Part 6 - Extremist Environmentalists

After the 1965 hurricane swamped New Orleans the Army Corp of Engineers started to shield the city with flood gates similar to those that protect the Netherlands. Work stopped in 1977 when an environmental group called “Save our Wetlands” filed lawsuits claiming that the Corps’ environment impact statement was deficient. While the environmentalists blame the Corp, the Corp let the environmentalists win the day and proceeded to build less controversial levees that failed when Katrina struck.

Litigation delay involving governmental bodies like the Corp can effectively kill necessary projects. That is too often the intention of groups like the Save the Wetlands and the Sierra Club. Delay or try to kill any project they decide to attack. Large federal projects cannot proceed unless executives and legislatures at several levels agree on the same course of action at the same time. As delays turn into years, funds dry up and elections change the players.

National environmentalist groups and federal agencies share the belief that federal power is usually a force for good. Their disagreement is who should wield the power - activists or bureaucrats? Federal power is often a force for bad and ditto for state governments, but when the feds intervene, things often get worse because of the blurring of the lines of responsibility. When Washington decides which project to fund, state officials can take credit for bringing in federal bucks and blame the feds for the mistakes in priorities. Federal government tends to do more than is strictly necessary.

The Clinton administration argued that Congress should return many programs, including some environmental ones to the states in order to “focus the energies of the federal government on the parts of the task for which it has a distinct advantage, and rely on the states for activities they are more likely to carry out successfully.” Unfortunately, more bureaucracies were create that tend to try to micromanage everything they can. Government bureaucracy has grown so huge that intelligent decisions are difficult to make at any level of government. Had the corps been given the responsibility of protecting New Orleans without interference from the radical environmentalist and an overbearing federal government and had the State of Louisiana been made responsible for its own destiny, the destruction of Katrina would have probably been mitigated. If not, then the responsibility would have at least been correctly identified and reconstruction would now be proceeding under new management.

That’s the way successful private industry works. While the capitalist system may not be perfect, far too many failures are occurring in this bureaucratic society with few ways to truly assess the blame and hardly any demotions or outright firings occurring. When administrations changed in year 2000, many of us thought we would have smaller government with states and communities made responsible for much of their own destinies. Instead, government has become much larger, more expensive, and the buck easier to pass. As long as people believe that the federal government should increase the budget to include “earmarks” for everybody, the more the feds are going to tell the recipients where they will spend this “free” money.

So New Orleans environmentalists have now lost their wetlands at a cost of maybe a quarter of a trillion dollars and thousands of lives ruined and with no promise that the city can survive another major disaster. With 20,000 acres of wetlands now destroyed, I wonder what havoc the extremists and fumbling bureaucracies are doing today.

There are a growing number of people who want the government to relieve them of all responsibility, bow to any “herd” pressure and guarantee safety with little responsibility, no matter what the expense is to others. It’s unfortunate but the lack of willingness to accept responsibility penetrates to all levels of government. Sometimes I feel I am part of a dying breed of people and elected officials who believe in accepting responsibility without so much governmental and bureaucratic assistance.

Parts of this article come from “Saving our Environment from Washington: How Congress Grabs Power, Shirks Responsibility and Shortchanges the People by David Schoenbrod, a professor at New York Law School and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. I personally have studied much that went wrong with the State of Louisiana and New Orleans and was disappointed to see Nagin gain reelection. The amounts of money being dumped into that sorry situation are more than alarming.