Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

In the spring of that year, heavy snowmelt, along with weeks of intense rain across the Midwest, resulted in record-breaking water levels. To spare New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway, about thirty miles upriver from the city. (The Bonnet Carré diverts water into Lake Pontchartrain; when all the gates are open, the flow through it exceeds that of Niagara Falls.)

Two separate vats served as the source for the mini-Mississippi. One provided clear water. The other held the mud of the Little Muddy, though not real mud. This was simulated sediment, imported from France and composed of exactingly milled plastic pellets—teensy, half-millimeter-wide pellets for large grains of sand and even teensier pellets to represent finer particles.

Here, in black and white, was Louisiana’s land-loss dilemma. In the days before floodgates and spillways, a super-wet spring like that of 2011 would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside.

Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had instead washed out to sea.

Much of Plaquemines lies below sea level—six feet under, people sometimes say. This arrangement is made possible by levees—four sets of them. Two run along the river, one on each bank. Another two—known as “back levees”—run between the parish and the Gulf, to prevent the sea from rolling in.

Where other schools might have a gym or a ground-floor cafeteria, South Plaquemines High has enough empty space to park a fleet of tractor trailers. (The school’s mascot is a swirling hurricane.) Many of the homes in the parish have been similarly elevated. One house we passed had been raised to a particularly vertiginous height; Simoneaux estimated its pilings were thirty feet tall.

like the rest of the delta, BA-39 had come out of the Mississippi, just not in the usual way. “Picture a massive eight-foot drill bit on the bottom of the river,” he said. As the drill spun, it had gouged out sand and mud. Enormous diesel-powered pumps had sent this slurry gushing through a steel pipe thirty inches in diameter. The pipe had run for five miles, from the west bank of the Mississippi, over the river levees, under Route 23, across some cattle fields, over the back levees, and finally into a shallow basin of Barataria Bay. There the muck had piled up until bulldozers spread it around.

CPRA’s somewhat redundantly titled “comprehensive master plan” calls for dozens more such “marsh creation” projects, each with a price tag of millions or, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars. But Louisiana is locked in a race with the Red Queen, and in this race it has to move twice as fast just to stay even.

In what’s become known as the “Great Flood of 1927,” two hundred and twenty-six crevasses were reported. That flood inundated twenty-seven thousand square miles across a half-dozen states. It displaced more than half a million people, caused an estimated $500 million worth of damage (more than $7 billion in today’s money), and marked a very wet watershed.

In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of water-related legislation “since the world began.”

Thanks to the “project beneficent,” the crevasse period came to an end. But with the end of river flooding came an end to fresh sediment. In the succinct formulation of Donald Davis, a geographer at LSU: “The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed.”

The agency’s master plan calls for punching eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya. The openings will be gated and channelized, and the channels will themselves be leveed.

Kolker braked at an enormous pothole. It had been patched with asphalt, and this patch had developed a new pothole of its own. “Subsidence happens on a couple of different scales,” he observed. “You have the big scale, where the old marshes are degrading. And then you have smaller-scale features, like this.”

When you’re in the city, it’s hard to imagine the entire place sinking underneath you, yet it is. A recent study that relied on satellite data found some parts of New Orleans dropping by almost half a foot a decade. “That’s one of the fastest rates on earth,” Kolker noted.

But New Orleans’s world-class drainage system, like its world-class levee system, is a sort of Trojan solution. Since marshy soils compact through dewatering, pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved. The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required.

An unusually large storm, Katrina was far from a worst-case scenario. As it churned north in the early-morning hours of August 29, 2005, its eye passed to the east of the city. This meant the strongest winds also passed to the east, over towns like Waveland and Pass Christian, in Mississippi. Briefly, it seemed that New Orleans had been spared. But the storm was driving water into a network of channels along the city’s eastern edge.

Water was also surging into Lake Pontchartrain. As the hurricane pushed inland, this water was forced south, out of the lake and into the city’s drainage canals. The effect was like emptying a swimming pool into a living room.

Proposals to allow parts of the city to revert to water were floated and then, one by one, rejected. Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.

These pharaonic structures have kept the city dry through several recent storms, and, from a certain perspective, New Orleans now appears substantially better protected than when Katrina hit. But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another.

Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot.

Isle de Jean Charles, in Terrebonne Parish, lies fifty miles southwest of New Orleans and a few decades ahead of it. The island can be reached by a single, narrow causeway, which used to ride over land. Time it right and you can now fish from your car.

Since Billiot was a child, Isle de Jean Charles has shrunk from thirty-five square miles to half a square mile—a loss in area of more than ninety-eight percent.

The canals pulled in salt water, and, as the salinity rose, the reeds and marsh grasses died. The die-off widened the channels, allowing in more salt water, causing more die-off and more widening.

Residents of the island, as well as the families that have moved off it, are virtually all members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe. Comardelle is the band’s secretary, Billiot is a deputy chief, and the band’s chief is Billiot’s uncle.

As I wandered past empty homes plastered with NO TRESPASSING signs, I could see the economic logic of the island’s “planned deconstruction.” At the same time, the injustice was pretty glaring. The Biloxi and the Choctaw had come to Louisiana after they’d been dispossessed of ancestral lands, farther east. The Isle de Jean Charles Band had been able to live peacefully on the island only because it was too isolated and commercially irrelevant for anyone else to take an interest in.

Until the mid-1800s, an enormous logjam on the Atchafalaya, which was dense enough to walk across, complicated this choice. But once the jam was removed—by, among other means, nitroglycerine—more and more water began flowing out of the main stem of the Mississippi. As the flow on the Atchafalaya increased, it widened and deepened.

In the ordinary course of events, the Atchafalaya would have kept widening and deepening until, eventually, it captured the lower Mississippi entirely. This would have left New Orleans low and dry and rendered the industries that had grown up along the river—the refineries, the grain elevators, the container ports, and the petrochemical plants—essentially worthless.

Manly found himself wandering the desert owing to a series of unfortunate decisions. Three months earlier, he and some five hundred other argonauts had assembled in Salt Lake City, planning to journey together to gold country, in northern California. They’d arrived in Salt Lake too late in the season to take the most direct route, over the Sierras, and so, to avoid getting snowed in, they’d jogged to the south, along a pack trail, toward Los Angeles.

A few weeks into the trip, they’d encountered another contingent of forty-niners, led by a fast-talking New Yorker named Orson K. Smith. Smith carried a crude map, which, he claimed, showed a different, faster path west. Most of the members of Manly’s group decided to follow Smith, only to reverse course a few days later, when they found their way barred by a canyon so deep it couldn’t be crossed by wagon.

Sitting around the campfire a few nights after Manly had broken down in tears, one man described the region as the “Creator’s dumping place,” where he “left the worthless dregs after making a world.”

Just at the edge of Death Valley, spirits briefly lifted. On a stony ledge, the party chanced upon a cavern that contained a pool of warm, clear water. A few of the men plunged in; one recorded in his diary that he had “enjoyed an extremely refreshing bath.” Manly peered into the water and noticed something strange. The pool was surrounded by rock and sand. It was miles from any other water body. Yet it was dancing with fish. Decades later he would remember these tiny “minnows,” each “not much more than an inch long.”

The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis.

The pool, which is about sixty feet long and eight feet wide, constitutes Cyprinodon diabolis’s entire habitat. This, it’s believed, is the smallest range of any vertebrate.

In the Death Valley area alone, there were at one time eleven species and subspecies of pupfish. One is now extinct, another is believed to be extinct, and the rest are all threatened. The Devils Hole pupfish may well be the rarest fish in the world.

Even in midsummer, the pool receives only a few hours of direct sunlight each day.

I noticed a bathtub-type ring around the pool and asked Chaudoin about it. She explained it was a function of the pull of the moon; the aquifer beneath us was so massive that it experiences tides.

In the desert, the temperature varies dramatically between night and day, winter and summer. The water in the cavern, heated geothermally, maintains a constant year-round temperature of 93°F and a consistent, albeit very low, concentration of dissolved oxygen. The conditions of high temperature and low oxygen should be fatal. Devils Hole pupfish have evolved—somehow—to cope with these conditions and, just as important, only with them.

Later, I did a calculation. Altogether, the pupfish at Devils Hole weighed in at about a hundred grams. This is slightly less than the weight of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

In his early twenties, Manly hunted his way to Wisconsin. In one three-day period, he killed four bears. He ate so much bear meat he spent the next day vomiting.

What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence. If earlier losses had unfolded gradually—so gradually that not even the participants would have been aware of what was going on—the advent of technologies like the railroad and the repeating rifle turned extinction into a readily observable phenomenon.

One reads CAUTION: PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT, and the second: WARNING! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE: USE EXTREME CAUTION. The first time I visited, I asked about the signs. I was told they’d been put up to deter politically engaged if chemically clueless protesters from trying to break in and trash the place.

In the cavern, pupfish live for about a year; in the tank, they can hang on for twice as long. When I visited, Devils Hole Jr. had been in operation for six years. It held about fifty adult fish. Depending on how you look at things, this is a lot of pupfish—fifteen more than the total population on earth in 2013—or not very many.

It was reproducing far faster than in the wild, and somewhere along the way it had developed a taste for pupfish young. One day, Feuerbacher was watching footage from a special infrared camera that’s used to capture images of larval pupfish when he saw one of the beetles, which is about the size of a poppy seed, go on the attack.

Not coincidentally, Cyprinodon diabolis’s troubles also date back to this period. In January 1952, President Harry S. Truman added Devils Hole to Death Valley National Park. In a proclamation, Truman said his goal was to protect the “peculiar race of desert fish” that lived in the “remarkable underground pool” and “nowhere else in the world.” That spring, the Department of Defense detonated eight nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, about fifty miles north of Devils Hole.

By the end of 1970, the pupfish’s spawning area had shrunk to the size of a galley kitchen. At this point, a biologist from the University of Nevada came up with the idea of constructing a sham shelf for the fish to breed on. Made out of lumber and Styrofoam, it was installed in the deep end of the pool. Since the deep end receives even less light than the shallow end, the National Park Service rigged up a bank of one-hundred-fifty-watt bulbs to make up the difference.

because the aquifer is so large, Devils Hole experiences what are known as seismic seiches—in effect, mini-tsunamis.)

Some saw the fish as an emblem of the desert’s fragile beauty. Others saw it as a symbol of government overreach. SAVE THE PUPFISH stickers appeared on car bumpers. Then rival stickers appeared. KILL THE PUPFISH, they said.

Devils Hole pupfish release just one pinhead-sized egg at a time. Often these get eaten by the pupfish themselves.

“To watch a small school of pupfish arc through a tiny pool of desert water is to discover something vital about wonder,” Christopher Norment, an ecologist, wrote after a visit to the real Devils Hole.

Consider the “synanthrope.” This is an animal that has not been domesticated and yet, for whatever reason, turns out to be peculiarly well suited to life on a farm or in the big city.