republicans and the environment

The dinosaurs were lucky to have ruled during Earth's most steady and serene climate. One hundred and sixty million years of perfect weather. They ruled for millennia and perhaps they fell simply of an evolutionary fault, time capsuled in the American alligator.

While crocodiles may hint at the dawn of man, alligators may hint at the dawn of mammals.

Skillet is incredibly thin and wears a gold chain and a white t-shirt and sun bleached whiskers. As our conversation just gets going, a mini-van pulls up and he jumps in. It's his wife driving, and baby in the passenger seat. Skillet introduces me to his family. They live a few miles away, and drive out this way sometimes, to look for big gators. The wife, the baby, maybe you could say they didn't seem that excited about the alligators. 'Skilly larves all-e-gat-ers' the wife says to me, and then they are gone.

The road through Martin Lake is filled with birdwatchers from Alabama, Arkansas, Texas. People have driven all day and all night to get here. Bird watchers tend to be older, and statistically they are also Republican. The hunters and fishermen, statistically Republican. The Louisiana oil industry? The conservative Catholic Cajun shrimpers? The American-loving Vietnamese immigrants brought to the Louisiana Coast as a favor for their help in the war?

Before I left for the bayou, I wanted to learn a little about what the environmental organizations thought about the sinking bayou. When I visited the Sierra Club website, I was distracted by a prominently displayed series of animated jokes about the President and about his political party - the one that Americans call the Republicans. The Republicans were oil hungry monsters driving around monstrous Hummers. The President was evil. Middle Eastern oil. And so on.

And I thought, isn't this The Sierra Club? Have they not just isolated the half of the country they most need to convince? It’s no secret that elected Republicans have had a reputation of being funny on these sorts of issues.

But that wasn't always the case. A Republican - Theodore Roosevelt - introduced modern environmentalism to the world and created the world's first national park system. Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act, the clean air act and consolidated several federal agencies into what is called the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of the most profound environmental legislation passed in the United States has been under the pen of past Republicans.

The sinking bayou problem is a perfect case of an environmental problem that would benefit from the inclusion of Republicans. Or more specifically, the sinking state makes a good case for ending the partisanship of American environmental reforms.

Louisiana is a Republican state whose last two Republican Governors failed to publicly recognize that there was a problem at all, even though the foundations of the problem were recognized as early as the nineteen sixties. The consequence of that oversight, if prolonged, means that within fifty years the destruction of America’s second largest fishery, huge costs for Louisiana's oil industry, and the so-called sportsmen industry. The alligator watchers. The lady from New Orleans fishing for catfish.

In time, the lady from New Orleans would have no incentive to visit bayou country. The out-of-state swamp hunters, coastal fishermen and birdwatchers will face an ecosystem that has literally vanished under the sea. And all three major industries of bayou country – shrimping, oil, sports tourism - will be faced with incredible costs or will themselves vanish. Worse yet, if a hurricane actually hits New Orleans, the integrity of the coast will be so poor, the entire region may simply...sink.

Last winter, conservative Louisiana elected a Democrat from bayou country as Governor, and among her top priorities was the restoration of coastal Louisiana. To stop her state from sinking.

Now, to a lot of out-of-state environmentalists, the election of Kathleen Babineaux Blanco is the happy ending. I see it differently. If environmentalism remains partisan, the party with the monopoly on the issue could easily sway from a focused agenda. If one party has a monopoly on an issue, the execution of the solution loses quality, just like the products and services of a monopoly.

In an issue like Louisiana coastal restoration, it is impossible to disassociate environmentalism from its economic consequences. What's interesting is that a Republican state relied on electing a Democrat to solve an issue (protecting industry) that typically Republicans thrive in.

Governor Blanco may be taking the wrong route to Louisiana's problems. Although her current plan, approved and supported by the President – to which she should be commended for – calculates a current cost of two billion. But the reality is that this current plan implies future spending and future doubt. Her policies will demand costs of twenty, thirty, maybe forty billion dollars.

She's got the Army Corps of Engineers working for her, and she's got thumbs up from the folks in bayou country. Her heart is in the right place, but her solution requires federal micromanagement and big government spending.

For the sake of argument, let's say that swamp maverick Jon from Gibson is right, and that there is a simpler solution at a fraction of the cost. If you just let the Mississippi flood a third its water into the Atchafalaya (coincidentally an amount that will not impede barge navigation on the Mississippi), you’re just letting the Mississippi do what it was meant to do. To spill and build land in Louisiana. Getting the Army Corps of Engineers to manage a huge project to divert and micromanage water to get it to do your bidding will be monumentally expensive, and quite possibly a failure. Continuuing to build more levees like bandages does not imply long term land-building. Levees, after all, are part of the problem.

Republicans like to think that a free market works because human nature is compelled to perform best when unrestrained by economic bandages. The point isn't that Republicans might do a better job than Blanco, the point is as long as Republicans stick their noses at rational environmental reforms, there will always be an inefficient monopoly on protecting our national resources.

If you just let the basin flood, the coast will rebuild itself in time, nobody doubts that. That’s a simple solution – it sounds like free market thinking to me.