Wetlands in Louisiana getting too wet

NY Times:

All trees and farmland, the tribal chief said. With hard acres of green where cattle grazed, adults trapped game, and boys and girls of the Biloxi-Chitimacha tribe ran without even dampening their feet. You should have seen it.

But you can hardly imagine it, much less see it, because where gardens sprouted and children sprinted just 30 years ago, there is now a grass skirt of mushy marshland, and beyond, the rippling open waters that lead to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Water," the tribe's conflicted chief, Albert Naquin, said. "All water."

Think of a ship with expansive decks and a close-knit crew. Now think of that ship surrendering slowly to the ocean, leaving its crew clinging to an ever-sinking bow. The ship is this island, here at the bayou bottom of Louisiana, about 30 miles south of U.S. Highway 90. And its crew members are the island's inhabitants, the small band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha, related to the Choctaws and part of a larger confederation of Muskogees.

For natural and manufactured reasons, 30 square miles of South Louisiana wetlands vanish every year into the Gulf. People here say they lose a football field every 20 minutes, every half-hour, every hour — the estimates vary, but the panic is constant, partly because wetlands and barrier islands act as hurricane buffers for the vulnerable mainland.

The unnerving sense of "look away, lose an inch" is especially keen here on the very poor, very mucky and thoroughly exposed Isle de Jean Charles, which almost dutifully received six feet of water during Hurricane Rita last September. But the advancing waters rubbing away a culture have a partner, tribal members say: the government.

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Wouldn't you know they would find a way to blame President Bush for acts of god? Actually the story does not mention the President, but does say the government is not protecting the island. Click on the link in the last paragraph to see a map that locates the island. There is much more including how a cost benefit analysis leaves the island sinking outside of a levee system.