April 1, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under Water,” a reporting piece on Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, one of “the fastest-disappearing places on Earth.” What I like about it is Kolbert’s active, participatory, first-person observation. She flies over Plaquemines: 

Flying at an altitude of two thousand feet, I could make out the houses and farms and refineries that fill the strips, though not the people who live or work in them. Beyond was open water or patchy marsh. In many spots, the patches were crisscrossed with channels. Presumably, these had been dug when the land was firmer, to get at the oil underneath. In some places, I could see the outlines of what were once fields and are now rectilinear lakes. Great white clouds, billowing above the plane, were mirrored in the black pools below.

She visits Louisiana State University’s Center for River Studies, in Baton Rouge, where she walks across an amazing scale model of the Mississippi delta (“I pulled off my shoes and tried to walk from New Orleans to the Gulf. By the time I got to English Turn, my feet were wet. I stuffed my soggy socks into my pocket”). She describes the effect when projectors in the ceiling above the model are switched on:

Suddenly, the fields of Plaquemines turned green and the Gulf blue. A satellite image of New Orleans glowed in the crook between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain. The effect was dazzling, if also a little unnerving, as when Dorothy steps out of sepia-toned Kansas into Oz.

She visits a “marsh creation” project known as BA-39 (Enormous diesel-powered pumps had sent this slurry gushing through a thirty-inch steel pipe. The pipe had run for five miles, from the west bank of the Mississippi, over the river levees, under Route 23, across some cattle fields, over the back levees, and finally into a shallow basin of Barataria Bay. There, the muck had piled up until bulldozers spread it around”). 

She boards a boat and goes out on the Mississippi to view new land created by the river’s sedimentary flow (“We sped in and out of unnamed bayous. A large alligator sunning itself on a log plopped into the water as we passed”). 

She explains the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s plan to save the Plaquemines by punching “eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya.” 

She gets on a bike and goes on a “subsidence tour” of New Orleans with coastal geologist Alex Kolker (“ ‘Pumping is a big part of the issue,’ Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. ‘It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive-feedback loop’ ”). 

And she visits the Old River Control Auxiliary Structure located eighty miles upriver from Baton Rouge. She says, 

If there is a single feat of engineering that can stand for the centuries-long effort to dominate the Mississippi—to make it “go where it listeth not”—the Auxiliary Structure might be it. Unlike a levee or a spillway, built to stop the river from flooding, it was put up to stop time.

Kolbert’s “Under Water” is another piece in her ongoing documentation of man’s destruction of the planet. Her outlook is bleak (“Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future”), but her writing is a delight.