If the the future of food is hazy right now due to overconsumption, globalization, and climate change, the future of seafood is even murkier. The global fish catch topped out sometime in the 1990s, leaving many fish populations more or less permanently overstressed. Aquaculture has grown to satisfy rising global demand - but fish farms have brought environmental devastation to many a coastal zone. Is the answer to pack up those coastal operations and move fish farming offshore? That's the question I attempt to answer in this Yale Environment 360 piece. I started out with the assumption that, whatever the …

In a post last week on the bureaucratic inflighting over Louisiana's coastal restoration efforts, I took a "the system's broken" point of view. Chris Macaluso, a spokesman for the state's coastal restoration efforts, sent me an email that elaborates on some of the ways the system is broken. The state government -- which ought to have strong voice in how billions of dollars are spent to rebuild, well, a large area of the state -- is effectively marginalized by the Corps of Engineers, which is jealously guarding its own turf and funding. In a nutshell: A federal task force in …

It seems that in the fraying marshes of southern Louisiana, we can't afford to maintain both shipping and coastal restoration at the same time. Louisiana's biggest freshwater diversion project -- essentially, a set of gates in the Mississippi River levees that let river water to flow over marshlands, depositing much-needed silt -- must be closed because it's affecting ship anchorages nearby. That requires dredging, which would cost $140 million over the next 15 years, and there's no money available for that: The West Bay diversion allows 20,000 cubic feet per second of sediment-laced water to flow into the bay, with …

Here's a question I'd like to know the answer to. Hurricane Gustav dealt New Orleans a glancing blow, passing it by to the west. Yet as the world saw, the city's Industrial Canal -- a large ship channel running north-south close to neighborhoods -- filled nearly to the top, and there was some alarming, if mostly harmless, overtopping due to wind and waves. Why did this happen, and what does it say about the city's vulnerabilities in future storms -- and Louisiana's disappearing coast? We sort of know the answer to this. The Industrial Canal is connected to the open …