Overview

TIMED FOR THE FIFTEENTH COMMEMORATION of Hurricane Katrina's dreadful epic of destruction and loss, suffering and death, KATRINA'S WAKE: Journeys on a Hurricane Coast takes the reader along with lifelong journalist and nature writer Doug Lee, also a photographer and expatriate native son of the Central Gulf Coast, on a post-storm pilgrimage to a part of the world he has known well and loved deeply all his life. There he searches out what tattered remnants can still be found of an older way of life, conducted over extensive travels to New Orleans and surrounding areas of Louisiana and Mississippi in the critical years of 2006 to 2009, when the region's comeback was just beginning, whole neighborhoods of New Orleans remained all but abandoned, and the storm's debris and wreckage still littered the landscape. Katrina's Wake is a window into that tenuous period when come-backs were in question, and, further, an in-depth exploration of the Gulf Coast with an eye to the much longer view, evaluating the role that Louisiana's disappearing coastal wetlands have historically played in mitigating hurricanes' damage to New Orleans, and how they can be restored to significant portions of their former area, presently about 4,000 square miles of marshes, bayous and swamps. That's decreased by a third from its original natural extent since whole-scale levee-building along the Mississippi River undertaken nearly a century ago cut off their main source of fresh water and sediments borne by the Big Muddy's annual floods, and as you read this, they're still eroding at the rate of a football field's worth of invaluable wetlands every hour and a half, round the clock, every day of the year. Lee reports on the steps that can and must be taken to restore these protective and incredibly fertile wetlands, home at some point in their life cycles to every commercial species of fish, shrimp or crustacean that swims in the Gulf of Mexico. Equally critical, they constitute a protective bulwark for South Louisiana's towns and cities, most notably New Orleans, by lowering a hurricane's storm surge a foot for every three miles of wetlands it covers as it plows inland. This phenomenon has become well-known in South Louisiana as providing 'Speed Bumps for Hurricanes', a phrase that's become a rallying cry for restoring the coastal marshes through major engineering projects channeling the Mississippi's overflows into strategically critical areas of damaged or destroyed wetlands..These and a great many other aspects of the storm and its aftermath are explored in this book, as well as the region's long-term prospects, resting on a foundation of extensive reportage by the author for articles published in National Geographic in the 1980s and '90s, when he was a senior staff writer and editor in the magazine's Science Department. Those early travels and the more recent journeys he undertook from 2006 into 2009 to research and write Katrina's Wake have given him a knowledge and intimacy with the quirky life and colorful history of settlements and their vividly individualistic inhabitants who have resided beside the river south of New Orleans in the Mississippi River Delta, all but forgotten by modern readers or lovers of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast's history. Traveling with him, we meet a vivid cast of swamp frontiersmen born a century late, fierce and determined urban survivors, and embattled oystermen, fishermen and and shrimpers, academics and scientists all united in one thing: their love and grief for this coast's many indelible cultures and its wounded natural inheritance, whose future lies now in our hands, and their determination and dedication to revivifying the life abundant they once knew so well.Lee's fascination with this region is both professional and personal, as he spent most summers of his pre-teen and teen years driving tractors and milking cows, barefoot in his Uncle Frank's dairy barn on the family's Mississippi Coast farm.

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