TagBayou Corne

How local protests are saving the planet

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There’s an old saying in politics: Think globally, act locally. But when it comes to the major issues facing our environment, that idea has been largely honored in the breach. The rise of large and well intentioned lobbying groups such as the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council led a lot of rank-and-file voters to assume that someone was off in Washington, D.C., or maybe...

Louisiana still one bad storm away from environmental disasters

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One consequence of the recent 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was a chance to reflect just how lucky New Orleans and the surrounding parishes have been recently — at least when it comes to weather. Of course, no major hurricane has struck Louisiana in a while, and so far 2015 has been largely free of severe tropical weather. On the other hand, that may also provide a false sense of...

Don’t let Jindal do to America what he’s done for Louisiana and its environment

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You might have missed it — there are, in all seriousness, close to 20 announced or expected Republican candidates for president in 2016 — but the outgoing governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, threw his hat into the ring earlier today. The Ivy League technocrat who once promised to reform government in a state with a rich history of corruption is a dim memory after seven years in Baton...

Progress for the people of Louisiana

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One of the major themes I’ve been writing about frequently in the last year is the rising environmental movement in Louisiana. To be clear, my home state already boasted some fierce fighters for environmental justice, like Marylee Orr and her Louisiana Environmental Action Network, or the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, doing battle with dirty chemical plants. But the shock of recent events such...

A terrible quick fix for the Louisiana sinkhole

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Remember the people who brought you the Louisiana sinkhole, the Texas Brine Co? These are the folks whose drilling activities in a salt cavern underneath a small isolated community about 70 miles west of New Orleans caused problems that were overlooked by state regulators in Baton Rouge and ultimately led to a collapse and a massive water hole near the center of the town. That hole grew to the...

Bayou Corne, natural gas, and the law of unintended consequences

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If there’s been one common theme in both my life’s work as an environmental lawyer and my writing here on this blog, it is that mankind’s ever-growing thirst for fossil fuels has many unintended consequences — and too often these consequences are not good. Over the years, I’ve seen first-hand how drilling and production of oil and natural gas fields across the Deep...

Something’s happening in South Louisiana, and the “Dirty Dozen” doesn’t get it

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Every day, there’s more evidence that the healthy winds of change are blowing through Louisiana. That’s especially true in the southern part of the state which has been battered by events that have been both epic in scale — the BP oil spill and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina — and more prosaic, like the Bayou Corne sinkhole and the day-in, day-out toxins pumped into the...

Big Oil still poisoning Louisiana with radiation

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Most of us are very familiar with the famed quote from the 20th Century philosopher George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For me, I think of those words when I think about oil production and radioactive waste — an environmental problem that America did not fix in our very recent past, and one that we are now repeating in our new...

Hope for the Louisiana governor’s mansion

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The other day, I mentioned, with some enthusiasm, the growing involvement of Gen. Russel Honore in environmental issues across our home state of Louisiana. Honore is a well-known, and enormously respected, figure not just down here in bayou country but across the nation. That is due to his steady hand of leadership in the greatest crisis in modern Louisiana history, the aftermath of Hurricane...

The Louisiana sinkhole: It gets even worse

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The saga of the Louisiana sinkhole just keeps getting worse and worse. Officials with the company that mined the brine under the town of Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish — the Texas Brine Co. — and the Louisiana state regulatory agencies said they were simply shocked, shocked in the summer of 2012 when the earth began to rumble under the bayou community and when dozens of residents...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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