A Landscape Already Desolate

Josh Levin is on the Gulf Coast:

If the wetlands go, Louisiana will go along with them. The state's seafood industry would crater, and every bit of marsh that's lost means a higher storm surge when a hurricane careens through the Gulf of Mexico. But the state's wetlands were dying long before the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Indeed, as you fly over Grand Isle and Barataria Bay, the oil spill seems almost irrelevant. On the helicopter ride over from New Orleans, the Jefferson Parish police officers on board seem less awed by the scope of the oil spill than by the "amazing land loss" in southeastern Louisiana over the last few decades.