The Pelican Brief Essay

In John Grisham’s The Pelican Brief, He brings up oil and gas companies drilling in the wetlands, which is destroying them, and I decided to investigate further about how these companies have been hurting the environment. The main way that the wetlands are being killed is by the salt water that is getting into the marshes and the canals, that gas and oil companies use, are the way that most salt water gets so deep inside the wetlands (Barnowski). Oil and gas companies are always trying to build more canals to get into different areas of the wetlands when they find different reserves of oil and gas just like Victor Mattiece was in the Pelican Brief. When they build more canals, The wetlands soil starts to get broken up and that destroys the

Ocean waves are also a cause of wetland destruction, but it’s a lot smaller contributing factor then canals. “There are 10 major navigation canals and countless smaller ones winding intricately through the wetlands of Southeast Louisiana” (Barnowski). Those canals are used for a lot of things, including for the oil and gas companies to find oil reserves and drill to get to them. The canals take up 10,000 miles of land and all the canals are basically just paths for salt water to get in and destroy some of the deepest freshwater marshes in Louisiana (“Louisiana’s Oil”). The canals have already caused a lot of damage because building them requires destroying land in the wetlands and then they kill more of the living things and destroy more of the wetlands as they bring salt water into the different parts of the wetlands that normally wouldn’t be exposed to the salt water. Then you have to add the amount of traffic that comes through these canals every day. All of the traffic that is passing through the canals makes the land erosion even worse because the soil is already loose and unstable and the more salt water splashed against it every day causes it to get worse and makes more land erode (Barnowski). The salt water that gets out of the canals goes deeper into the wetlands than it would ever naturally go and that kills off

When oil and gas companies, such as the one Victor Mattiece owned, find new gas or oil reserves in the wetland they buy the area it’s in and most times need to build a new canal to get to it so they can get all of their equipment into the area of the reserve. Once they have a way to get in the area and work there, they will begin drilling into the wetlands to get to the oil or gas. “Then dredge yet another channel through the hapless and beleaguered marshlands so that the men and their equipment could get to the rigs and the oil could be brought out with haste. The canal would be thirty-five miles long and twice as wide as the others. There would be a lot of traffic.” (Grisham 230). This quote from the book points out all the different things I have mentioned about how the wetlands are being destroyed by canals. Victor Mattiece had found a new oil reserve and was going to drill into it and sell it so he could make even more money. He was going to create an even larger canal than most that already existed so he could transport his men and equipment to the site of the oil reserve he found, but that would hurt the environment even more and that’s why someone caught him and was going to bring him to court. The traffic that would travel through his canal would cause even more severe damage like I mentioned