Where the Alligators Roam

The United States spends more on military arms, equipment and personnel than any other country. More than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and England combined, according to the National Priorities Project. We sell most of the weapons that countries like Saudi Arabia, England and others buy.In no small measure, the business of the United States is war.Between our foreign policy and our defense spending, we create markets for weaponry and wars and then pivot to respond to the siren cries of those markets.And, while the U.S. Defense Department stands resolute in its commitment to respond to climate change to protect its bases and national security interests, the Department is a major source of greenhouse gases as a profligate burner of fossil fuels.The No War 2017 Conference at American University in Washington in September sought to find paths to link the anti-way and peace movements with the climate and environmental movements. That effort naturally puts the U.S. military at the center of the debate.The conference was a project of World Beyond War, an international peace organization.I was invited to speak about the successful fight to prevent the open burning of 16 million pounds of munitions propellant at Camp Minden following an explosion of a small amount of some of the materials in 2012. After a strong grassroots effort that engaged thousands of northwest Louisiana citizens in the fight, the area’s congressman, one Senator, and a dedicated state representative.While at the conference, I conducted several interviews,

Dr. Willie Parker was born into poverty and Christianity in Birmingham, AL. He became a doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine. He later joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii’s John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu.During his first 12 years of practice, Parker did not provide abortion services for any of his patience. While some of his Christian friends were opposed to it and believed abortions to be immoral, Parker says he avoided dealing with the moral complexity of the issue by not providing the services himself. He did observe other providers perform the procedures, but he kept his distance from the controversial subject by not directly providing services.Things changed when a change of leadership at the hospital led to the end of providing abortion services there. It sparked a crisis at the hospital and a rebellion among some physicians and nurses who saw the necessity of the legal services.When some of his peers decided to create a clinic separate from the hospital where they would provide the mostly poor women the abortions they wanted, Parker came to a personal reckoning with abortion.

For six years, there has been an epic David v. Goliath battle being fought in Louisiana over the fate of public education in our state. The Goliaths in this fight are members of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) who owe their elections to a group of out-of-state pro-charter school billionaires who have bought that board in each of the two most recent election cycles.The front man for the Goliaths is Louisiana Superintendent of Education John White, who has direct personal ties to a number of the billionaires, including former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Los Angeles businessman Eli Broad, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.White spent about seven months running the Recovery School District before being named superintendent in January 2012 by the freshly-bought BESE members who won election in 2011. Then-governor Bobby Jindal served as in-state cheerleader for White until the two had a falling-out (real or feigned) over support for Common Core.The Davids in this struggle have been teachers and friends of public education who see the charters as an attack on teaching as a profession and as an attack on the civic role that public schools play, namely creating citizens.Among those opposing the store-bought charter advocates are a handful of activist, bloggers, and authors all of whom happen to be directly connected to public eduction and believers in its central purpose.Mike Deshotels is one of the stalwarts in that group.

Jack McGuire met then-Governor Earl K. Long during Long’s 1959 campaign for Lieutenant Governor (in those days, Louisiana governors were barred from seeking re-election to successive terms). McGuire was a senior at Newman High School in New Orleans. He’d been assigned a paper on the state elections that year, and chose to look at Long despite the fact that Jack’s father David McGuire had been kicked out of LSU in the 1930s (along with six other journalism students) for refusing to apologize to Huey Long for calling for him to stop interfering with the coaching of the LSU football team. By 1959, David McGuire was chief administrative officer for New Orleans Mayor Chep Morrison — who had run against (and lost) to Earl Long in the 1955-56 governor’s race (primary elections then were late in one year with runoffs early the next. Governor’s were inaugurated in May then). “I didn’t think I had too much to learn from the anti-Longs, so I talked to my father about following Earl,” Jack recalls. They first connected in New Orleans during that campaign. Earl, who’d suffered a breakdown while addressing the Legislature in April of that year, was subsequently committed by his wife Blanche to a mental hospital in Galveston, TX, and then Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville. Jack actually attended the hearing where Earl was released from Southeast Louisiana Hospital after firing the director of the hospital system and then having the new director fire the head of the hospital itself. Earl ran third in the race for Lieutenant Governor. His political career seemed finished. Uncle Earl, as Long was called, decided that he was not done. He chose to challenge incumbent Democratic Congressman Harold McSween for the Eighth District Congressional seat that Earl’s brother George had held for eight years until his death in 1958. Earl was all in. Jack and a couple of high school friends decided to follow Earl on the campaign trail for a couple of weekends during the summer of 1960. What Jack saw in the desperate campaign that Earl Long waged moved him in a fundamental way. He spent a significant amount of his adult life working to claim Earl’s essence from the sensationalistic, often tawdry press coverage and academic writing that portrayed the three-time Governor and brother of Huey Long as a crazy man. Jack gathered an incredible collection of articles, photographs, memorabilia, and interviews with people who knew Long and/or were involved in that 1960 campaign, which ultimately took Uncle Earl’s life. Flooding from Katrina in Mandeville claimed much of Jack’s collection of material on Earl Long. But, because he had shared it with so many people in an effort to get them to write the story of that last campaign, he was able to reassemble his materials and even added to the collection. It became clear that Jack was going to have to write the book on Earl’s last campaign if it was going to be written. University Press of Mississippi sent the original manuscript to readers. One liked it; one hated it. UPM said that if Jack would take into consideration the comments from the readers, they would be willing to take another look at it. Jack and the late Water Cowan had written an earlier book on Louisiana governors that UPM published. Jack turned to me to help him edit the book and get it into shape for reconsideration. We worked together on it for about seven months in 2014 and 2015. We sent off the revised manuscript in April 2015, the weekend before Jack went in for knee replacement surgery. The UPM editors loved the new approach and committed to publish the book. Jack left it to me to deal with the New York copy editor UPM chose to work with us, and to track down many of the photos that ended up in the book. Jack’s son Barrett helped cover the cost involved with printing the additional photographs that contribute to much to the quality of the book. The book,

Dr. Rick Swanson is chair of the UL Lafayette Political Science Department. He was in the audience for the February 2016 LCG Council meeting when an hours-long public comment session regarding the Afred Mouton that sits in the point of a plaza in front of Lafayette’s International Center.Swanson was struck by the inaccurate statements made by some defenders of the statue (Mouton was a West Point trained, slave-holding native of Opelousas whose father founded what became Lafayette) made to the council and the public regarding the origins of the Civil War and the nature of relations between blacks and whites in the area.That launched a still-ongoing research project that sent Swanson scouring the records of the Library of Congress, the Center for Louisiana Studies, and public archives seeking to document the true history of the war and the true nature of the relationship between blacks and whites here.It’s an ugly tale that the Mouton statue, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1922, both symbolizes and distorts. The statue was one of hundreds the UDC erected across the country after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized segregation in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision.As anyone who reads history knows, separate was never equal. It took 58 years before the Supreme Court reversed Plesssy with its Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in 1954.

"For the second successive August, Louisiana is getting hit hard by rain. Last year, it was three days of heavy rains that dumped 20-inches of rain or more across much of south central and eastern Louisiana. This year, rains associated with Hurricane Harvey have been soaking parts of the state for days, with more rains predicted as the storm prepares to re-enter the Gulf of Mexico.

The August 2016 floods and the floods developing now might not be directly attributed to climate change, but they separately show the influence of climate change. Both floods are at least partially the result of the warming of the Gulf of Mexico and of the atmosphere. Higher temperatures allow for higher humidity. Water from the Gulf evaporates more quickly filling the higher capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture. That moisture comes down as rain over land.

South Louisiana and south Texas are both flat. We do not drain quickly. Too much rain over too long a time results in flooding.

And here we are. This is the new normal.

Albert Slap is a former law professor and environmental attorney who recognized that there was no readily available means for individuals to make sense of the implications of climate science and the phenomena happening around us. His Florida-based, Coastal Risk Consulting, set out to solve that riddle by combining publicly available science and data resources with detailed elevation tools to help provide risk assessments for residential and commercial property owners.

Florida and much of the east coast of the United States have begun to experience tidal flooding — that is, day-time flooding not associated with storms or even rain. In this interview, Slap says that the late summer and fall are the times when the flooding is most pronounce due to the interplay of prevailing winds and the moon's gravitational effect on tides.

Florida shares with Louisiana the problem of sinking land in the midst of rising sea levels. Mortgage bankers and insurance companies are taking note. Slap posts trade publication stories regularly on LinkedIn about how actuaries in each industry are beginning to change the way they view climate change and the risk and costs that will be associated with it. He believes that in the not too-distant future mortgages will be scarce for properties exposed to climate risk.

As Hurricane Harvey batters Texas, the National Flood Insurance Program is set to expire on September 30 (the end of the current fiscal year for the federal government). As those who weathered any of the disasters that have struck Louisiana and Texas in this century know, NFIP insurance is just about the only chance homeowners have to approach full recovery from these calamities. But, the program is billions in debt due to payouts made from storms here and elsewhere.

What will happen after September 30? Will Congress renew the act, even temporarily? What will happen in the flood next time?

Some in Congress want to attract private insurance companies into the NFIP. Insurance companies deal with risk. Climate change and climate change-induced disasters are taking on the look of certainty, not chance. How does the idea of risk figure into that? How much will it cost to get the coverage (if it's available)? What are people living in coastal areas to do if the coverage is not available when they suffer losses?

Climate change is happening now and getting real for more people — even those who profess not to believe that it is man-made. Albert Slap has seen it coming. He talks about it in this podcast."

"Nancy MacLean's Democracy In Chains not only sheds light on the history of the ideas that have come to dominate the best funded wing of U.S. conservatism (more accurately defined as radical libertarianism), it also sheds considerable light on the idea...

"Scientists at 13 federal agencies have released the final draft of their report on the impact of climate change on the United States. The report says that the country is already experiencing the effects of climate change. The release of the report constitutes a form of whistleblowing since it was done without the permission of the Trump administration.

There is growing evidence that mortgage and insurance companies take climate change seriously because of the growing book of evidence regarding sea level rise. Tidal flooding on the Eastern Seaboard from Miami to Boston is already occurring. Louisiana's coastal land is sinking even as sea levels rise.

Three Louisiana residents share their perspectives on the scientific, engineering and humanitarian challenges facing Louisiana, its people and its leaders as we begin to confront the existential threat posed by climate change and natural forces.

Bob Marshall is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter based in New Orleans. Marshall earned those awards (and others) for his insightful work on Louisiana's wetlands both as a natural and economic resource, and as a buffer protecting Louisiana's coastal communities from storms.

Marshall continues his work of making sense of climate science for laymen.

Bren Haase is chief of research and planning for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the Louisiana entity charged with responding to the disappearance of Louisiana's coast, reversing some of that, and protecting our communities as well as possible from future storms that will assuredly batter our coast in coming decades.

Johanna deGraffenried was with the Gulf Restoration Network when her segment of this show was recorded. In it, deGraffenried talks about the unpleasant truth that even if we succeed in saving some of our coast, many residents will no longer be able to live in the communities they now call home. GNR produced abandonment zone maps using data from the CPRA and the Census Bureau. The late Dr. Ezra Boyd produced those maps for CPRA.

Three interviews conducted separately that give a compelling view of the challenges we face going forward."

"Americans are accustomed to things just working. Flip a switch and the lights come on. Open a tap and clean water flows from it. But, as investments in essential infrastructure have declined, problems with things like drinking water have begun to crop up more frequently.

The problems with lead contamination of the Flint, Michigan, water system persist even as the headlines have faded. Louisiana has not been immune to these issues. The state of Louisiana rescued the St. Joseph water system from problems. Baton Rouge is plagued by salt water intrusion as ExxonMobil and Georgia Pacific continue to suck huge amounts of water from the Southern Hills Aquifer for use in their industrial processes (while other companies use river water). Water systems in several Louisiana parishes have been found to contain brain-eating amoeba (a problem that can usually be cleared up by increasing the amount of chlorine added to the system).

Lafayette Utilities Systems' main water well field is located on what was once the north side of the town — just across the railroad tracks around Mudd Avenue and Simcoe Street. That area abuts an abandoned railroad yard that included a roundhouse and train cleaning and repair facility. For seven decades or more, solvents and chemicals of various kinds were used to degrease engines and apparatus, much of it being allowed to spill onto the ground where it was absorbed.

Kim Goodell of WaterMark Alliance says the contamination from that now-abandoned rail yard poses an imminent threat to Lafayette's water system as traces of contaminants from the rail yard have turned up in samples taken from the nearby LUS wells. In any given day, LUS draws about 20 million gallons of water from the wells in that field.

Two other factors add urgency to the situation.

The first is that recent studies have found that the Chicot Aquifer (the primary groundwater resource in south Louisiana) rises very near the surface of the ground near the rail yard. In some spots, the aquifer is as little as 30 feet below the surface. That would indicate that any chemicals in the abandoned rail yard don't have far to travel before they have reached the aquifer.

The second factor is the proposed plan to build the I-49 Connector through downtown Lafayette. An elevated segment of the road would run directly through the rail yard, resulting in hundreds of pilings being driven through the site and possibly into the aquifer, driving contamination toward the aquifer in the process.

Beyond the public health threat, the contamination near the water well field could force LUS to relocate its wells and go through the expense of having to reconfigure the structure of the water system.

Kim discusses the problems with the rail yard, the lack of any comprehensive study of the extent of the contamination of the site, and the kinds of threats these pose to Lafayette's drinking water."