“No Net Loss of Wetlands” Wetlands as Infrastructure

It has been almost twenty years since President George H.W. Bush pledged “No net loss of wetlands.”
This year Louisiana will have, for the first time in a very long time, “no net loss of wetlands.” Louisiana has a surplus and much of it is going into wetland restoration, 4,000 acres restored in 2009.
This year folks [...]

Conflicting Demands: Levees and Wetlands

 
The Flood of 2008  breached several agricultural levees along the Upper Mississippi in Henderson, Hancock, and Adams Counties in Illinois. 
The farmers who till the 4-mile-wide floodplain here were wiped out for the summer. The village of Meyer, right on the Mississippi, saw its population reduced from 40 people to 10. The flood caused $80 million [...]

Grand Isle and the Spring Migration

 
Spring is here and its wet in Waterloo, Illinois. Robins and grackles are bathing in the puddles in the grass.  The ganders are jousting, their necks extended like lances, vying for who gets which nesting place on which pond. They will continue this behavior until the fledglings are out of the nest and swimming in [...]

Beneficial Use of Dredge Material

Len Bahr at lacostpost.com has an interesting post about the beneficial use of dredge material to rebuild 440 acres of marsh near Black Lake and 227 acres in the Sabine National Wildlife Refuge to the south, using material dredged from the Calcasieu Ship Channel.
Beneficial Use of Dredge Material:  such an awkward,  bureaucratic term; such a [...]

Ecosystem Restoration as Infrastructure

 
Louisiana is losing a football field every hour from its coastal marshes. It’s barrier islands and coastal marshes are Louisiana’s first line of defense against hurricanes.
 
Ivor van Heerden, a coastal scientist at Louisiana State University, put Louisiana’s coastal dilemma very succinctly: “Barrier islands protect the wetlands. The wetlands protect the levees. The levees protect the [...]

The Flood of 2008

There were several floods along the Mississippi and the Louisiana coast during the Summer of 2008.
First, the Flood of 2008 along the Upper Mississippi destroyed many levees that collapsed in 1993, and many that didn’t. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers described the flood as shorted in duration as the 1993 flood, which soaked the Upper [...]