In the Gulf Coast region the petroleum industry is the biggest economic sector, and greenhouse-gas emissions are the highest in the nation. Most of the big industry is out of compliance with federal environmental regulations that are weak and inconsequential to begin with, literally watered down by the corporate-owned and increasingly privatized U.S. government.
The Congress is mandated by the Constitution to be the voice of We the (clay) People, and the voice is loud and clear in favor of environmental and social destruction.
A hurricane named Katrina was not to blame for the wetland loss.
What Was Beautiful is Broken [13]
Mainstream media played the battering storm theme over and over but has never addressed the root causes of the rising storm surge: the destruction of the Gulf Coast environment by and for big industry. Millions of acres of Gulf Coast wetlands have been ruined by the military industrial complex.
Like its nearby Gulf Coast neighbors, Louisiana is overrun with industry out of control. Chemical refineries, agribusiness, shipbuilding, paper mills, sugar and timber plantations, industrial trawling and shell-fishing, defense and aerospace industries have obliterated and polluted mile after mile of pristine natural ecology once worthy of World Heritage Site status. Louisiana is rich in flora and fauna that depend upon the wetlands, harboring over 28% of all wetlands in the lower 48 states. [14]
Nearly 70 million acres of coastal plain forests once stretched from Virginia to Florida to eastern Texas. Once dominated by longleaf and other species of pine trees, the indigenous forests have mostly been obliterated by logging, plantations and petroleum infrastructure.
With more than 352,000 acres of private plantation lands in Louisiana, Weyerhaeuser Corporation has been a leading destroyer of natural forests. The lower coastal plain was once a continuous moist pine barren known as Gulf Coast pitcher plant bogs, but less than 3% of the pitcher plant bogs remain. [15] Less than 1% of the original vast grasslands and coastal plain prairies of the western Gulf region remain intact. The giant cypress trees of the bayou wetlands have been mowed down everywhere, and Wal-Mart sold cypress mulch from Louisiana.
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