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Like a Great Wall rimming the coast, cypress forests in the Atchafalaya and elsewhere in Louisiana are the single best defense against hurricanes—magnitudes stronger, more enduring, and cheaper than any concrete or earthen levee. Their extensive root system spreads several hundred feet, weaving a tight lattice that serves as an anchor against high winds and storm surges. Hassan Mashriqui, a Louisiana State University professor of coastal engineering who creates computer simulations of hurricanes, told me that a stand of cypress just a football field in width can slash a town-leveling, 20-foot-high storm surge by 90 percent.
Which makes it all the more staggering that in recent years an entire industry intent on logging cypress has lawfully sprung up. Some of the timber winds up as boards for home construction or furniture, but most trees are ground into garden mulch. That's right: The last natural stronghold that could stop hurricanes from obliterating southern Louisiana is being pulverized into chips to adorn the very homes that the cypress would save from annihilation. According to the Louisiana Forestry Association, loggers are razing up to 20,000 acres of cypress every year. If the carnage continues apace, Louisiana's strongest barrier between it and an angry sea will be gone in fewer than two decades.
It's sick, it's twisted, it's totally insane, and that's why today Wilson regularly patrols rivers, lakes, and bayous in search of logging operations. He takes careful notes, snaps photos, and forwards the data to the local media, conservation groups, the Environmental Protection Agency (epa), the Army Corps of Engineers, and Waterkeeper's headquarters in New York.
His efforts have infuriated loggers, mill operators, and timber-beholden politicians who say they provide desperately needed jobs to poor counties. Wilson has been threatened, warned to watch his back. A few days before my visit, he discovered Luna, his sprightly seven-year-old Samoyed-German shepherd mix, in a crumpled heap at the end of his gravel driveway. She was dead—intentionally poisoned, his vet later confirmed. "Who do you think did it?" I ask Wilson early one morning as we bounce along a dusty back road in his double-cab pickup. "I have many enemies. Could be anyone," he says, then quickly changes the subject. "Do you like the Alan Parsons Project?" he asks, fumbling for a CD wedged between the front seats.
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http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/louisianas-mulch-madness.html