When Tom Reddoch was growing up in southern Louisiana, on a pencil-thin strip of land flanked on one side by the Mississippi and on the other by a marshy inland waterway, he and his friends used to brag to each other that this was the greatest place on Earth. Children had different expectations back in the 1950s: what they meant was that they would never go hungry.
"The one thing we could be certain of is that we would never starve down here. In those days, this was one great protein factory."
Fishing and oyster harvesting was easy, as the nutrient-rich swirl of the freshwater Mississippi and the sea spawned wildlife in endless abundance. But over the course of his lifetime, Reddoch has seen about 70% of that extraordinary biodiversity fade away through the combined onslaught of overfishing, the laying of oil pipelines and man-made diversions to the Mississippi.
Now the region – which includes nearly half of America's wetlands – faces its greatest threat of all, one which, Reddoch fears, could kill off what little environmental riches are left.
"This could be the coup de grace. It could be the last blow," he says.
All along this levee-lined spit of land that stretches from just south of New Orleans down to Venice – a fishing and oil town which, as the name implies, stands on the seafront – people are bracing themselves for the arrival of what could become the worst environmental disaster the US has ever seen. About 50 miles offshore from Venice is the site of Deepwater Horizon, the oil drilling rig operated by BP that exploded on 20 April, leading to the disappearance and presumed death of 11 workers and the spewing of up to 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea.
Unless BP succeeds in plugging three leaks some 5,000ft (1,500 metres) undersea, the disaster will within a matter of weeks exceed even the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe off the coast of Alaska.
With the oil being pushed into fragile marshland around Venice by strong winds this morning, Louisiana declared a state of emergency and the Obama administration declared it a spill of "national significance".
"The one thing we could be certain of is that we would never starve down here. In those days, this was one great protein factory."
Fishing and oyster harvesting was easy, as the nutrient-rich swirl of the freshwater Mississippi and the sea spawned wildlife in endless abundance. But over the course of his lifetime, Reddoch has seen about 70% of that extraordinary biodiversity fade away through the combined onslaught of overfishing, the laying of oil pipelines and man-made diversions to the Mississippi.
Now the region – which includes nearly half of America's wetlands – faces its greatest threat of all, one which, Reddoch fears, could kill off what little environmental riches are left.
"This could be the coup de grace. It could be the last blow," he says.
All along this levee-lined spit of land that stretches from just south of New Orleans down to Venice – a fishing and oil town which, as the name implies, stands on the seafront – people are bracing themselves for the arrival of what could become the worst environmental disaster the US has ever seen. About 50 miles offshore from Venice is the site of Deepwater Horizon, the oil drilling rig operated by BP that exploded on 20 April, leading to the disappearance and presumed death of 11 workers and the spewing of up to 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the sea.
Unless BP succeeds in plugging three leaks some 5,000ft (1,500 metres) undersea, the disaster will within a matter of weeks exceed even the 1989 Exxon Valdez catastrophe off the coast of Alaska.
With the oil being pushed into fragile marshland around Venice by strong winds this morning, Louisiana declared a state of emergency and the Obama administration declared it a spill of "national significance".
