What has been done can be undone. We are not the ones to undo it. But, we can give you the number of someone who might be.

For a long time I have been interested in novel methods of reclaiming/reharnessing the end-products of industry, and imagining some better way of diminishing their ecological impact. The ideal solution, to me, had always seemed grounded in the discovery and implementation of some unique microorganism, which when set about to the task, would go ahead and just *eat* all of our waste material. The total bio-organism will eventually do the same thing, so why not circumvent the problematic time we humans would all be poisoned and dying in our own toxins by encouraging a symbiotic relationship?

It seems as though these hopes are no longer mirages on the horizon. Dr. John Coates and Dr. Laurie Achenbach, UC Berkeley, has worked on bioremediation strategies for controlled use of around 40 different species of bacteria able to metabolize ammonium perchlorate into oxygen and sodium chloride. There are still significant problems yet to be overcome with regard to the scale necessary to affect significantly groundwater supplies, but research continues.

On the ingeniously useful front, microbial fuel cell technology is being pursued, which manages to both clean wastewater, and produce electrical current as it does so. The ability of a simple microorganism to significantly offset the cost of running a sanitation facility may be crucial in coming years, as the problem of access to clean drinking water has worsened recently and by some accounts will continue to do so without significant effort to counteract current trends.

links: perchlorate-reducing bacteria: http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Sep-01-Wed-2004/news/24634759.html
microbial fuel cells: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-02/ps-mfc022304.php
another one for microbial fuel cells: http://www.geobacter.org/research/microbial/

Global warming is a red herring. Climate change is developed from organizational models which can be flawed or weighted (consciously or not) in a particular direction. Perhaps there is no way to plan for crisis on this scale, but surely we have been striving for years to do just that. Who *was* that guy who said we should drop nuclear warheads on hurricanes?

Natural systems seem to be incredibly good at adapting themselves to impediments. Water always finds the path of least resistance, because that is all it can do. So, despite our organizations against things like floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, which do improve slightly the chance of some sanctuary from disaster, things tend to give in other places. Complex systems are precisely the things that we cannot adequately predict or react to, and at the same time that we are trying to brace for, are themselves adapting to our adaptations.

So, sure. In some sense this sounds like fatalist hand-wringing. But I believe that there actually *are* systems already in place, should we be humble enough to allow them to function, which can alleviate some of the overwhelming destruction of the path of least resistance. Sadly, often these things are rather the inverse of natural disasters; stuff that is so obviously necessary, but generally undesirable, we forget about it, like oxygen-replenishment systems, or the necessity of all those creepy insects everywhere, or land that's essentially unuseable to us in any overt way, such as coastal wetlands.

Not useful from a Neoclassical Economic standpoint, perhaps. Again, the same standpoint that has failed to value the whole CO2-O2 tradeoff between flora and fauna simply because no one has figured out a way to charge people to breathe, yet. Useful, nonetheless. From the Independent U.K.: "Wetlands, along the edges of rivers and near the coast itself, are vital for absorbing and storing floodwaters. As such, they provided New Orleans with a natural defence against storm surges such as the one generated by Katrina."

And, to examine just how long the history of augmentation of relevent natural landforms is, wholesale lifted from some public military document by the Mississippi River Commission, a concise timeline of the river's extensive alterations:

1717
First levee built by Europeans along the Mississippi River
Sieur Leblond de la Tour, the French engineer who designed New Orleans , constructed the first levee along the Mississippi River . Upon completion, the levee was 3 feet high, 5400 feet long, and 18 feet wide at the top. It doubled as a roadway.

1735
Extension of the levee system
The extension of levee line kept pace with the establishment and growth of settlements. Each planter was required to complete the levee along his own property front. By 1735, the levee line extended along both banks of the river for a distance from 30 miles above New Orleans to 12 miles below.

1803
Louisiana Purchase
Napoleon Bonaparte negotiated the sale of the Louisiana territory with American negotiators James Monroe and Robert Livingston. The new American government sought to facilitate trade and to develop the region's rich economic potential. With the extension of American control, the floodgates were thrown open to frontiersmen eager to settle the fertile lands of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley, and the population of that region grew dramatically.

1849-1850
Swamp Acts
Congressional members from Louisiana led a fight to secure the transfer of swamp lands of the states along the Mississippi Valley, culminating in the Swamp Land Grants of 1849 and 1850. Revenue raised from the sale of those lands paid for further levee construction and encouraged the organization of levee districts throughout the lower valley. The acts represented the first step toward the federalization of flood control on the Mississippi River , but the onus of flood protection remained on the shoulders of local governments.

1861-1865
U.S. Civil War
Necessarily preoccupied over the next four years and beyond, the people of the lower Mississippi Valley abandoned their flood control efforts altogether, and, very quickly, the levees began to deteriorate. The general neglect of the levee system throughout the war years resulted in untold damage to the system, as whole sections fell into disrepair and were washed away by the river. A major flood in 1862 hurried this process. The levees sustained further damage as a result of military operations in 1863 and 1864. By the end of the war, the neglected levee system was in shambles.

1879
Creation of Mississippi River Commission
Congress established the Mississippi River Commission (MRC) to develop and oversee the implementation of plans to "improve and give safety and ease to navigation" and to "prevent destructive floods" on the Mississippi River. Because Congress established the MRC as an executive body, only a simple majority vote was necessary for the passage of any resolution, resulting in compromise, and sometimes inconsistent, policy.

1886
Congress prohibited the MRC from revetment work
Bank revetment work to improve navigation along the channel was prohibited by Congress in 1886, just as technical advances were finally providing effective bank protection. Irregular and inadequate Congressional appropriations and a tendency by the federal legislature to dictate engineering policy had effectively paralyzed the MRC by the end of the decade.

1913
Townsend Report and the expansion of MRC jurisdiction
Following the 1913 flood, President Woodrow Wilson directed the MRC to submit a report on flood control. This report considered six methods of flood control-reforestation, reservoirs, cut-offs, outlets, floodways, and levees. As with all previous reports, the Commission condemned the various alternatives to levees and advocated a continuation of policy. The Rivers and Harbor Act of 1913 authorized the MRC to complete a survey and examination of the upper Mississippi River between Cairo and Rock Island, with a view toward building levees for navigational purposes.

1926
MRC declared the levee system complete
The MRC concluded in its annual report that the levee system "is now in condition to prevent the destructive effects of floods." At the same time, Congress passed legislation tasking the Corps of Engineers to complete a study to determine the feasibility of controlling Mississippi River floods below Old River by means of spillways and levees.

1927
Mississippi Valley deluged
The "Great Mississippi Flood of 1927" so devastated the valley that Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce, called it "the greatest peace-time calamity in the history of the country."

1990
Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection Restoration Act passed
Coastal Louisiana loses over 900,000 acres since the 1930s. As late as the 1970s, the loss rate for Louisiana 's coastal wetlands was as high as 25,600 acres per year. The cumulative effect of human activities in the coastal area has been to drastically tilt the natural balance from the net land building deltaic processes to land loss due to altered hydrology, subsidence, and erosion. Approximately 30 percent of the land losses being experienced in coastal Louisiana are due to natural causes. The remaining 70 percent are attributable to man's effect on the environment, both direct and indirect. In 1990, passage of the Coastal Wetland Planning, Protection Restoration Act, (PL-101-646, Title 111, CWPPRA), locally referred to as the Breaux Act provided authorization and funding for a multi-agency task force to begin actions to curtail wetland losses.

The military website doesn't have it, but in 2001 acts like this were almost universally overturned, repealed, gutted, or rendered effectively useless. Very probably, even this would have been too little and too late to halt what we all now know was the eventual fate of our massively organized and terribly unprotected metropolis.

Global warming is a red herring. Don't go assuming that all ecological arguments are quite the same.

[links: wetlands+hurricane: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article309471.ece
river+flooding: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/topics/attach/html/ssd98-9.htm
society of wetlands scientists: http://www.sws.org/regional/northcentral/images/swscommentsisolatedwetlands.pdf
MRC chronology: http://www.mvd.usace.army.mil/mrc/index.php?page=timeline&loc=Includes
et al.]