- Email: [email protected]
The 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: What would Mother Nature do?
Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Ecological Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecoleng
Editorial
The 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: What would Mother Nature do?
On April 20, 2010, a lethal explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico led to a gigantic fire and the spewing of an estimated 780,000 m3 (206 million gallons, or 4.9 million barrels) of oil into the Gulf. The story has been on international news almost every day since. The spill became an ever-changing footprint, expanding to an area of over several hundred km2 (Fig. 1) and leading to the shutdown of fishing in May 2010 of 118,000 km2 of the Gulf by the US government (Kerr et al., 2010). The well was finally capped by BP on July 15, 2010. In the meantime, a menagerie of government officials, scientists, engineers, and consultants have been describing, all with scarce data, the fate and impacts of the spill and actions we should be taking to deal with the spill and its aftermath. Ecological engineering should, more than any other field, be brought into play now to suggest solutions to this spill: ecological problems need to be solved ecologically. This ecological thinking is especially needed, given contradictory evidence and poor judgment being displayed in the spill’s aftermath. A debate on National Public Radio (NPR) (August 19, 2010) http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=129306358, for example, had accomplished coastal scientist Dr. Chuck Hopkinson arguing that 75% of the oil is still in the Gulf, in marked contrast to public statements from another distinguish scientist turned government agency (NOAA) administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who claims that 75% of the oil is gone. As Edward Overton from Louisiana State University summarized in the NPR report, both estimates are educated guesses based on few data. Kerr (2010) estimated that, based on the uncertainties, anywhere from 13% to 39% of the oil remained in the Gulf as “residual oil” that still would need to be consumed microbially or evaporated. There is also discussion of mostly invisible “underwater plumes” at 1 km depth that have concentrations as high as 1–2 ppm of oil (Kerr, 2010). In essence, the oil has now gone “underground” and there is great uncertainty of how much is actually left. Given this great uncertainty over the amount of oil that remains in the Gulf, the extent of marshes and beaches that have been contaminated by oil, and the lack of good models to predict the fate and effects of the oil, what should we be suggesting as good ecological engineering for cleaning up the Gulf oil spill, assuming that the oil can still be found? I do not have a good answer to that question. But I think it is time to put forward some basic principles on dealing with such ecological disasters.
0925-8574/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2010.08.009
1. Design for disasters Have plans to shut off the source of the problem as quickly as possible. Once the oil spill occurred on the Gulf on April 20, 2010, it was pretty much agreed to by all that the oil spill shut-off was the priority. Yet it still took British Petroleum almost 3 months to shut off the spill. By then, almost 5 million barrels had been released, making this one of the largest oil spills ever. Perhaps there is a warning here for having a plan B and plan C to cut off potentially devastating pollution spills before they happen. Double-hulled oil tankers became a requirement a few decades ago after several tanker disasters. Where was the “double-hull” in this oil platform disaster? 2. Do no harm This has to be the first principle once a disaster occurs and the spill is contained. So-called cleanups often lead to worse conditions than leaving things along. A paper in Ecological Engineering 13 years ago (Davydchuk, 1997) described exactly that situation after the nuclear meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl Ukraine in 1986. More harm and less good was probably done at sites where there was massive earth-moving remediation. Twenty years ago, Cronk et al. (1990) suggested with the help of a simulation model that oil spill booms used on a 2700-m3 (17,000 barrel) inland oil spill on the Ohio River in 1988 may have caused more harm than good by concentrating oil on the river bottom where the booms were used, instead of letting it disperse downstream. Even now, activities in and on the Gulf of Mexico that do not pass the ecology “sniff test” or, as Louisiana marine scientist Len Bahr says, “are being done without adult supervision” are wasting taxpayer and oil company money (eventually passed onto the consumer) and worse than that, may be causing even more ecological damage. Adding surfactants to the ocean to pull out the oil creates two problems – the liquid solid wastes from this extraction, and the impacts that the surfactants themselves have on the aquatic ecosystems. Using chemicals to “clean off” marsh plants and soils creates the same second-pollutant problems and, in the long run, really does little good. Probably the most egregious waste of resources and potentially the project with the greatest lack of respect for ecological engineering principles is the highly controversial construction of oil protection sand berms along the coastline of Louisiana for
1608
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
Fig. 1. General location and extent of 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill in June.
intercepting the oil spill. This project, at a cost of US$360 million and being paid for by BP to the State of Louisiana, involves dredging and filling about 170 km of sand spits and coastal barrier reefs in the area where the Mississippi River discharges to the Gulf in southeastern Louisiana. The artificial islands are 2 m high by 60 m long (see Fig. 2) and will probably be blown away by the next category 4 or 5 hurricane. In fact much smaller waves have already washed away parts of the berm. With signs of measurable oil on
the surface becoming rare, these sand barriers are becoming less and less relevant every day. And there is already serious concern of unanticipated ecological damage. On an August 21, 2010, web page editorial entitled “Construction of Sand Berms Becomes Fatal for Turtles?” (http://www.dredgingtoday.com/2010/08/21/ construction-of-sand-berms-becomes-fatal-for-turtles-usa/) on Dredging Today.com (the home of a professional dredging association that certainly would not have an economic interest in halting
Fig. 2. Construction of sand berms in July 2010 along Louisiana coastline on Gulf of Mexico, summer 2010 for oil spill protection. This photo illustrates berm construction in northern Chandeleur Island, Louisiana. copyright Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, Western Carolina University, reprinted with permission.
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
this dredge and fill project), editor Matt Rota wrote: In drafting comments responding to Louisiana’s request to continue with and expand the project, we discovered that in a single two week period, the current sand berm project killed at least five threatened Loggerhead Turtles – and the full toll on turtles is likely higher. In fact, one Army Corps’ report indicated large amounts of turtle activity in the area, stating “Many turtles and turtle heads seen in the area in and around the trawling/dredging site.” This project does not seem to be passing the “do no harm” test. 3. Self-designing ecosystems can help One of the principles of ecological engineering is to design systems that ultimately design themselves. We refer to this as “self-design” (Mitsch, 1993; Mitsch and Jørgensen, 2003, 2004). I was taught many years ago by H.T. Odum that nature has the ability to self-organize, adapt and form new ecosystems as forcing functions and conditions change (Odum, 1989). He even proposed in his classification of coastal ecosystems of the United States (Odum et al., 1974) that there are a class of coastal ecosystems that have developed in response to human-caused pollution. He generously defined these as “emerging new systems” and stated that although they were not what we like to see in nature, they are still ecosystems. Interestingly, he had long work experience on the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and well knew the petroleum-polluted coastal systems on the Gulf of Mexico; in fact, one of the types of ecosystems in his classification of disturbed systems was “oil shores” (Odum et al., 1974). The oil in the Gulf will ultimately dissipate, evaporate, or most important, be consumed by oil-degrading microbes. Here again, scientists argue over how quickly this occurs, although the warm water temperatures of the 2010 summer in the Gulf and the relatively rich nutrients that come down the Mississippi River from the American Midwest will both accelerate biological breakdown of low molecular weight oil. The microbes are there; there is no need to import “oil-eating microbes” to clean up the Gulf. The same microbial degradation will occur in the marshes when the oil reaches the shorelines, although we should be concerned if the oil somehow accumulates in the marsh soils, for anaerobic conditions could preserve the oil there for decades. But in the aerobic waters and soil surfaces at least, microbes will be part of nature’s self-design to clean up the mess. As stated by NOAA scientist William Lehr in reference to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a recent issue of Science (Kerr, 2010): “Mother Nature is almost always the best removal mechanism.” A clever ecological engineering way to prevent oil from entering Mississippi delta marshes was using Mississippi River water itself. Diversion structures were opened to spread water flow through the delta; the freshwater flux may have prevented a large amount of oil from penetrating deeply into the estuaries and marshes. 4. Keep a focus on the big picture even when disasters occur The coastal area of southern Louisiana was a big mess already, well before the episodic events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 (see Costanza et al., 2006a,b; Day et al., 2007) and the Gulf oil spill of April–July 2010. The continual loss of wetlands in the Louisiana delta and a pending sea level rise that will exacerbate the situation are probably much greater disasters in the long run
1609
than either the oil spill or Katrina because the wetland loss is on a scale much larger than the oil spill and the wetland loss may be partially responsible for the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Katrina – the average loss rate of wetlands over the period 1956–2000 was 88 km2 /year (Day et al., 2005). The funds used to build the berms described above could be used far more productively in ecological engineering approaches to counter this wetland loss. Furthermore, the wetlands of the delta could be part of the solution of the 20,000-km2 hypoxia, or “dead zone,” in the Gulf caused by excessive nutrients coming down the Mississippi River (Mitsch et al., 2001). Yet every time there is a short-term disaster, the state and nation lose their focus on repairing the wetland loss (despite an attempt by the Louisiana government to define these wetlands as “America’s wetlands”) to deal with those disastrous yet short-term episodes. A broader ecological view is needed in Louisiana and by those who mean well but have been distracted by the calamities in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in the past half-decade. 5. Conclusions There are lessons for all of us from this oil spill disaster. In view of the fact that every major pollution disaster is different, it is difficult to have an ecological engineering handbook on how to react. As we continue to dig deeper and go further out to sea for oil resources while depleting this resource, events like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill will inevitably occur again. In the USA alone, we have had the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio burning with a combination of wood and oil in 1969 (and several times that did not get press attention before that), the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, and now the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as ecological disaster markers that have made indelible long-term marks on our environmental awareness. Let us hope that the silver lining of this latest spill will be a recognition to be prepared for disasters, do no harm when they occur, recognize self-design and the self-healing capacity of nature, and always keep the big picture and long-term view of protecting and enhancing our ecosystems for the services that they provide. Appendix A. Supplementary data including audio interview Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2010.08.009. References Costanza, R., Mitsch, W.J., Day, J.W., 2006a. Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans. Ecol. Eng. 26, 317–320. Costanza, R., Mitsch, W.J., Day, J.W., 2006b. A new vision for New Orleans and the Mississippi delta: applying ecological economics and ecological engineering. Front. Ecol. Environ. 4, 465–472. Cronk, J.K., Mitsch, W.J., Sykes, R.M., 1990. Effective modeling of a major inland oil spill on the Ohio River. Ecol. Model. 51, 161–192. Davydchuk, V., 1997. Ecosystem remediation in radioactively polluted areas: the Chernobyl experience. Ecol. Eng. 8, 325–336. Day Jr., J.W., Barras, J., Clairain, E., Johnston, J., Justic, D., Kemp, G.P., Ko, J.-Y., Lane, ˜ R., Mitsch, W.J., Steyer, G., Templet, P., Yanez-Arancibia, A., 2005. Implications of global climatic change and energy cost and availability for the restoration of the Mississippi delta. Ecol. Eng. 24, 253–265. Day Jr., J.W., Boesch, D.F., Clairain, E.J., Kemp, G.P., Laska, S.B., Mitsch, W.J., Orth, K., Mashriqui, H., Reed, D.R., Shabman, L., Simenstad, C.A., Streever, B.J., Twilley, R.R., Watson, C.C., Wells, J.T., Whigham, D.F., 2007. Restoration of the Mississippi delta: lessons from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Science 315, 1679–1684. Kerr, R.A., 2010. A lot of oil on the loose, not so much to be found. Science 329, 734–735. Kerr, R.A., Kintisch, E., Schenkman, L., Stokstad, E., 2010. Five questions on the spill. Science 328, 962–963.
1610
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
Mitsch, W.J., 1993. Ecological engineering—a cooperative role with the planetary life–support systems. Environ. Sci. Technol. 27, 438–445. Mitsch, W.J., Day Jr., J.W., Gilliam, J.W., Groffman, P.M., Hey, D.L., Randall, G.W., Wang, N., 2001. Reducing nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River Basin: strategies to counter a persistent ecological problem. BioScience 51, 373–388. Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E., 2003. Ecological engineering: a field whose time has come. Ecol. Eng. 20, 363–377. Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E., 2004. Ecological Engineering and Ecosystem Restoration. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 411 pp. Odum, H.T., 1989. Ecological engineering and self-organization. In: Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E. (Eds.), Ecological Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 79–101. Odum, H.T., Copeland, B.J., McMahan, E.A. (Eds.), 1974. Coastal Ecological Systems of the United States, 4 vols. Conservation Foundation, Washington, DC.
Editor-in-Chief William J. Mitsch ∗ Wilma H. Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park, School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, 352 W. Dodridge Street, Columbus, OH 43202 USA ∗ Tel.:
+1 614 292 9774; fax: +1 614 292 9773. E-mail address: [email protected] 27 August 2010
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Ecological Engineering journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecoleng
Editorial
The 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: What would Mother Nature do?
On April 20, 2010, a lethal explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil platform operated by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico led to a gigantic fire and the spewing of an estimated 780,000 m3 (206 million gallons, or 4.9 million barrels) of oil into the Gulf. The story has been on international news almost every day since. The spill became an ever-changing footprint, expanding to an area of over several hundred km2 (Fig. 1) and leading to the shutdown of fishing in May 2010 of 118,000 km2 of the Gulf by the US government (Kerr et al., 2010). The well was finally capped by BP on July 15, 2010. In the meantime, a menagerie of government officials, scientists, engineers, and consultants have been describing, all with scarce data, the fate and impacts of the spill and actions we should be taking to deal with the spill and its aftermath. Ecological engineering should, more than any other field, be brought into play now to suggest solutions to this spill: ecological problems need to be solved ecologically. This ecological thinking is especially needed, given contradictory evidence and poor judgment being displayed in the spill’s aftermath. A debate on National Public Radio (NPR) (August 19, 2010) http://www.npr.org/ templates/story/story.php?storyId=129306358, for example, had accomplished coastal scientist Dr. Chuck Hopkinson arguing that 75% of the oil is still in the Gulf, in marked contrast to public statements from another distinguish scientist turned government agency (NOAA) administrator, Dr. Jane Lubchenco, who claims that 75% of the oil is gone. As Edward Overton from Louisiana State University summarized in the NPR report, both estimates are educated guesses based on few data. Kerr (2010) estimated that, based on the uncertainties, anywhere from 13% to 39% of the oil remained in the Gulf as “residual oil” that still would need to be consumed microbially or evaporated. There is also discussion of mostly invisible “underwater plumes” at 1 km depth that have concentrations as high as 1–2 ppm of oil (Kerr, 2010). In essence, the oil has now gone “underground” and there is great uncertainty of how much is actually left. Given this great uncertainty over the amount of oil that remains in the Gulf, the extent of marshes and beaches that have been contaminated by oil, and the lack of good models to predict the fate and effects of the oil, what should we be suggesting as good ecological engineering for cleaning up the Gulf oil spill, assuming that the oil can still be found? I do not have a good answer to that question. But I think it is time to put forward some basic principles on dealing with such ecological disasters.
0925-8574/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2010.08.009
1. Design for disasters Have plans to shut off the source of the problem as quickly as possible. Once the oil spill occurred on the Gulf on April 20, 2010, it was pretty much agreed to by all that the oil spill shut-off was the priority. Yet it still took British Petroleum almost 3 months to shut off the spill. By then, almost 5 million barrels had been released, making this one of the largest oil spills ever. Perhaps there is a warning here for having a plan B and plan C to cut off potentially devastating pollution spills before they happen. Double-hulled oil tankers became a requirement a few decades ago after several tanker disasters. Where was the “double-hull” in this oil platform disaster? 2. Do no harm This has to be the first principle once a disaster occurs and the spill is contained. So-called cleanups often lead to worse conditions than leaving things along. A paper in Ecological Engineering 13 years ago (Davydchuk, 1997) described exactly that situation after the nuclear meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl Ukraine in 1986. More harm and less good was probably done at sites where there was massive earth-moving remediation. Twenty years ago, Cronk et al. (1990) suggested with the help of a simulation model that oil spill booms used on a 2700-m3 (17,000 barrel) inland oil spill on the Ohio River in 1988 may have caused more harm than good by concentrating oil on the river bottom where the booms were used, instead of letting it disperse downstream. Even now, activities in and on the Gulf of Mexico that do not pass the ecology “sniff test” or, as Louisiana marine scientist Len Bahr says, “are being done without adult supervision” are wasting taxpayer and oil company money (eventually passed onto the consumer) and worse than that, may be causing even more ecological damage. Adding surfactants to the ocean to pull out the oil creates two problems – the liquid solid wastes from this extraction, and the impacts that the surfactants themselves have on the aquatic ecosystems. Using chemicals to “clean off” marsh plants and soils creates the same second-pollutant problems and, in the long run, really does little good. Probably the most egregious waste of resources and potentially the project with the greatest lack of respect for ecological engineering principles is the highly controversial construction of oil protection sand berms along the coastline of Louisiana for
1608
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
Fig. 1. General location and extent of 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill in June.
intercepting the oil spill. This project, at a cost of US$360 million and being paid for by BP to the State of Louisiana, involves dredging and filling about 170 km of sand spits and coastal barrier reefs in the area where the Mississippi River discharges to the Gulf in southeastern Louisiana. The artificial islands are 2 m high by 60 m long (see Fig. 2) and will probably be blown away by the next category 4 or 5 hurricane. In fact much smaller waves have already washed away parts of the berm. With signs of measurable oil on
the surface becoming rare, these sand barriers are becoming less and less relevant every day. And there is already serious concern of unanticipated ecological damage. On an August 21, 2010, web page editorial entitled “Construction of Sand Berms Becomes Fatal for Turtles?” (http://www.dredgingtoday.com/2010/08/21/ construction-of-sand-berms-becomes-fatal-for-turtles-usa/) on Dredging Today.com (the home of a professional dredging association that certainly would not have an economic interest in halting
Fig. 2. Construction of sand berms in July 2010 along Louisiana coastline on Gulf of Mexico, summer 2010 for oil spill protection. This photo illustrates berm construction in northern Chandeleur Island, Louisiana. copyright Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, Western Carolina University, reprinted with permission.
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
this dredge and fill project), editor Matt Rota wrote: In drafting comments responding to Louisiana’s request to continue with and expand the project, we discovered that in a single two week period, the current sand berm project killed at least five threatened Loggerhead Turtles – and the full toll on turtles is likely higher. In fact, one Army Corps’ report indicated large amounts of turtle activity in the area, stating “Many turtles and turtle heads seen in the area in and around the trawling/dredging site.” This project does not seem to be passing the “do no harm” test. 3. Self-designing ecosystems can help One of the principles of ecological engineering is to design systems that ultimately design themselves. We refer to this as “self-design” (Mitsch, 1993; Mitsch and Jørgensen, 2003, 2004). I was taught many years ago by H.T. Odum that nature has the ability to self-organize, adapt and form new ecosystems as forcing functions and conditions change (Odum, 1989). He even proposed in his classification of coastal ecosystems of the United States (Odum et al., 1974) that there are a class of coastal ecosystems that have developed in response to human-caused pollution. He generously defined these as “emerging new systems” and stated that although they were not what we like to see in nature, they are still ecosystems. Interestingly, he had long work experience on the western shore of the Gulf of Mexico in Texas and well knew the petroleum-polluted coastal systems on the Gulf of Mexico; in fact, one of the types of ecosystems in his classification of disturbed systems was “oil shores” (Odum et al., 1974). The oil in the Gulf will ultimately dissipate, evaporate, or most important, be consumed by oil-degrading microbes. Here again, scientists argue over how quickly this occurs, although the warm water temperatures of the 2010 summer in the Gulf and the relatively rich nutrients that come down the Mississippi River from the American Midwest will both accelerate biological breakdown of low molecular weight oil. The microbes are there; there is no need to import “oil-eating microbes” to clean up the Gulf. The same microbial degradation will occur in the marshes when the oil reaches the shorelines, although we should be concerned if the oil somehow accumulates in the marsh soils, for anaerobic conditions could preserve the oil there for decades. But in the aerobic waters and soil surfaces at least, microbes will be part of nature’s self-design to clean up the mess. As stated by NOAA scientist William Lehr in reference to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in a recent issue of Science (Kerr, 2010): “Mother Nature is almost always the best removal mechanism.” A clever ecological engineering way to prevent oil from entering Mississippi delta marshes was using Mississippi River water itself. Diversion structures were opened to spread water flow through the delta; the freshwater flux may have prevented a large amount of oil from penetrating deeply into the estuaries and marshes. 4. Keep a focus on the big picture even when disasters occur The coastal area of southern Louisiana was a big mess already, well before the episodic events of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 (see Costanza et al., 2006a,b; Day et al., 2007) and the Gulf oil spill of April–July 2010. The continual loss of wetlands in the Louisiana delta and a pending sea level rise that will exacerbate the situation are probably much greater disasters in the long run
1609
than either the oil spill or Katrina because the wetland loss is on a scale much larger than the oil spill and the wetland loss may be partially responsible for the extensive damage caused by Hurricane Katrina – the average loss rate of wetlands over the period 1956–2000 was 88 km2 /year (Day et al., 2005). The funds used to build the berms described above could be used far more productively in ecological engineering approaches to counter this wetland loss. Furthermore, the wetlands of the delta could be part of the solution of the 20,000-km2 hypoxia, or “dead zone,” in the Gulf caused by excessive nutrients coming down the Mississippi River (Mitsch et al., 2001). Yet every time there is a short-term disaster, the state and nation lose their focus on repairing the wetland loss (despite an attempt by the Louisiana government to define these wetlands as “America’s wetlands”) to deal with those disastrous yet short-term episodes. A broader ecological view is needed in Louisiana and by those who mean well but have been distracted by the calamities in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in the past half-decade. 5. Conclusions There are lessons for all of us from this oil spill disaster. In view of the fact that every major pollution disaster is different, it is difficult to have an ecological engineering handbook on how to react. As we continue to dig deeper and go further out to sea for oil resources while depleting this resource, events like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill will inevitably occur again. In the USA alone, we have had the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio burning with a combination of wood and oil in 1969 (and several times that did not get press attention before that), the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989, and now the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as ecological disaster markers that have made indelible long-term marks on our environmental awareness. Let us hope that the silver lining of this latest spill will be a recognition to be prepared for disasters, do no harm when they occur, recognize self-design and the self-healing capacity of nature, and always keep the big picture and long-term view of protecting and enhancing our ecosystems for the services that they provide. Appendix A. Supplementary data including audio interview Supplementary data associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.ecoleng.2010.08.009. References Costanza, R., Mitsch, W.J., Day, J.W., 2006a. Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans. Ecol. Eng. 26, 317–320. Costanza, R., Mitsch, W.J., Day, J.W., 2006b. A new vision for New Orleans and the Mississippi delta: applying ecological economics and ecological engineering. Front. Ecol. Environ. 4, 465–472. Cronk, J.K., Mitsch, W.J., Sykes, R.M., 1990. Effective modeling of a major inland oil spill on the Ohio River. Ecol. Model. 51, 161–192. Davydchuk, V., 1997. Ecosystem remediation in radioactively polluted areas: the Chernobyl experience. Ecol. Eng. 8, 325–336. Day Jr., J.W., Barras, J., Clairain, E., Johnston, J., Justic, D., Kemp, G.P., Ko, J.-Y., Lane, ˜ R., Mitsch, W.J., Steyer, G., Templet, P., Yanez-Arancibia, A., 2005. Implications of global climatic change and energy cost and availability for the restoration of the Mississippi delta. Ecol. Eng. 24, 253–265. Day Jr., J.W., Boesch, D.F., Clairain, E.J., Kemp, G.P., Laska, S.B., Mitsch, W.J., Orth, K., Mashriqui, H., Reed, D.R., Shabman, L., Simenstad, C.A., Streever, B.J., Twilley, R.R., Watson, C.C., Wells, J.T., Whigham, D.F., 2007. Restoration of the Mississippi delta: lessons from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Science 315, 1679–1684. Kerr, R.A., 2010. A lot of oil on the loose, not so much to be found. Science 329, 734–735. Kerr, R.A., Kintisch, E., Schenkman, L., Stokstad, E., 2010. Five questions on the spill. Science 328, 962–963.
1610
Editorial / Ecological Engineering 36 (2010) 1607–1610
Mitsch, W.J., 1993. Ecological engineering—a cooperative role with the planetary life–support systems. Environ. Sci. Technol. 27, 438–445. Mitsch, W.J., Day Jr., J.W., Gilliam, J.W., Groffman, P.M., Hey, D.L., Randall, G.W., Wang, N., 2001. Reducing nitrogen loading to the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi River Basin: strategies to counter a persistent ecological problem. BioScience 51, 373–388. Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E., 2003. Ecological engineering: a field whose time has come. Ecol. Eng. 20, 363–377. Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E., 2004. Ecological Engineering and Ecosystem Restoration. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 411 pp. Odum, H.T., 1989. Ecological engineering and self-organization. In: Mitsch, W.J., Jørgensen, S.E. (Eds.), Ecological Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 79–101. Odum, H.T., Copeland, B.J., McMahan, E.A. (Eds.), 1974. Coastal Ecological Systems of the United States, 4 vols. Conservation Foundation, Washington, DC.
Editor-in-Chief William J. Mitsch ∗ Wilma H. Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park, School of Environment and Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, 352 W. Dodridge Street, Columbus, OH 43202 USA ∗ Tel.:
+1 614 292 9774; fax: +1 614 292 9773. E-mail address: [email protected] 27 August 2010