Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost approximately 1,800 square miles of land due to the subsidence of the states coastal wetlands. By the early 1970s, public officials and private citizens were starting to become aware of the crisis on the coast, and a broad agreement developed among state and federal representatives that action was needed to address the problem. Over the course of nearly forty years, policymakers in Louisiana and Washington, D.C., implemented a series of laws and regulations meant to protect vulnerable ecosystems like the states wetlands. In the 1980s, officials also started crafting policies to help restore Louisianas shrinking coastline. While considerable progress has been made to slow the subsidence, stopping or reversing coastal erosion has proven to be nearly impossible. Inefficient bureaucratic management, insufficient funding, and the failure to substantially alter land-use and water-use policies in Louisiana have undermined the states conservation and restoration efforts since the 1970s. The catastrophic consequences of Hurricane Katrina forced officials in Baton Rouge and the federal government to correct some long-standing problems, but the implementation of a fully comprehensive restoration and management plan remains piecemeal even a decade after the devastating 2005 hurricane season. This dissertation examines the broad context of the political and economic climate that contributed to the development of coastal erosion in Louisiana and closely examines the state and federal policy responses to the crisis between 1970 and 2009.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-10212016-123203 |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Creators | Costa, Rebecca B. |
| Contributors | Long, Alecia P., Culbert, David H., Burstein, Andrew, Shindo, Charles J., Reams, Margaret A. |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-10212016-123203/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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