Rural areas sacrificed to prevent city floods

The term "national sacrifice area" is sometimes applied to a place that is or might be drastically changed by government-regulated human activity. The accuracy of that appellation varies, but there can be no question that it applies to the Atchafalaya River basin in Louisiana, which the federal government is flooding today to eliminate the real risk of catastrophic flooding in Louisiana cities on the Mississippi River, such as Baton Rouge and Katrina-devastated New Orleans.

This is not the first time that rural people and communities have been sacrificed for the preservation of urban places. Earlier in this flood, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blasted levees in Missouri to prevent the flooding of Cairo, Ill., at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. But the phenomenon goes back much farther. (Los Angeles Times map by Lorena I. Elebee)

"There’s a long history here, one that reveals big mistakes by leaders of the conservation movement during the 20th Century. They believed that wise use entailed controlling the nation’s rivers by building levees and draining wetlands to create farmland and promote other development," Timothy Collins, assistant director of the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University, wrote recently in the Daily Yonder. "The technological solutions of the past made money for many of our forebears and salved their consciences in terms of their treatment of the Earth. But they also left a legacy of problems for the present. Use trumped wisdom, and now we pay for it." (Read more)

For today's coverage from The Advocate of Baton Rouge, click here; from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, here; and from The Advertiser of Lafayette, to the west of the flood zone, here.