Sluggish progress on reducing nutrient runoff into the Bay marks an inconvenient truth, but offers lessons for others seeking to clean their watersheds.
Worsening local effects on health and recreation in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin are spurring action on problems that also cause the Gulf of Mexico’s chronic “dead zone.”
This summer’s “dead zone,” a low-oxygen area where the river empties into the sea, could span 5,827 square miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana has the power to call for change.
One year away from a federal deadline to reduce nutrient runoff into the Gulf of Mexico by 20%, increases in tile drainage, livestock and fertilizer use have made success unlikely.
As groups try to influence a federal decision, Louisiana fishers squeezed by current LNG exports call for an end to expansion.
The more carbon dioxide the factories produce and capture, the more federal money the projects can receive.
A new road threatens to cut through the “safe haven” for youth created through the Grow Dat Youth Farm, in what critics see as an unnecessary focus on motor vehicles.
If we bring the right people to the table and think outside the box, we can reduce insurance rates, bring down heat levels within our city, put our youth to work, have strong roofs, dry streets, cooler neighborhoods and be a national leader in climate adaptation.
While industry proponents still see the EPA’s administrator as their foe — deserving of Louisiana prison time, one says — environmental groups say that the agency’s lagging standards lead to increasingly polluted wastewater.
