Water and Oil

A monumental history of the Gulf Coast’s creation and destruction—and the battle over who will control its future—from the New York Times bestselling author of Rising Tide and The Great Influenza

In Water and Oil, John Barry tells the story of how the Louisiana coast was shaped—and reshaped—by human ambition. What was once a landscape of extraordinary abundance became the foundation of America’s energy empire, and the decisions that fueled that empire now threaten its survival.

For thousands of years, the Mississippi River carried a continent in its current, pouring sediment into the Gulf of Mexico and building one of the most fertile and strategically vital regions on Earth. It became a gateway for global commerce and the hub of the nation’s oil and gas industry. But in just over a century, that coast has been disappearing at a rate unmatched anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Barry traces the Gulf Coast’s unraveling from its origins. He brings to life the engineers who sought to tame the river, the rise of the oil and gas industry that dredged canals through fragile wetlands, and the political and corporate decisions that altered the flow of water and sediment. Again and again, choices made in Washington and Baton Rouge—often in the name of progress—stripped away the natural buffer that protected the coast from catastrophe.

As the story moves forward, the stakes grow urgent—and personal. After Hurricane Katrina, Barry found himself drawn into the struggle he had long studied. Joining the levee board charged with protecting New Orleans, he confronted mounting scientific evidence that coastal land loss had magnified the storm’s destruction. What followed was a fierce legal and political battle to hold the oil and gas industry accountable—an effort that ignited one of the most ambitious environmental lawsuits ever filed and collided head-on with entrenched power structures.

In the process, Barry reveals that the fate of Louisiana’s coast is inseparable from the nation’s energy infrastructure, food supply, and economic future. Magnificent in scope, urgent in purpose, and unflinching in its moral clarity, Water and Oil is a story about power—how it builds prosperity, how it shields itself, and how it can be challenged. It is the story of a landscape built over centuries and imperiled in a lifetime—and of the fight to determine who will bear the cost of saving it.