{"id":288134,"date":"2017-01-02T01:20:56","date_gmt":"2017-01-02T00:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/louisianas-oil-and-gas-industry-continues-growing-along-the-coast-its-helping-shrink\/"},"modified":"2017-01-02T01:20:56","modified_gmt":"2017-01-02T00:20:56","slug":"louisianas-oil-and-gas-industry-continues-growing-along-the-coast-its-helping-shrink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/louisianas-oil-and-gas-industry-continues-growing-along-the-coast-its-helping-shrink\/","title":{"rendered":"Louisiana's Oil and Gas Industry Continues Growing Along the Coast It's Helping Shrink"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"GoldenGolden Meadow, Louisiana, in Lafourche Parish. (Photo: Julie Dermansky)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes<\/a>. This\u00a0staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated\u00a0by human activities,\u00a0including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and\u00a0gas\u00a0industry.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is also a problem that is best seen from the sky.\u00a0Thanks to the nonprofit conservation organization SouthWings<\/a>, I was able to photograph the state’s troubled coast for DeSmog during a flight on November 15,\u00a02016.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“<\/span>Flying out along the Louisiana coast and seeing the tattered wetlands from above with your own eyes make the scale of the threat posed by coastal land loss feel strikingly real and immediate,” Meredith Dowling, SouthWings\u00a0associate executive director,\u00a0told me while discussing the group’s\u00a0work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The organization offers flights, piloted by volunteers, with the goal of expanding the public’s understanding of the biodiversity and ecosystems of the American Southeast. “To have a pilot point at a map that shows where land should be and look\u00a0down and see only water, that sticks with you,” she\u00a0said.<\/p>\n

\"OilOil and gas industry site near the mouth of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (Photo: Julie Dermansky)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Dowling is based in New Orleans. For her, the state’s land loss is\u00a0personal.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“<\/span>Coastal land loss and climate change threaten the future of coastal Louisiana and all of us who call this place\u00a0home,” she said. “Having independent eyes monitoring our critically important ecosystems and reporting bad actors to regulators helps protect us all from those who would illegally pollute our\u00a0land and\u00a0waterways.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

During my flight, I photographed active and abandoned oil and gas industry sites that have been named in lawsuits, filed by parish governments, which are making their way through the\u00a0court\u00a0system.<\/p>\n

Plaquemines, Jefferson, Vermilion, Cameron, and St. Bernard Parishes<\/a> have filed multiple…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Golden Meadow, Louisiana, in Lafourche Parish. (Photo: Julie Dermansky) The Louisiana coast loses a football field’s worth of land every 38 minutes. This\u00a0staggering rate of land loss has been brought on by climate change and coastal erosion accelerated\u00a0by human activities,\u00a0including water diversion projects and damage done by the oil and\u00a0gas\u00a0industry.\u00a0 It is also a problem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":288135,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-288134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/288135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}