For the Mississippi to make such a change was completely natural, but in the interval since the last shift Europeans had settled beside the river, a nation had developed, and the nation could not afford nature. The consequences of the Atchafalaya’s conquest of the Mississippi would include but not be limited to the demise of Baton Rouge and the virtual destruction of New Orleans. With its fresh water gone, its harbor a silt bar, its economy disconnected from inland commerce, New Orleans would turn into New Gomorrah. Moreover, there were so many big industries between the two cities that at night they made the river glow like a worm. As a result of settlement patterns, this reach of the Mississippi had long been known as “the German coast,” and now, with B. F. Goodrich, E. I. du Pont, Union Carbide, Reynolds Metals, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Georgia-Pacific, Hydrocarbon Industries, Vulcan Materials, Nalco Chemical, Freeport Chemical, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, Stauffer Chemical, Hooker Chemicals, Rubicon Chemicals, American Petrofina—with an infrastructural concentration equalled in few other places—it was often called “the American Ruhr.” The industries were there because of the river. They had come for its navigational convenience and its fresh water. They would not, and could not, linger beside a tidal creek. For nature to take its course was simply unthinkable. The Sixth World War would do less damage to southern Louisiana. Nature, in this place, had become an enemy of the state.Seriously, it's some of the best long-form journalism that I have ever read.
When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantationposted by beesoar at 5:19 PM on September 30, 2011 [2 favorites]
is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value,
has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow
neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it,
and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit,
the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch,
and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its
value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds
itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around
it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles
of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth.
Watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times,
and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them,
the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to
cut a ditch.
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posted by doyouknowwhoIam? at 2:26 PM on September 30, 2011