The Mississippi"-The Threat
Thursday, November 20, 2008SUSIE GHARIB: Protecting the environment is a growing concern for American businesses. It's also a growing concern for one of America's natural wonders: the Mississippi River. Farm chemicals and waste water pollute the river and levees disrupt its natural flow. Nowhere is that more evident than at the river's mouth in Louisiana. As we wrap up our series "The Mississippi," Diane Eastabrook reports the mighty river is now threatening a valuable resource.
EASTABROOK: Family business brings Steve Voisin and his son Jared, into Moncleuse Bay in Louisiana's bayou.
STEVE VOISIN, V.P., MOTIVATIT SEAFOODS, LLC: This is our livelihood. We've been at it almost 35 years.
EASTABROOK On this day the Voisins are checking oyster beds for damage caused by recent hurricanes.
S. VOISIN: You got a couple dead and a couple alive, more alive on that one.
EASTABROOK: The Voisin family has been harvesting oysters in this Gulf of Mexico inlet since the revolutionary war. Increasingly these days their business, Motivatit Seafoods, seems to be at war with Mother Nature. Hurricanes are one problem, the Mississippi River is another. Oysters thrive in a delicate balance of salt water and fresh water. In the bayou, the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River provide that equilibrium. But Steve Voisin says frequent flooding from the Mississippi upsets the oysters' ecosystem.
S. VOISIN: It spreads across the state where the oysters are growing and like this past springtime with the tremendous floods we had, killed a tremendous amount of oysters along the coast.
EASTABROOK: River flooding exacerbates a natural condition called hypoxia. It happens when algae decomposes and robs water of oxygen which marine life need to survive. There is now an explosion of algae growth in the Gulf's coastal waters. Scientists, like Nancy Robalais say the cause is crop fertilizer and waste water that flow into the Mississippi River from as far north as Minnesota.
NANCY RABALAIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LOUISIANA UNIVERSITIES MARINE CONSORTIUM: One of the things we are finding now and we can correlate it with the increase over the last couple of years is increased use of fertilizers in the watershed for the production of corn for ethanol. And we see much higher nitrate, nitrogen levels in the river now than we did historically.
EASTABROOK: The result is a hypoxic zone which now stretches 8,000 square miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana to Texas. At risk is Louisiana's $2.5 billion seafood industry. Producers fear hypoxia could kill the state's oysters and drive shrimp and crawfish farther into the Gulf.
MIKE VOISIN, V.P., MOTIVATIT SEAFOODS, LLC: These oysters were harvested about a week ago.
EASTABROOK: Mike Voisin works with his brother, Steve at Motitvatit Seafoods and is president of the National Fisheries Institute, a non-profit group that promotes the U.S. seafood industry. Voisin says it is hard to put a dollar amount on the potential damage from hypoxia, but he's been bending ears in Washington about solving the problem.
M. VOISIN: Are people listening? Yes. Maybe not necessarily for us, but for the cumulative affect of what, you know, food that's produced in south Louisiana and the potential challenge to that food source could protect this country in case of some sort of a cutoff of imported foods because we eat a tremendous amount of imported foods.
EASTABROOK: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is also listening. Bryon Griffith heads its Gulf of Mexico program. He wants better controls over the pollutants that now stream into the river. Griffith says changes made in the Mississippi's flow are contributing to the pollution problems in the Gulf.
BRYON GRIFFITH, DIRECTOR, GULF OF MEXICO PROGRAM: It's channelized (ph) and it's levied to be a hypodermic needle injection into the Gulf. That did not happen previously. It naturally overflowed its banks and basically nourished these wetlands.
EASTABROOK: After a morning of checking oyster beds, Steve and Jared Voisin head back to shore. And despite the challenges of oystering, Steve remains optimistic about the industry that has been his family's livelihood for eight generations.
S. VOISIN: Our lord, Mother Nature has a way of, you know, bringing us back always. And it would only end if we would decide to get out of the business.
EASTABROOK: Scientists say it took Mother Nature 10,000 years to create the Mississippi River and man only 100 years to alter it structurally and environmentally. But they think the businesses and communities who depend on the Mississippi River have a better understanding now of how important it is to protect it, so they can continue using it for centuries to come. Diane Eastabrook, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, Houma, Louisiana.
