Oil spill approaches gulf coast, threatening economy and environment

Oil spill from Deepwater Horizon explosion creeps inexorably towards LouisianaWhen Tom Reddoch was growing up in southern Louisiana, on a pencil-thin strip of land flanked on one side by the Mississippi and on the other by a marshy inland waterway, he and his friends used to brag to each other that this was the greatest place on Earth. Children had different expectations back in the 1950s: what they meant was that they would never go hungry."The one thing we could be certain of is that we would never starve down here. In those days, this was one great protein factory."Fishing and oyster harvesting was easy, as the nutrient-rich swirl of the freshwater Mississippi and the sea spawned wildlife in endless abundance. But over the course of his lifetime, Reddoch has seen about 70% of that extraordinary biodiversity fade away through the combined onslaught of overfishing, the laying of oil pipelines...

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