Hit & Run points to this Washington Times interview on how environmentalists may inadvertently caused the flooding when Katrina hit:

Q: How did environmentalists contribute to the disaster in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina?

A: They blocked the building of large steel and concrete floodgates around Lake Pontchartrain that the Corps of Engineers, the ... state congressional delegation, and the New Orleans levee board had all endorsed as being able to provide the best protection against storm surge from hurricanes.

The gates were similar to the folding "seagates" that were being built, and now have been built, in the Netherlands that only close during North Sea storms. Like those, these gates would have only closed during severe storms -- blocking water from getting into Lake Pontchartrain and flooding New Orleans. Renowned hurricane experts say these gates would have likely prevented most of Katrina's devastation in New Orleans. But the Environmental Defense Fund (now Environmental Defense) and the Louisiana group Save Our Wetlands persuaded a federal judge to halt the gates in 1977 because of the alleged damage they could do to fish, even though the project had already been granted a thumbs-up in a review from the Environmental Protection Agency.

This is extremely important, and was one of the major points I was trying to get across when I talked about "Do Something Syndrome" in regards to global warming.  Both action, and inaction have real world consequences.  Environmentalists have done an excellent job at trying to quantify the potential consequences of global warming.  But they ignore the real world consequences of the policies that they push, and only concentrate on what it might do to maybe possibly avert global climate change at some unknown time in the future.

The fact of the matter is that people change their environment to make it better suited to our comfort and success as a species.  While many environmentalists have taken the tact that this change will come back to bite us, the reality is that in the near term, many of the changes that they propose could do us harm as well.  It is just as important to examine those near term effects, as well as the long term effects.

I wonder how many residents of New Orleans cared that much about the fish that they were willing to risk the damage that Katrina ended up bringing.