Wildlife Refuge in Danger
Read the full article on FoxNews here: Report: Second Oldest U.S. Wildlife Refuge in Danger of Being Lost
Report: Second Oldest U.S. Wildlife Refuge in Danger of Being Lost
Saturday, July 12, 2008
NEW ORLEANS — The nation’s second oldest national wildlife refuge, a chain of barrier islands southeast of New Orleans, is in danger of being lost unless the islands are restored, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday.
The Chandeleur and Breton islands have been battered by hurricanes in the past four years and they took a pounding from Hurricane Katrina, which “reduced the islands by one-half of their pre-storm size,” the agency said in a new report.
The nation should pour money into restoring the refuge, the report said.
“Current management has not been able to keep up with the rate of land loss,” the report said. “Circumstances are now at a turning point. We can either let things continue to deteriorate or we can expand restoration efforts.”
The islands form an arc in the Gulf of Mexico southeast of the swamps and marshes that surround New Orleans. Remote and accessible only by boat and aircraft, the islands are important nesting grounds for a variety of birds, chief among them brown pelicans, terns and black skimmers.
Read the full article at the link above.
Hmm.. this is kind of sad, but if you restore something that degraded naturally, what are you accomplishing? Should we try to hook calves back to their glaciers? Restore mountains and buttes back to their original shape and size? I’m curious as to what the readers think…
if its natural erosion, then honestly I think resources should not be wasted. It would be a tremendous amount of tax dollars to do that kind of restoration work. Yea if they restored them then whos to say another few years down the road hurricanes and hurricanes erode them away again. what spend another 10 billion to fix them again? I think not
July 12th, 2008 at 11:46 am