The Army Corps controls the design and operational procedures of flood reduction, so it doesn’t matter whether the governor selects the levee board members or if a panel picks candidates – or even if we choose the first nine people coming out of church on Sunday.
In the River Parishes, at the site of the largest slave revolt in history, a new generation is fighting for a cleaner future.
Nick Chastil and Katy Reckdahl on working conditions at Angola's Farm Line, with an eye on summer heat, and execution in Louisiana, following the first state execution in more than a decade.
With budget losses to both the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, mitigation grant programs to address riverine flooding could be impacted substantially. According to FEMA, every federal dollar spent on flood mitigation yields $7 in benefits.
The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, a journalism collaborative based at the University of Missouri School of Journalism in partnership with Report for America, publishes an examination of how legal and policy changes will impact wetlands in the basin.
The 1985 "Swampbuster" law — which has protected millions of acres of U.S. wetlands from being cleared and plowed — is being challenged in court.
The Yazoo Pumps project purports to reduce flooding while protecting farmers and minimizing environmental harm. But concerns over wetland degradation have stymied past, smaller versions of the project.
Communities across the state are testing the economic value of grant programs to build new wetlands that reduce flooding risk. In the upper Midwest, researchers found that wetlands save nearly $23 billion a year that would otherwise be spent combating floods.
While the science is clear – wetlands have lots of benefits and we know how to build more of them – the future is not. The growing Wax Lake Delta provided data for the now-stalled Mid-Barataria sediment diversion, which is designed to rebuild wetlands in nine parishes along the Louisiana Gulf Coast.
In the wake of federal rollbacks, states are now choosing whether to further degrade or expand wetlands protections. Some conservationists fear that a loss of protections will increase the price of mitigation credits while decreasing the demand.
