Louisiana has a lot of problems with pollution, species and habitat loss, and straight up land disappearing, but what killed Louisiana was the first trenches the oil companies dug through the marshes and estuaries.

They dug paths to get equipment to the coast and the Gulf. Part of the agreement was that they fill the trenches back in, with the mud and dirt they had simply stacked in hills next to the channels they dug. It would have cost a fraction of a percent of what they paid to get the equipment in place and running.

They simply refused, and everyone who could have made them do it was bribed not to care. For 70+ years the fragile Louisiana waterways were inundated with more and more salt water. It would be like putting a hole in your guts, then pouring in a little hydrogen peroxide twice a day every day.

Louisiana had decades to fix this before it got too bad. You could watch it happen over the years. Louisiana is lost, for a a month of oil profits in a single year out of 70.

We could have all had a culture that was a melting pot of all this that was here. Louisiana was killed because they couldn’t take it from us, and had they let us, we would have supplanted their bullshit “culture” with something real.