Remora

Sierra should be a better magazine than it is. It goes for the faux John Muir touch when it should go for the jugular. Granta has better nature writing, Mother Jones, of course, better investigative writing. Take this article, by Dean Rebuffoni, about the Mississippi As far as it goes, it is unobjectionable. It tells us a bit about the Army Corps of Engineers dastardly, eighty year project to channelize the most unchannelizable of rivers. It goes on a bit, at first, about Mark Twain. It mentions the inevitable result of Mississippi River pollution (propulsed by the afore-mentioned Army Corps of E., who have the idea that the river is a big pipe that can shoot water into the Gulf of Mexico without consequences). Here's a nice graf about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico:

"By the time the Mississippi reaches Louisiana, it carries the collected municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastes of the nation's largest river basin--and keeps on going. Beyond the Mississippi delta, the pollutants and nutrients borne by the river have created the infamous Dead Zone, an oxygen-deprived region in the Gulf of Mexico in which fish, crabs, and other aquatic creatures cannot survive. This summer, it grew to the size of Massachusetts."

Still, there's no mention of one of the great public policy puzzles we are eventually going to have to face about the Miss: keeping it in its present channel, instead of letting it naturally divert via the Atchafalaya, is starting to exert a terrific environmental cost. On the other hand, letting it divert means killing New Orleans and the strip of industry all the way to Baton Rouge. In other words, it means letting Louisiana hang out to dry like a tired work shirt. Do you want to tell those people, sorry, had to let the river do its thing? Nobody wants to talk about this, because the ideology, for one thing, doesn't give you clues. Is it left wing or right wing to say no to the Corps? Meanwhile the mudbanks underlying the coastline of Louisiana are slipping, slipping, slipping, and the Gulf is rising. I suspect that the world's greatest diversion project and this mud-tectonic event are connected. But you won't find a nice account of that in Sierra. You'll find it in Ocean's End -- and here's an enthusiastic review of that book. Why can't Sierra get off its duff and do some real magazine work on an article about the Miss? Because that would scare contributors. They want to row gently, gently gently down the stream, so Sierra obliges. It is sooo sad.