Let the river go

Bob Marshall, a Times-Picayune environmental reporter, was calling for radical coastal restoration in a Friday opinion, "The river wild":

Five years ago, after 25 years of chronicling the loss of our coastal wetlands, I stopped believing a cure was on the way. I became a realist. ...

So when readers and media colleagues continued to hammer me with the question "When will people wake up to what's happening?" my standard reply became this: "When a hurricane puts five feet of water on Canal Street."

Sadly, Katrina proved me wrong. We still live in a state of denial.

I say that because six months after Katrina wrecked our city and killed more than 1,100 of our neighbors, the nation and state still don't get it. Our leaders talk incessantly about levees (bigger, stronger, longer, costlier), and occasionally about wetlands. The implication is that if we build higher mud walls, then add the collection of coastal restoration projects the state has been pushing for 20 years, we can survive here.

That might have been true 20 years ago, but it isn't today. The loss of coastal wetlands is too severe.

What many coastal scientists know, but are afraid to say publicly, is that we are almost out of options. The Gulf has moved so much closer to our back doors that there now remains only one real hope for a long-term future on the delta of the Mississippi River: Let the river go.

The federal government must claim eminent domain on everything south of U.S. 90, then begin managing it as an ecosystem with one priority: Rebuilding land faster than it's being lost to the Gulf.

This can only be done by opening large sections of the levees. River-borne sediments could then begin reconstructing the 1,900 square miles of wetlands that provided us some safety from the Gulf and its storms.

Read on ...