Articles by Emily Gertz

A possible smear campaign fingers greens for flooding in New Orleans

The Gonzales Justice Department may be seeking to orchestrate a smear campaign blaming environmentalists for the flooding of New Orleans.

The Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger reports that the following email was sent to various federal attorneys this week by the Justice Department:

SUBJECT: Have you had any cases involving the levees in New Orleans?

QUESTION: Has your district defended any cases on behalf of the Army Corps of Engineers against claims brought by environmental groups seeking to block or otherwise impede the Corps' work on the levees protecting New Orleans? If so, please describe the case and the outcome of the litigation.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment to the paper, because the message is "an internal email."

How I spent my summer vacation … at the movies

I’d love to tell you about my summer close to nature — how I whiled away the days on a hidden Maine-coast isle, picking blueberries in the early morning and watching seals cavort in the sea. But the truth is, I spent quite a few of my July and August afternoons in a different sort […]

A Los Angeles Times story tars wetlands activists without telling the whole story

... or so you can imagine Michelle Malkin reworking the old lawyer joke with glee this past weekend, when a reader alerted her to "A Barrier That Could Have Been" in the Sept. 9 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

In a nutshell, the newspaper reported that in 1977, wetlands preservation activists successfully sued under the National Environmental Policy Act to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from building a massive hurricane barrier meant to protect New Orleans. They proved to a U.S. District Court judge that the Corps had failed to do a thorough evaluation of the project's possible environmental impacts. The St. Tammany Parish and local fishers had also opposed the project.

The LAT reporters wrote, "Now the question is: Could that barrier have protected New Orleans from the damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina?"

That's the wrong question.

Student journalists reflect on the New Orleans they once knew

As noted in today's Daily Grist (you do read the Daily Grist, don't you? Of course you do!), Fish and Wildlife Service staff are just getting to work assessing the ecological damage to two wildlife refuges near New Orleans: Bayou Sauvage and Big Branch Marsh.

I've never been to New Orleans or the Gulf Coast. I avoid places that might serve up more heat and humidity than I endure on the average August day in New York City; find blackened anything inedible; and own my heritage as a repressed Northeasterner who finds the whole Mardi-Gras-public-nekkidity-license-to-debauch thing a little scary.

But reading about places like Bayou Sauvage makes me really regret it. Below the fold, a description from some student journalists who attended the Society of Environmental Journalists' 2003 annual confab in New Orleans: