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As horrific as this impact has been on my constituents, it is only a small part of the overwhelming destruction covering 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast.

Protecting vital sources of renewal - unscathed marshes, healthy reefs, and deep-sea gardens - will provide hope for the future of the Gulf, and for all of us.

Worldwide, enormous areas of peatland are still being lost to agricultural development, drainage schemes, overgrazing, and exploitation-based infrastructure development projects such as roads, electricity pylons, telephone masts and gas pipelines.

Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.

Places like Hilton Head, with water adjacency and nice climates, are in high demand, and land values are insane. In the case of Hilton Head, which was developed in 1970 on what had been a mosquito- and alligator-infested swampy barrier island, land value has leaped from nearly zero to now unaffordable.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.

In the depths of the moor, the peat may be seen riven like floes of ice, and the rifts are sometimes twelve to fourteen feet deep, cut through black vegetable matter, the product of decay of plants through countless generations.

My home was 25 miles from the gulf, and I did not want to see it become a shorefront property.

I needed to explain that Louisiana's coast accepts the drainage from two-thirds of the United States and, while the necessary levees constructed upstream have prevented floods, they have also contributed to problems downstream.