Coastal restoration and management as a strategy for wealth creation in Louisiana

With more people in the world living along coasts than any other environment, planning for the coastal zone requires negotiating the socially constructed human relationships that have traditionally produced severe inequality between coastal residents and users. In Louisiana, this inequality is apparent in the great deal of wealth external users have extracted from the coast at the direct environmental and economic expense of local residents. An examination of the economic history of Louisiana's coast reveals how this disparity between coastal residents and users has produced deleterious environmental consequences, which have grown exponentially precisely because this inequality between human residents and users persists today. The current coastal restoration and management strategy in Louisiana does not focus on the socially constructed origins of this continuing environmental destruction, but it must do so in order to restore any hope of saving, restoring, and improving the coast. This thesis offers a socially reconstructed strategy for coastal restoration and management in Louisiana that narrows the environmental and economic disparity between coastal users and residents to address the environmental harm. This new wealth creation strategy enables local firms and residents to offer their existing knowledge of the coast and participate in the implementation of restoring and improving the natural assets of their coast through a variety of economic incentives.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Sridaran, Lakshmi

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Karl Seidman.

• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/50121

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/50121