Former US Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt spoke to the SCB last night (he’s flogging a new book). Now “free at last to say what I think” he took the Army Corps of Engineers to task for their plan for restoring the sinking Louisiana coast, which can be found here. To be fair, this plan was completed before Hurricane Katrina, but Babbitt claims that its estimate of how much land will be lost is way off, because it assumes that land-loss rates from the seventies through 2000 will continue in the future.

The ACOE plan estimates that Coastal Louisiana will lose 328,000 acres by 2050. Babbitt says that he figures that subsidence and sea level rise (thanks to our pal global warming) will submerge some 6 million acres by 2100. Even assuming that New Orleans is safely walled off, he says that a million people “are in grave risk of floating by the end of the century.”

Then he took the conservation community at large to task for taking the ACOE study seriously. “The most charitable explanation is that we—I mean all of us…tend to operate in a climate of political intimidation,” in which telling hard truths about very large scale problems is not the done thing.

“We risk undermining our credibility by going along with these kinds of analysis,” he said.