Actually just a sidenote here:
In southeast Louisiana, all the canals they dug created saltwater intrusion, which, wouldn’t be an issue if we hadn’t intervened in other ways.
BUT, since we diverted part of the water of the Mississippi River to protect New Orleans, all of the sediment isn’t reaching the delta to restore what salt water intrusion is eroding.
We disrupted natures ability to heal itself in the name of commerce.
To this day, we lose 2 football fields per year to saltwater intrusion. Our delta was our strongest protection against hurricanes, since they created a land barrier to starve storms of energy before they reached more densely populated areas.
(And since we’ve made the climate worse with constant fossil fuel consumption those storms are only getting stronger but that’s a story for another post)
So yeah. Canals kind of doomed New Orleans and most of southeast Louisiana. Grand isle is a shadow of what it once was and a bunch of other smaller communities don’t even exist anymore.
So uh. Yeah. I don’t care if canals are the most efficient foolproof way of transporting cargo. They’ve fucked up the wetlands of my home in a way we can never truly recover from. Like they’re TRYING but the state government dumps all the coastal wetland money into oil subsidies instead of restoring what we’ve lost.
Because it always comes back to money and “efficiency” with these people
