NYT has a feature up about the Louisiana coast. Pretty interesting.

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persuaded allies in the Legislature to create the Lafitte Area Independent Levee District. Funded by a small property tax, the levee authority pays [the mayor] $12,000 a year as its president, on top of his mayoral base salary of $79,538, according to legislative audits.

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Since prospectors first discovered oil in Louisiana 117 years ago, 57,465 wells have been drilled in 10 coastal parishes, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Thousands of miles of canals have been dredged through marshes for access. They broaden each year from erosion caused by boat traffic and storm currents, even as their spoil banks block natural water flow. A 50,000-mile thicket of pipelines connects rigs to refineries and tank farms across the state.

After years of laissez-faire regulation, some consequential finger-pointing has begun in the courts, where parish governments and private landowners are for the first time suing energy companies to rebuild their land. To date that burden has fallen mostly on taxpayers, even when the property being repaired is owned by oil and gas interests, an examination of state records shows.

The impact extends far beyond Louisiana’s shoreline.

The slender coastal zone, stretching west from Breton Sound across the mouth of the Mississippi to Sabine Pass, contains 37 percent of the estuarine marsh and the largest commercial fishery in the contiguous 48 states. Its ports support 24 percent of the nation’s waterborne commerce and a fifth of its oil supply. The coast provides winter habitat for five million migratory waterfowl. Along with man-made levees and flood walls, it is the buffer that keeps the Gulf of Mexico from draining into New Orleans, much of which sits below sea level.

Last year, Louisiana officials acknowledged for the first time that even with a vast restoration program, even with tens of billions of dollars they do not have, they no longer believed they could build land fast enough to offset the losses. Plotted on a map, their projections show 40-mile swaths, encompassing Jean Lafitte and everything below it, splashed in red to denote that, without action, they will disappear within decades. The crisis has become existential, with policymakers confronting choices about which communities they can afford to rescue.

In the starkest illustration, a $48 million federal grant is being used to relocate the nearly 100 residents of Isle de Jean Charles, a narrow spit in lower Terrebonne Parish that has lost 98 percent of its land over 60 years. In a national experiment, the money will be used to buy land and build homes for those willing to move to higher ground on a sugar farm near Houma, about 40 miles north.

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