Article by Oliver A. Houck
This is a study of the Louisiana coast, which is currently disappearing at the rate of fifty square miles per year. The rate is increasing. Within the next century four coastal parishes will sink largely below water; within half that time one may entirely disappear. The fact of these losses, ongoing as this article is written and read, is almost as remarkable as the fact that, until recently, they were paid little attention.
Were the State of Texas to make an annual raid across the Louisiana border to take fifty square miles of real estate there would be a rather stong response. The response to coastal subsidence has been, to say the least, more measured. Documentation of the phenomenon has been available for the past twelve years, during which time the rate of subsidence has more than tripled. Not until 1980 did the State of Louisiana begin to study the problem in earnest, and not until 1983 did it begin to launch pilot projects in search of a remedy. The federal government, which through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has constructed an extraordinary navigation complex through the coastal zone and which operates the federal regulatory program designed to conserve coastal ecosystems, is just now preparing its first approach to the problem. The oil and gas industry, sponsor of a canal system of its own through the coastal region even larger than that of the Corps of Engineers, has yet to acknowledge a role in the problem at all.
The task of this study has been to present in one place the best available data on the loss of coastal Louisiana. It begins by identifying the most prominent natural and man-induced causes. It attempts next to make an appraisal, at some risk, of the value of the coastal zone and the consequence of its loss. Finally, it turns to several laws and programs that could be brought to bear more directly on the problem to help, quite literally, stem the tide.
Without forecasting the results unduly this research arrives at some conclusions that seem unavoidable and that may be useful to suggest in a preliminary way. The Louisiana coast is a beleaguered region, beset with adversaries on land and sea. The sea waters are corrosive, and they may be inexorably rising. The land is unstable and sinks of its own weight. These forces are not kind to real estate in South Louisiana. Yet, until very recent years, they had been building real estate on this coast at the highest rate and in the greatest volume in North America. The tide has only recently turned. What has caused the tide to turn? Some would say eustatic sea rise, a fickle nature turning her back on coastal man. Others point to the works of man themselves—canals, spoil banks, pipelines, and levees—that happen to coincide with Louisiana's remarkable reversal from land builder to land loser in location, in time, and in the ever-accelerating rate of the loss itself.
The ultimate mortality of the Louisiana coast may lie beyond our control. Were global seas to rise, from a cyclical upswing in temperature or from an inversion brought on by new records in the consumption of fossil fuels, this coast and others would be in great jeopardy. But the affairs of human beings are directed largely at what humans can do. We are all mortal, and will die quite soon by coastal, geologic time; yet we attend to homicide, and to those acts which would bring our lives to a more precipitous end. So too should we attend to this living coast. To the extent that we are killing it prematurely we should, all who have had a hand in it, begin to make amends.
About the Author
Oliver A. Houck. David Boies Chair in Public Interest Law, Tulane University; B.A. 1960, Harvard College; J.D. 1967, Georgetown University.
Citation
58 Tul. L. Rev. 3 (1983)