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Len, as you know I have been preaching for years that the solutions for coastal restoration and hypoxia abatement must be integrated in an ecosystem-based management context because both problems are part and parcel of the disruption of the Mississippi River system. See http://www.umces.edu/president/EBM%20CB-LA.pdf. In particular, it will be necessary to significantly reduce nutrient pollution of the river so that restoration of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya deltas can proceed while minimizing collateral impacts on water quality and ecosystem health. As Garret Graves, chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, told the Gulf Hypoxia Task Force: “The Mississippi River built almost all of South Louisiana. We will rely upon it to help us rebuild what has washed away over the last century. The river must be healthy in order for us to succeed.”

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Finally I think there are several basic and critical science questions that need resolution so as to assure the public that our science is credible and that we can reasonaby predict the outcome of the expenditure of billions of public dollars. These questions include: (1) what would be the outcome of releasing all the flow of the Mississippi-Atchafalaya river system within the shallow estuarine zone; (2) how rapidly is subsidence occurring and where and why; and (3) how much sediment would be needed to restore Louisiana’s inundated landscape to some sustainable level and are there sufficient sources available.

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Jim Cowan seems to be accusing the numerous scientists who have published scores of papers on Gulf hypoxia or have been involved in several high level national assessments of: hyperbole; flawed, exaggerated, and subjective arguments; ignoring their ethical and moral obligations; discrediting science; obscuring the underlying treats to Gulf fisheries; and, if those weren’t bad enough, advertising. These are rather harsh words to be throwing around, even if one is a paragon of objectivity. It’s hard to see how such serious accusations are helpful.

Jim says that he can find no evidence that hypoxia, wetland loss, fishing or anything else, for that matter, has affected Gulf fishery landings, but he “infers” that it is likely that “cumulative impacts will write the last chapter about a fishery ecosystem that reached a tipping prior to a precipitous and perhaps irreversible decline.” If that is true, why would one risk letting extensive and recurring oxygen depletion on the Louisiana shelf get worse, coastal wetlands further deteriorate, or wasteful by-catch discards to continue?

Jim seems to react viscerally to reference to the Dead Zone, a term initiated by the press rather than scientists, but now used world-wide and with its own Wikipedia listing. He might regard this as hyperbole, but get used to it, the popular reference to the Dead Zone is here to stay. Scientists have always been clear that there are organisms living in the Dead Zone, although we await with interest the publication of the observations by Cowan’s group that ground fish and shrimp are abundant on the bottom under oxygen concentrations less that 2 mg/L. This is at odds with all other scientific observations and the actual practices of shrimpers, who know better than to lower the trawl where the Dead Zone is well formed. Jim also seems also to have fallen into the shifting baseline trap in claiming there is no evidence for hypoxia effects on fishery landings because the have not declined between 1985 and 2007 (Bianchi et al. 2008). Hypoxia was already severe and widespread by 1985–the appropriate comparison is with the period prior to the 1970s when recurrent hypoxia first began to develop. The atlas that Rez Darnell produced for MMS clearly showed that the highest summer biomass of bottom fish during the 1960s was found on parts of the shelf now occupied during the summer by hypoxia rather than bottom fish. There have also been dramatic changes in the dominant fish species caught in bottom trawls since the 1930s when Gordon Gunter first conducted scientific surveys on the inner Louisiana shelf (Chesney and Baltz, 2001).

AS Doug Daigle points out, the national policy to abate hypoxia by reducing nutrient pollution has already been determined based on extensive scientific assessment and political compromise. Rather than “advertisers,” the scientists who participated in these assessments have functioned as what Roger Pielke, Jr. calls Honest Brokers of Policy Alternatives. The science behind this policy was reviewed in depth and confirmed by an independent expert panel convened by the EPA. The EPA panel considered the issues of non-riverine organic matter and physical processes affecting water column stability in reaffirming “the basic conclusion that contemporary changes in the hypoxic area in the northern Gulf of Mexico are primarily related to nutrient fluxes from the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin.” Meanwhile, Cowan and his co-authors (Bianchi et al. 2008) express “concerns about the monetary costs of nutrient reductions in the Mississippi Basin” without a shred of evidence or analysis of what the benefits and costs are. This is not objectivity and rigor, but the opposite of hyperbole, meiosis, or purposeful understatement.

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The national policy effort on Gulf Hypoxia has been stymied by lack of resources to implement any comprehensive action for almost a decade. The national Action Plan that was developed in 2000 explicitly stated that, while questions remained about the impacts of hypoxia, the importance of the national resource at stake (the Gulf fishery) justified a national investment to protect it. Specifically, this involved a national investment in actions (programs, projects, etc.) to reduce nutrient loading in the Mississippi River Basin.

This effort, and the voluntary framework adopted to implement it, were pragmatic policies, but they were not funded by the Bush administration or Congress. Some parties have propogated overestimates of the costs of reducing nutrient loadings, and for obvious reasons. But the failure to make even a modest investment in protecting a resource as important as the Gulf fishery continues to be striking.

The Gulf Hypoxia Task Force and Action Plan were developed prior to the boom in biofuel production in the Mississippi River Basin, which has resulted in millions of acres being put back into production that were formerly in conservation programs (with concurrent increases in fertlizer application on those lands), just over the past two years. That development was not anticipated in 2001, and unfortunately the Task Force was prevented from effectively addressing it even after it became apparent.

It’s a striking trend, yet Louisiana academics are arguing about “hypoxia hyperbole” rather than how to respond to a dramatic land use change that has serious implications for the state’s resources. Perhaps we can add that to the cumulative impacts that will be studied in years to come.

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