The Once and Future Delta

Abstract

Coastal Louisiana faces an extraordinary and unprecedented challenge: millions of people and a vast industrial infrastructure located in a disappearing landscape. The sea is re-occupying delta lobes and a coastal plain cut off from the river that built them. The decline is inexorable. Without systemic changes, coastal Louisiana, having already lost 1,900 square miles in less than a century, will disappear. Faced with this challenge, Louisiana's people are hampered by an inherent difficulty to comprehend how much the biophysical baseline has shifted. We lack an historic perspective, unaware of just how much more productive the system was and could be again. Many are engaged in a futile effort to hold onto what is doomed or put back what is already lost, rather than allow what could be: a vibrant new river management system that reignites the process that built the delta and its vast productivity in the first place. The key is unleashing the potential of the Mississippi River to build land. The challenge is to accept and adapt to the dislocations that river reintroduction will bring to navigation, fisheries, and coastal communities. The difficulty of adapting pales beside the catastrophe that waits if we do not.