Anglers burn with passion over the seasonal movement of redfish to the jetties south of Calcasieu Lake.
Raise your hand if you’re in favor of coastal restoration. O.K., unless my LASIK-improved eyes deceive me, that includes all of us. We all support coastal resoration, right?
I mean, after all, for nearly a century the federal government has fiddled while one of its states — clearly one of its most important and culturally vibrant states — has been getting reclaimed by the sea.
If that same government would finally step in, do the right thing and bandage the open, festering wounds at the ragged sole of the Louisiana boot, we would all be in favor of it. We would jump for joy that the Bayou State would be saved. We’d parade in the streets, and fry everything we could — and boil what we couldn’t — and invite over all our friends and neighbors to celebrate with us.
That’s what we’d do, right?
Umm, no. Actually, that’s not what we’d do. Not by a long shot.
This is what we’d do: We’d tell the federal government to pack up their cranes, hitch up their barges and get the hell out of town.
Don’t believe me? Just look at what has happened every time a restoration project has been installed anywhere along the Bayou State. We whine and moan and complain because, lo and behold, the project has impacted our hunting and/or fishing.
The latest example comes courtesy of the St. Bernard Parish Council, which voted at its April meeting to shut down the Caernarvon Diversion. Why? Because all that dirty water was making it tough to find speckled trout, redfish and shrimp.
“We’re trading away our future for a possible po-boy today,” said Mark Schexnayder of Louisiana Sea Grant and LSU AgCenter.
Fortunately, the vote didn’t carry the power of law, but it demonstrates how short-sighted we can be as a people.
To be fair, the area between Caernarvon and Delacroix encountered jaw-dropping erosion during Hurricane Katrina, but geomorphologists and coastal scientists say that was to be expected. Freshwater marshes fare worse during hurricanes than do saltwater marshes, but they also heal themselves much more quickly.
The damage to the saltwater marshes wasn’t as impressive to the eye, but the slow drip of destruction there continues unabated.
The St. Bernard Council ought to really love it when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins in early 2009 a project that will help to enlarge the impact of the Caernarvon Diversion.
“We want to open some of the cross canals,” said Project Manager Courtney Elzey. “Right now some of them are so silted in that even if we increase the flow, we won’t be able to get the water where we need it.”
They’re also going to do some marsh creation around Lake Lery.
We can’t have that, now can we? Marsh creation near Lake Lery during the bass spawn? Egads! That’s probably somebody’s favorite springtime honeyhole.
“Diversions are kind of like being able to control the rain,” said John Lopez, director of the coastal sustainability program for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. “If you make it rain on any given day, somebody’s going to be mad. Everyone agrees we need the rain, but nobody wants their event to be messed up.”
But in my book, a nice, controlled rain beats an eternal drought any day.
