That the Gulf oil spill is only the latest in a long string of insults and injuries to the Mississippi River Delta should come as little surprise to anyone who grew up or lived very long in the Mississippi River valley. Those of us who pay attention know that the Army Corp of Engineers’ projects up and down the river to contain flooding have done nothing more than treat the mighty river like a giant drainage pipe. Growing up near it, I learned early on that it is too powerful and vast to be contained or managed.
Great rivers like the Mississippi are living organisms that change over time, and they resist efforts to change them. It has been steadily moving east for eons, eroding and undercutting the hills and bluffs to the east while leaving the land flat to the west, where it has wandered from. It’s a sort of aquatic bulldozer that chews away slowly on its eastward journey and leaves prairie in its wake.
We know that the river is ancient because of its snaky path. As rivers cycle through the annual flood season over and over again, the floodwaters create new channels within the flood plain. They meander and either create oxbows or, when the flood cuts a new channel through the ends of an oxbow, create oxbow lakes.
During the flooding, the river picks up pieces of every region it drains and sends them downstream to the delta, where they form barrier islands and fresh water wetlands, ecosystems that not only support and nurture a diverse and rich life, but also serve to protect the mainland from storm surges.
Since 1932, Louisiana alone has lost 1,875 square miles of land: barrier islands that no longer exist. They have succumbed to the sea because they lack the constant replenishment of silt that used to drain the big river and settle naturally. But for silt to settle, the water cannot be moving fast. It must linger as the sediment falls out. That’s what made the delta such a bountiful cropland.
The Army Corp decided that it could tame the river like some feral animal. But the river isn’t and never has been feral: it’s been wild and refusing to be anything else. During a rainy year, the evidence of that abounds.
The natural flood plain is miles wide, but instead of recognizing this and not building in it, the Corp has built mile after mile after mile of levees to contain the water and move it downstream faster. But levees fail. Years of repeated flooding weakens them, and then they collapse. When they do, the river goes back to where it has always lived.
The levees not only hurt our coastline, but they also provide a false sense of security to those who live along the river’s banks.
The idea of taming nature is a neoclassical idea that belongs more in the 17th or 18th century. Those thinkers believed that nature was to be studied and controlled. That man was put on earth to understand, subdue and dominate the chaotic natural world in which they lived.
A more modern (and old-fashioned) approach would be to live in harmony with the natural world. Tear down the levees. Move out of the flood plain. Let the river get back to doing what it does best.
Because the floodwaters from about 1/3 of the US are funneled into and down this poorly engineered pipeline, we are losing barrier islands at an alarming rate, as well as the wetlands that are the home of a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We won’t be able to get it back.
This eco-disaster didn’t happen because of the oil spill. It only shined a light on what has been a continuing disgrace to this country: that we have allowed one of our greatest assets to become degraded almost to the point of extinction.
And I will say again that anyone who lives along the river knows it can’t be tamed or even managed to any great degree. It will continue to erode bluffs and break levies, even as it dumps its load of precious silt that should be renewing barrier islands and wetlands into deeper water off shore where it does no good.
The natural cycles along the length of America’s mightiest river have been disrupted for decades, all in the name of flood control, while the simplest, most logical and efficient response would have been to leave the flood plain undeveloped.
Live around it rather than attempt to control it. Give it the respect it will refuse to quit demanding.
It will win in the end. It always does. It always has.
