editor: Understanding the real problem behind Katrina... excellent read... rt
Bayou Farewell: "Bayou Farewell
News: The Louisiana Bayou has been sinking for years, and now it's almost gone—taking New Orleans and Cajun culture with it.
Mike Tidwell
Interviewed By Erik Kancler
October 3, 2005
Mike Tidwell knew nothing about the environmental perils facing the Louisiana Bayou when the Washington Post sent him down there, in the spring of 1999, to write about Cajun culture. Yet, having hit on the idea of “hitchhiking” the shrimp and crab boats of the Bayou, he soon came upon numerous and puzzling signs that something was seriously awry in Bayou Country: groves of sun-bleached and leafless Oak trees, half-drowned and hundreds of feet from land; lines of telephone poles planted in swampland; cemeteries where only the tops of graves remained visible.
Bewildered, he asked the locals for an explanation, and everywhere he heard variations on the same theme---from shrimpers, crabbers, and fishermen, no less than from local scientists and conservationists. In the words of a local shrimp-boat captain, upon whose vessel Tidwell first hitched a ride, 'All dis land around us, as far as you can see, is droppin' straight down into de water, turnin' to ocean. Someday, Baton Rouge, one hundred miles nort' of here, is gonna be beachfront property.'"
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