Tree Huggers, New Orleans & Hurricanes

This article in National Review Online discusses the impact the environmentalist might have had on the devastation in New Orleans. I have blamed them for the ensuing spike in the price of gasoline, as their efforts have ensured that not one new refinery has been built in the U.S. in the last 25 years, coupled with their efforts to detrail drilling in ANWAR.

With all that has happened in the state, it’s understandable that the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club may not have updated its website. But when its members get around to it, they may want to change the wording of one item in particular. The site brags that the group is “working to keep the Atchafalaya Basin,” which adjoins the Mississippi River not far from New Orleans, “wet and wild.”

These words may seem especially inappropriate after the breaking of the levee that caused the tragic events in New Orleans last week. But “wet and wild” has a larger significance in light of those events, and so does the group using the phrase. The national Sierra Club was one of several environmental groups who sued the Army Corps of Engineers to stop a 1996 plan to raise and fortify Mississippi River levees.

Hopefully when this tragedy is examined in retrospect, groups like the Sierra Club get their knuckles rapped for impeding efforts to protect the people who live on the Mississippi from floods.