A Faustian Bargain - Dangers Of Levees Understood 140 Years Ago - CSM

[hatrack]

BATON ROUGE, LA. – It was the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 - the worst river flooding in American history - that prodded Congress to direct the US Army Corps of Engineers to begin an intensive levee-building program in Louisiana.

Those levees and their successors accomplished Congress's goals: They kept the Mississippi River open to shipping and out of New Orleans. But they also represented a Faustian bargain that Louisiana state engineers recognized at least as early as the 1840s. By keeping silt in the channel rather than letting it build up banks or replenish the surrounding landscape, levees raised the river and allowed the land to sink. The region is now trying to deal with the ecological and geophysical consequences.

Even 160 years ago, engineers understood the dangers of the river's rising water levels. "Every day, levees are extended higher and higher up the river - natural outlets are closed - and every day the danger to the city of New Orleans and all the lower country is increased," the state engineer, P.O. Herbert, observed in 1846. Louisiana should "endeavor to reduce this level, already too high and too dangerous, by opening all the outlets of the river," he wrote in a report.

Four years later, his successor, A.D. Wooldridge wrote: "I find myself forced to the conclusion that entire dependence on the leveeing system is not only unsafe for us, but I think will be destructive to those who shall come after us."

EDIT

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0831/p13s01-usgn.html

[NNadir]

1. Tres interessant.

[Boomer]

2. A harbinger of things to come

As you've noted in other threads, we know the perils of both coal and oil industries, and should be weaning ourselves away from them as fast as humanly possible.

But this story illustrates how people will persist in diastrous courses, ignoring the known risks, because it's too inconvenient to stop and change course. It's always going to be a "future" problem, someone else's agony. So where's the motivation to turn it into your own problem now?

This, in a nut shell, is why I have little optimism about our ability to forestall global warming. Rather than avoid it, we are rushing forward full tilt, without brakes or caution.

[NNadir]

3. I wish I could say your point was invalid.

The atmosphere is the levees writ large.

[Boomer]

4. It sucks eggs, doesn't it?

Our species has the intellectual and analytical capacity to predict risk for years, even decades, in the future. We also have the capacity to formulate solutions that would avoid, or at least ameliorate the effects of those disasters.

What we lack is control over our own cultural institutions, not to mention our emotional resistance to inconvenient change. For the majority of the time, change itself is a risk, so I realize it's not surprising that both our culture and our animal instincts support the status quo. Individualism is suspect, innovation is suspect, because the results are unpredictable and the current way works. Keep the devil you know.

But every once in a rare while, change is the answer, change is our salvation.

This is one of those times, but our complex, highly developed technological/business culture is going to oppose that change until the structure collapses.

[NNadir]

5. The ironic thing is that so much of what goes on is motivated by fear.

Sometimes I hear so much about that putative farmer living 5 miles from Yucca Mountain in 600 years who might get cancer, I want to explode.

We fear so much that we actually have developed good reason...to fear.

I wish FDR was here but sadly he isn't. He had it right. Fear is self perpetuating.

My generation of course, has no right to an FDR. We are far too self absorbed and stupid.