taxpayers have paid dearly to restore the Kissimmee's old river bends. It is far more expensive to fix broken natural systems than it is to prevent harm beforehand.
Louisiana's wetland loss is the largest in the United States, and Florida isn't far behind. Louisiana loses a football field of land every 30 minutes, reports the advocacy group America's Wetland. The state's shoreline has migrated inland 20 to 30 miles since the 1930s, says oceanographer Joe Suhayda. That massive wetland loss occurred in less than one human lifetime. If what the scientists say is true, that 30-mile wetlands buffer would have sucked up a lot of Katrina's storm surge.
Low-lying Florida has squandered its wetlands with abandon. St. Petersburg Times reporters Craig Pittman and Matt Waite found that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has rubber-stamped permits to fill wetlands here more than in any other state. In 2003, for example, the Corps approved 3,400 Florida wetland-destruction permits and rejected just one. The government could curb this and steer growth to more suitable places. Instead, it bends to developers time after time.
Someone is getting rich from developing the Gulf Coast, and you can bet it's not the people who stifled in the Superdome or tried to plan funerals for loved ones last week in Biloxi.
Centuries ago, when the United States paid France $15-million for 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi, folks described it as the greatest real estate deal in history. But in Louisiana as in Florida, they got so busy draining and filling "cheap land" they forgot about the treasure right under their noses. Now we'll pay $10-billion to try to restore the Everglades. It will cost at least $14-billion to restore Louisiana wetlands alone - not to mention those in Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. And the cost of rebuilding along the vulnerable Gulf Coast carries a multibillion-dollar price tag. But that's just money - many people paid with their lives this time.
That financial and human toll has risen because people have blindly pursued the addiction of money and growth, trashing the landscapes that buffer us from storms, clean our drinking water and grow our seafood. Wetlands are a bargain: They do all this work for free.
Julie Hauserman is a writer and environmental activist in Tallahassee.
