Disciplinary incidents dropped sharply within the Orleans Justice Center with the advent of electronic tablets, which stay on for 17 hours a day, bringing those in the jail new options -- movies, music, videogames, and e-messages -- all of which are tied to new charges -- 50 cents for an e-message and about a penny a minute for streaming content.
The shrimp stopped coming up the Calcasieu River after Venture Global built its Liquified Natural Gas terminal. The river’s ongoing pollution, on top of decades of hazardous waste dumping, earned the Calcasieu the #9 slot on American Rivers’ 2025 list of most endangered rivers.
While prison officials and Farm Line workers disagree about whether the incarcerated workers have all the shade and water they need, Farm Line workers are asking the judge to reverse DOC’s recent policy changes, which make field work even more dangerous in Louisiana’s summer heat, they contend.
In the River Parishes, at the site of the largest slave revolt in history, a new generation is fighting for a cleaner future.
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.
