From the hill country in the north to the marshy lowlands in the
south, Louisiana and its citizens have long enjoyed the hard-earned
fruits of the oil and gas industry's labor. Economic prosperity
flowed from pioneering exploration as the industry heralded
engineering achievements and innovative production technologies.
Those successes, however, often came at the expense of other
natural resources, leading to contamination and degradation of land
and water. In A Thousand Ways Denied, John T. Arnold documents the
oil industry's sharp interface with Louisiana's environment.
Drawing on government, corporate, and personal files, many
previously untapped, he traces the history of oil-field practices
and their ecological impacts in tandem with battles over
regulation. Arnold reveals that in the early twentieth century,
Louisiana helped lead the nation in conservation policy,
instituting some of the first programs to sustain its vast wealth
of natural resources. But with the proliferation of oil output,
government agencies splintered between those promoting production
and others committed to preventing pollution. As oil's economic and
political strength grew, regulations commonly went unobserved and
unenforced. Over the decades, oil, saltwater, and chemicals flowed
across the ground, through natural drainages, and down waterways.
Fish and wildlife fled their habitats, and drinking-water supplies
were ruined. In the wetlands, drilling facilities sat like
factories in the midst of a maze of interconnected canals dredged
to support exploration, manufacture, and transportation of oil and
gas. In later years, debates raged over the contribution of these
activities to coastal land loss. Oil is an inseparable part of
Louisiana's culture and politics, Arnold asserts, but the state's
original vision for safeguarding its natural resources has become
compromised. He urges a return to those foundational conservation
principles. Otherwise, Louisiana risks the loss of viable uses of
its land and, in some places, its very way of life.
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