" couldn’t they join a good fight? The coastal land of Louisiana had long been slowly sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. The state’s coast provides 40 percent of the nation’s wetlands, and its commercial fisheries provide a quarter to a third of the nation’s seafood. Experts agree that a major cause of the land’s subsidence is the extraction of oil and saltwater intrusion. Over the years, oil companies have dredged hundreds of canals and laid down pipeline through which oil drilled in the Gulf has been piped inland. Saltwater seeps in along the canals, killing grasses that once provided protection against Louisiana’s frequent tropical storms. Since 1930, the state had already lost an area equal to the size of Delaware—an average football field every hour. "

― Arlie Russell Hochschild , Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right