Mississippi Today
Gulf ‘dead zone’ is larger than average this year, the size of New Jersey
This year’s area of low oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico is larger than average, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday.
The “dead zone” is approximately 6,705 square miles, as measured last week. Within NOAA’s 38 years of measuring the dead zone, this year’s assessment marks the 12th-largest area of low- to no oxygen, which can kill fish and marine life.
NOAA had forecast at the beginning of the summer that the dead zone would be above average. But the measurement announced this week is even larger than anticipated.
Experts fault upriver conservation efforts that are not keeping pace.
Scientists at Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium
(LUMCON) conducted the 2024 dead zone survey aboard the research vessel Pelican from July 21 to 26.
The annual survey helps keep track of the progress made through the efforts of the
Environmental Protection Agency’s Mississippi River/Gulf of Mexico Hypoxia Task Force, a
state-federal partnership that is working toward a long-term goal of reducing the five-year
average dead zone to fewer than about 1,900 square miles by 2035.
Today, the five-year average – which accounts for extremely wet and dry years becoming more common with climate change – is 4,298 square miles, more than twice the Task Force’s goal.
The dead zone occurs every summer and is caused in large part by nutrient runoff from the
overapplication of fertilizer on Midwestern farms. During rains or flooding, water carries the fertilizer’s nitrogen and phosphorus from fields into the Mississippi River and its tributaries.
When the nutrients reach the Gulf, either from the Mississippi or the adjacent Atchafalaya River, they ignite an overgrowth of algae. As the algae dies, it decomposes and sinks to the bottom, depleting oxygen from the water.
When this happens, animals like fish and shrimp will leave. Some commercially harvested
species such as shrimp will concentrate around the edges of the affected area, forcing local
fishermen to travel outside the dead zone to cast their nets.
Bottom-dwelling creatures, such as clams and burrowing crabs, aren’t as mobile. They cannot leave the dead zone and will suffocate and die.
“The hypoxic zones lead to habitat loss for several ecologically and economically important
species in the Gulf: I’m talking about shrimp, menhaden and a variety of other species,” said Sean Corson, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science.
In 2020, the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated the dead zone’s average annual cost in damages to fisheries and marine habitats at $2.4 billion. This year’s dead zone impacts a swath of marine habitat roughly the size of New Jersey, stretching from south Louisiana almost to Galveston, Texas.
Though the dead zone is larger than NOAA had anticipated with its early-summer forecast, it falls within the range experienced over the last four decades of monitoring, said LSU professor Nancy Rabalais, the co-chief scientist for the research cruise.
Still, researchers are never quite sure where the dead zone will hit hardest and what its size will be at the height of summer, said Rabalais. “We continue to be surprised each summer at the variability in size and distribution,” she said.
But the high five-year average is not surprising to most dead zone experts, who point upriver to the Midwest, where there’s been a lag in farmers adopting agricultural practices that reduce nutrient runoff.
“After nearly four decades of experience with the Gulf dead zone, it should be clear that we
can’t continue to rely on the same policy tools to manage fertilizer pollution and expect a
different result,” wrote Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“Instead, we should demand a new approach, one that not only helps farmers to shift their
practices but also insists that they do so,” she said.
In June 2022, the EPA established the Gulf Hypoxia Program to support the work of nutrient- reduction programs. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed $60 million to support state-driven strategies to reduce nutrient runoff within the Mississippi River Basin. This funding will be spread across 12 states over the next five years.
A preliminary goal for the EPA’s Hypoxia Task Force is to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus
loads in the river by 20% by 2025. In May 2024, the U.S. Geological Survey found that while nitrogen loads had fallen 7% since 1980, phosphorus had increased by 22%.
Some experts have linked this excess phosphorus to wastewater from municipalities that don’t remove the nutrient from otherwise-clean sewage discharged into the river and its streams.
By the time the water reaches Louisiana, it’s already loaded with nutrients from upriver. So, from a lower-river perspective, putting more resources into efforts across the basin has helped, but further policy changes must be enacted soon to reduce the size of the dead zone, said LSU research scientist Doug Daigle, who coordinates the Louisiana Hypoxia Working Group.
Without changes to current nutrient reduction programs, the task force will be hard-pressed to meet its 2035 goals, Daigle said.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) — A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 — a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as “the King of Ragtime,” copyrighted the “Maple Leaf Rag,” which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s “first classical music.”
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: “My faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, ‘My gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’”
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, “The Sting,” which won an Oscar for the music. His song, “The Entertainer,” reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among “Songs of the Century” list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera “Treemonisha” was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.
“The ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,” Rifkin said. “He is a treasurable composer.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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