James Lee Burke Foresees Calamitous Sludge Dooming His Louisiana Wetlands

[marmar]

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Listening to James Lee Burke reminisce about Louisiana wetlands before the oil spill is a lush, nearly tactile experience.

“It was like the Garden of Eden back in those marshes years ago,” he says of the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation’s largest swamp. “I thought it was the most beautiful place in the United States. At sunrise there would be this stillness, like the first day of Creation, and the sun looked like cotton candy inside the cypress trees.”

Then the 73-year-old bestselling novelist drops the hammer.

“That’s all going down the drain because of what’s occurred,” he says.

I spoke by telephone with the writer, who lives part of the year in what he describes as “a little bitty town about eight miles outside” of Missoula, Montana.

He spends the rest of his time in New Iberia, Louisiana, the setting for his popular Dave Robicheaux novels. “The Tin Roof Blowdown” made Hurricane Katrina a central character while starkly depicting the storm’s human toll in death and derangement. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aXTq33eOx8Pc

[babylonsister]

1. I love this writer. I bet he is heart sick. nt

[voteearlyvoteoften]

2. Read James Lee Burke

You will not be disappointed. Many fine novels set in the wetlands of Louisiana.

[asjr]

3. I am a long-time fan of his. The way he

caresses his words before putting them on paper makes him a poet and well as a writer of prose.

[Zorra]

4. One of my favorite authors. He often writes about the desecration

of the swamps and bayous in his novel.

I'd bet my life savings that he will write about this disaster soon.

[SoCalDem]

6. The desire to "drain the swamps" to sell "bad land" started the destruction

Poor folks who had always lived in the less desirable parts of the deep south, started to see dollar signs & sold out to developers who were eager to market land to unsuspecting northerners who could not afford the pricier coastal land.. It's the same thing that has happened (and is still happening) to family farmers who happened to have a lot of land. The "new" supplants the old, and in the process, ruins the land itself.:(

Humans have a nasty habit of not respecting anything until it's gone or damaged beyond repair:(..(Especially Americans)

[Mimosa]

5. He's saying what some LA folks here have been posting since before Katrina

Excerpt from the article:

Burke worked his way through college as a sort of scout for Sinclair Oil Corp. in the 1950s. He knows from experience that oil has already worked its way into the area’s canals, eroding a root system vital to the integrity of the marshlands.

“There are 10,000 miles of extant canals that have been cut over the decades through the Louisiana wetlands,” he says.

“The first time there’s a storm surge -- and it’s probably going to happen this summer -- that oil is going to be driven into those canals. That’s the story that’s not being covered.”

Work of God

Burke fears that sludge washing into the wetlands will destroy the place once and for all.

“It is just an absolute tragedy. Very few people understand how fragile the wetlands are,” he says. “There’s a symbiotic relationship between everything that lives in a marsh, and when you impair it with toxic waste and infuse it with poison, it’s like tampering with the work of God.”

While Burke at one point wants to speak off the record, he changes his mind because “there’s no point in avoiding” the truth.

“This is going to remain not just the worst industrial calamity in this country’s history, but maybe in the world’s history, outside of acts of war. The magnitude of this is just immeasurable.”