BAYTOWN, Texas – Brown pelicans, long-necked egrets, flamingo-like roseate spoonbills and squawking seagulls fly lazily around a Texas Gulf Coast island. Nearby, a toddler-aged wetland seeded with marsh grass completes the ecosystem, its thousands of inhabitants unaware their home is a manmade creation dredged from the Houston Ship Channel.
It’s all part of a 20-year-old project to restore lost wetlands and islands off the Texas coast. The federal government is hoping it could become a model for rebuilding these crucial ecosystems elsewhere in the five-state Gulf region.
This and other efforts to revitalize the environment and economy of the long-neglected coastal area are being partially bankrolled by a $1 billion fund from BP, which agreed to pay the money as part of its responsibility for the massive oil spill that fouled the Gulf of Mexico.
Harris Sherman, undersecretary for natural resources and the environment at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, recently viewed a
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