Ain't There No More: Louisiana's Disappearing Coastal Plain (America's Third Coast Series) Hardcover – Illustrated, February 6, 2017

This book is about Louisiana coastal erosion, the man-made causes, and the long neglect by government. Impressive photos and images from the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. This book covers almost 100 years of Louisiana Coastal Plain history with many rare and previously unpublished images and photos. It is full of old maps and charts. Hardly a page in this book does not have awesome images and photos. Covers floods such as the 1927 Mississippi flood. Text includes aftermaths of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. I collect books on Louisiana and this one is simply awesome. The book has text and photos that documents so many little known facts about Louisiana culture and ethnic groups, geology, industries.

Nice coffee table book

Chocked full of natural science, cultural history and photographs, this book is a treasure. For denizens of the Gulf Coast (not just Louisiana), it can break hearts. Author Davis has spent 40 years on coastal research and it shows, baby it shows.

Very interesting look at what’s happening in our state. Well written and extremely well documented.

The story of Louisiana has been told many times, each time with more knowledge and perspective. The destruction wrought by Big Oil is now well known. But Ain’t There No More, from the Third Coast series is a remarkable collection of history, photos, maps and stories that show total disregard for the physical state. Big Oil only gets mentioned briefly. There’s a whole lot more destruction going on.Maps going back centuries show the constant ebb and flow of land and water. Louisiana is ever changing. One estimate says a football field size lot is created or destroyed every hour. But settlers refused to work with nature; they insisted on bending nature to their wants. Wetlands were considered worthless – even though they provided game, furs and feathers for industry. So levees and canals redirected the Mississippi – with disastrous results. The canals mean all the silt flows right into the Gulf of Mexico, and when added to constant erosion and damage from hurricanes and flooding, Louisiana is in dire shrink mode, with no compensating factors. Since the 1930s, it has lost nearly 2000 square miles of coastal land. Neverending flooding meant locals built homes on stilts, or at very least lived on the second floor. Roads to connect coastal settlements were pointless, because either the road or the settlement could disappear at any time.Agriculture in Louisiana is a litany of failure. Cotton, sugar, cattle, strawberries and rice all failed. In the case of rice, grids of canals to flood rice paddies eventually allowed saltwater incursion, ruining both land and water supplies. Sugarcane fermented in the frosts and became worthless. Gulf shrimp have been so polluted by the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, even the federal government says no one should eat more than four a month. In every case, Man’s hand can be seen working against nature.On the human side, Louisiana suffered greatly when slavery ended, but learned to use child labor as badly as anyone had ever seen. And Louisianans are sedentary; they don’t move away to find a better life. It is not uncommon to find tenth generation families living in the same place. For a state so rocked by disaster and hardship, that is remarkable, and worrying.Ultimately, the book disappoints a little, because it seems to want to be a museum catalog rather than a view of the world. All the old photos, bills of lading, contracts, share certificates and maps are interesting, but the collection needs editing if it wants to make a point. And although it is nicely laid out, with a lot of brown shaded sidebars and full color whenever the originals had it, you really need to see it on paper. The electronic version is a minor nightmare of zooming in and out, hundreds of times, to read the tiny type of the highly detailed captions and try to read the original text in the images of the documents. Stick to paper for this one.David Wineberg

I received a free electronic copy of this study from Netgalley, Carl A. Brasseaux, and University Press of Mississippi. Thank you all, for sharing your fine work with me.This is an extensive look into the damage done to the Mississippi delta region by previous damming and leveeing over the last century and more, in an effort to relieve flooding. This is the same sort of damage you will see in western river basins after damming, multiplied by x5 or x8 due to the massive amount of water and soil that annually travel down the Mississippi - the nation’s largest drainage basin drains about 41% of the contiguous United States into the Gulf of Mexico at an average rate of 470,000 cubic feet per second. Because the water doesn't slow and dabble as it once did all the soil and minerals wind up in the Gulf of Mexico - and Louisiana at the current escalating level of loss is in serious trouble. Between 1956 and 1978 more than 294,000 acres of coastal marsh (460 square miles) became open water. We continue to lose 18 to 22 square miles per year.Add in misuse of the land, storm surges and hurricane damage. Since 1947 Louisiana has suffered through Hurricanes Flossy, Audrey, Ethel, Carla, Hilda, Betsy and Camille, Juan, Andrew, Georges, Isadore, Ivan, Cindy, Ernesto, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Irene, etc. Each onslaught of storm surge destroys more of the coastline, marshes and trembling prairies, and allows a creeping front of salt water to moving inland."Dozens of 19th century communities including St. Malo, Manila Village, Bassa-Bassa, Alluvial City, Coon Road, Daisy, Chong Song, Cabinish, Camp Dewey, Dunbar, Falia, Balize, Avoca Island, Nichols, Ostrica, Seabreeze, Doullet's Canal, Oysterville, Perry, English Lookout, Fisherman's Village, Cheniere Camidnada, Yankee Camp and many others - now exist only as vestigial Memories in the region's historical literature, for their respective sites now lie beneath the waves of encroaching Gulf Waters or as clusters of aging pilings. The economic infrastructure that once sustained these lost settlements has also vanished."And then we have the Deepwater Horizon disaster.... This is not just a problem for Louisiana. Every American will be impacted in one way or another by the loss of this special place.