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Rant warning - proceed at your own risk

Sunday I took the wife to see the National Botanical Gardens in Washington D.C. ostensibly to see the plants but really to just soak up some warmth in the greenhouse.

A new display had been put up about the salt marshes in Louisiana and their importance in protecting the state from hurricane damage. They are endangered due to re-routing of water which replenishes the salt marshes with silt, mud and other nutrients.

Part of the display was why we should care. According to the display we should care because the oil and gas industry would have to pay billions of dollars to protect the oil and gas pipelines and platforms from "open water" conditions if the marshes disappeared.

The rant begins here - I lived and worked in coastal Louisiana for three years and I can tell you from personal, on site experience that they forgot to mention that a significant amount of damage has been done by those same oil and gas industry cutting channels and laying pipeline through these same salt marshes. What should be solid "islands" are crisscrossed with open trenches which cause erosion and direct wave and wind flow past the marshes! I was so mad I almost took a marking pen to make an appropriate entry on the display!

Your tax dollars are being spent to help save these marshlands when a good deal of the damage was done by the industries which are not paying, which reap the greatest benefit because they can continue reaping free profit!