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Defenders Magazine
Defenders View: Lessons From Katrina
In late August, hurricane Katrina swept in from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed coastal Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. We watched in horror as the catastrophe unfolded. We grieved for the victims, and opened our hearts and our wallets to those who escaped with their lives and little else. While news coverage has focused, appropriately, on the human suffering, the environmental impacts of the hurricane were also severe. Thousands of acres of natural habitat that once supported legions of birds and other animals are now gone. At least six national wildlife refuges suffered extreme damage. One, Breton National Wildlife Refuge, is now half its original size. The fate of numerous imperiled species—like sea turtles, red-cockaded woodpeckers and manatees, to name but a few—remains uncertain as this issue goes to press.
Even now, as rebuilding efforts begin, the human suffering continues—and helping to alleviate it is the top concern. But, as conservationists, we must also begin to look at the environmental causes and impacts of Katrina, and to consider the lessons we should take away from it to help prevent or minimize future natural disasters.
How could the damage be so severe? Although the analyses are in their early stages, it should be clear that much of the devastation wrought by Katrina was caused by decades of pro- development policies that worked against nature rather than with it. At the largest scale, consider global warming: A study published recently in Nature shows the number of destructive hurricanes like Katrina has doubled in the past 35 years as sea temperatures have risen. Hurricanes will always occur; but the likelihood of natural storms growing to catastrophic dimensions increases as the Earth continues to warm. Despite this and other evidence of the impact of global warming, the Bush administration steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the scientific evidence and to join the worldwide call to curb greenhouse gases.
On a smaller scale more applicable to Katrina, consider the decades of purposeful destruction of Louisiana's coastal marshes—wetlands that should provide critical flood protection. For decades in the South and elsewhere, government policy has been to dredge and drain coastal wetlands, changing the flow of rivers and preventing the natural wetlands flooding that once replenished and nourished protective marshes by depositing millions of tons of river sediment there. Meanwhile the hundreds of miles of canals carelessly constructed to access the marshes has allowed saltwater to destroy the vegetation that formerly held freshwater marshes together.
As a result, Louisiana alone has lost nearly one-third of its coastal marshes. These marshes are not only vital habitat for a rich variety of fish, waterfowl and other wildlife, but they play a major part in helping to sustain the Gulf of Mexico fishery, a vital source of jobs and incomes for many along the Gulf coast. And, perhaps more important for those impacted by Katrina, such coastal marshes act as enormous natural sponges, absorbing and reducing the initial shock of storm surges. Scientists point out that had these wetlands not been destroyed, the force of Katrina's impact on New Orleans would have been significantly reduced.
Despite this, many of our current leaders in Washington still don't get it. Their ‘business-as-usual' response to Katrina is to seek scapegoats so they can continue their policy agenda of encouraging more oil and gas drilling, suspending environmental reviews for proposed federal actions, promoting unrestricted development and undermining key laws like the Endangered Species Act (see the article and special insert on this law starting on page 24 of this issue).
If Katrina has taught us anything, it's that we must learn from this disaster and move at long last to adopt policies that work with nature's forces, not against them. Short-term profit-taking for a few special interests might suffer, but in the long term, our economy and our country will both be better off. We should start the transformation now, while the destruction of Katrina is fresh in our minds. A good place to begin is to make sure that the billions of dollars of taxpayer-financed reconstruction aid include money dedicated to restoring the coastal wetlands on the Gulf of Mexico. We owe it to the victims of Katrina, and to future generations whose lives and natural heritage are at stake.
