There are more than a thousand miles of levees and floodgates lining each side of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Thousands of dams also hold back water and sediment throughout the Mississippi basin. But the thing is, you can’t totally harness a river such as the Mississippi. And, research has shown that our efforts to tame the river have actually made our risk of flooding worse when you add climate change to the mix.
As we experience worsening impacts from climate change, we’re wondering: How can we rethink engineering? Instead of trying to control nature, can we design with nature?
Today on Sea Change, we talk to MacArthur award-winning landscape architect, Kate Orff, and renowned environmental scientist, Don Boesch, about how they envision a future where instead of concrete, we turn to nature to protect us.
Produced by Carlyle Calhoun who co-hosts the show with Halle Parker. Our managing producer is Carlyle Calhoun. Editing help from Meg Martin. Our sound designer is Maddie Zampanti. Sea Change is a production of WWNO and WRKF. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
TRANSCRIPT
DESIGNING WITH NATURE
Corps of Engineers 1940’s promo video “The Valley of the Giant”
“Take a valley, broad and gentle. Stretch it from the from highlands to the sea.
Cloak it with natural beauty. Build cities and towns along its wooded slopes. And you have–the valley of the Mississippi. The greatest in the world. This is the valley of the giant.”
Halle: This is from a 1940s documentary called “The Valley of the Giant.”
Carlyle: Through that strong male voice and peaceful score, the short film assures us of man’s, power over nature. Well, really the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’.
“But sometimes the giant gets out of control. Sometimes the rich valley…which leave terror and destruction in their wake.”
Halle: The Mississippi has a habit of flooding. Centuries ago, Native tribes told the early European explorers to plan for it…that the river would flood every 14 years. To colonists, this was a problem. They were building towns and cities like New Orleans along the river’s banks. And they wanted to keep growing, but the flooding made that hard. So they looked for a solution.
Carlyle: The year after New Orleans was founded in 1718, it flooded. French colonists hastily built what would be the first levee on the Mississippi, although they didn’t succeed in holding back high floods. And Since that time, building levees has been the answer.
Halle: After intense debates, The Corps of Engineers even made the controversial, and fateful, decision to only use levees to control the floods. They wouldn’t do anything else. Options like cutting holes in the river’s banks to let floodwaters escape were off the table. And they would block the river from flowing through any of its natural outlets. The once-wild river was confined by concrete.
Carlyle: But as critics had warned, the levees caused the restricted river to flow higher and faster. Which meant ever taller levees were needed.
Halle: …Which failed in the worst flood in US history.
The Great Flood of 1927, when levees broke, devastating the Mississippi Delta region. The Corps’ answer: build more levees and dams.
“In response to this crisis.. Flood Control Act of 1928 was passed. The
Army Corps of Engineers was instructed to put into action a plan to control the floods…which had been stripping the valley of its great wealth.”
Halle: There are now a thousand miles of levees and floodgates lining each side of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Thousands of dams also hold back water and sediment throughout the Mississippi basin.
“A big job”
Carlyle: Infrastructure we call it.
“In the spring and the fall, when the river awakes headlong rush to the sea, these massive walls will stand to protect the valley. And so the future can hold new promise for the valley and the nation. The giant is being harnessed, slowly but surely.”
Halle: But the thing is, you can’t totally harness a river such as the Missisippi. And, research has shown that our efforts to tame the river have actually made our risk of flooding worse when you add climate change to the mix.
Carlyle: We are see-sawing between extreme events. In the last decade, we’ve seen unprecedented floods… and droughts.
Halle: The Mississippi River may not be totally tamed, but it is certainly not wild…it is no longer a natural river. But after all we humans have done here on Earth, what is still natural?
Carlyle: That’s a point one of our guests today makes: “There's no more natural nature left.
Halle: As we experience worsening impacts from climate change, we’re wondering: How can we rethink engineering? Instead of trying to control nature, can we design with nature?
I’m Halle Parker.
Carlyle: And I’m Carlyle Calhoun, and you’re listening to Sea Change.
<<theme music>>
Carlyle: Today on Sea Change, we talk to two leading experts about how they envision a future where instead of concrete, we turn to nature to protect us.,
Halle: Carlyle sits down with a MacArthur Genius landscape architect with big ideas about how we can redesign our world, and a renowned environmental scientist who has studied coastal ecosystems across the world.
Theme music - start interview tape
CARLYLE: I’m here with Kate Orff and Don Boesh.
Kate is the founder of SCAPE, a studio that’s worked with communities across the country to develop natural spaces that both enrich people’s lives and protect them. She is a leading voice for working with nature to make us more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
And Don is an environmental scientist who has been dubbed an Admiral of the Chesapeake. The New Orleans native has spent nearly 50 years studying coastal ecosystems, focused on their protection and restoration.
The two collaborated on a project called Our Future Coast that envisions a more hopeful future for Louisiana’s coast, where we are currently losing land at the fastest rate in the country. They say “a revived coast is within reach. reconnecting the Mississippi River to our coastal wetlands, means it could be far richer than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.
Hello! Thanks for being with us today.
Roundtable:
Carlyle: Good morning Kate, good morning Don. Thanks for being here today.
Pleasure to be with you. Right. So, let's first set the scene of where a lot of the work you've both been involved with is happening here in the Mississippi River Basin. So, as we know, the Mississippi River flows from Minnesota all the way down below New Orleans, where I'm sitting, to emptyS into the Gulf of Mexico.
Water drains in the Mississippi from over 40 percent of the continental United States. Kate, can you first talk about what makes the Mississippi Basin special and why you were drawn to work here?
Kate: Well, yes, I am a landscape architect and, and a professor at Columbia, and as you just mentioned, the Mississippi River, watershed is 40 percent plus of the entire country.
It's America's river, America's wetlands. It touches so many different. States and and it really to me, it's also has a strong cultural, obviously significance for our country, right? our mythology in many ways is tied to this water body. So it's both a parable of.
What could go wrong, I suppose, in terms of this, you know, engineering approach and , the way that the river has been modified and changed over the past century. But I also see it as a big. Opportunity for what we could do right in the future. So I'm drawn to it as a water body, as a story and, a kind of a hopeful moment, in our culture.
Carlyle: And Don, maybe if you can dig into that a little bit. the ways we have historically managed this river and tried to control it. and why that's set us up for a lot of the problems that we're now dealing, dealing with.
Don: Right. Well, well, for me, it's a personal history because I grew up and lived just blocks from the river in New Orleans. so it was there. I knew about it. It was part of my life. And, and I, as I grew older, I began to understand the changes that were taking place. In particular, I live. uh, through Hurricane Betsy that was flooded because of the, of Mr.
Goh and the Gulf and Intercoastal Waterway and our, and our failure to think about the big changes we were making and the consequences thereof. So I spent a good part of my career working, doing research and helping to facilitate science on the, on the coast And I think actually before I knew Kate, uh, I knew a book.
Uh, that she wrote, and she focused on the, you know, the industrial corridor, of the lower river. And what really impressed me about her approach, you know, as a landscaped architect, you think you're working on your backyard, your own little homescape, but she took an expansive view from the start, looking at the problems she just discussed of the whole river.
And they include You know, the vast development of agriculture in the river. you know, that's eliminated vast majority of the wetlands in the system caused the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the, the ability to control floods and to build dams, which have, which have intercepted the sediment supply that's needed to sustain the Delta.
All of those things come together. So I, I had the opportunity to work with her. I jumped at it because Yeah. From my view, she was an architect who thought like a scientist in terms of the big picture and connection. And if you think about it, you know, we have this challenge before us and, you know, it's, we're going to be talking about designing with nature, which is good, but in a way, what we've caused for ourselves is a major, alteration.
And, and so do, so we, we're out, we're under the pottery barn rule, right? We broke it, so we own it. And so we have to figure out best ways to fix it using, ways that are built on and use natural processes rather than fight them.
Carlyle: Yeah, and Kate–Don was just talking about both the kind of grey infrastructure that we’ve built and then also our natural infrastructure, or what is sometimes referred to as green infrastructure. And your work kind of lives at the intersection of these two. Can you talk about that?
Kate: so, I guess I would say we jump into green versus gray, you know, we have had a gray philosophy, and typically gray means, what I would say, single-purpose infrastructure largely why it's gray is because it's usually concrete, which is gray and, and this kind of single-purpose infrastructure tries to like solve for one problem. you have a flood wall and you're assuming that you're assigning, uh, you know, solving for in quotes, you know, uh, sea level rise or et cetera, but then what gray infrastructure kind of leaves in the rearview mirror is that as I would tell you, as a landscape architect, That landscapes are complex and dynamic systems that don't respond to one criteria.
There's rainbobs, which are massive flooding events. There are issues of water quality. There are issues of,you know, sort of depleting aquifers and so on. So gray infrastructure in my mind is a single thing. Purpose, quote unquote, false solution to a problem that is too narrowly defined.
And so I never like to compare that with green infrastructure because it's like, it's not apples to apples. They're two completely different paradigms of what will ultimately reduce our risk. And I think The green infrastructure very loosely kind of covers what I would call, you know, a more nature-based approach, which is the idea that truly robust, interconnected, natural systems, whether they're oyster reefs, mangroves, marshlands, et cetera, that these upland forests, that these intact systems ultimately have massive protective benefit for a huge array of the many, many climate challenges that we face.
I might just back up a little bit and reference the publication, Petrochemical America, that Don mentioned, and this was a, you know, a true labor of love and kind of a love letter to you. The Mississippi as a system, in a sense, and that it was an analysis with that's a sort of series of maps and drawings and text that kind of unpacked the story of the Mississippi in parallel with the photographer Richard Mizrach's Incredible photos that he took in 1997 and so, you know, I guess Petrochemical America, was really a story of the interrelatedness
of the system that that Don mentioned, right? That that hog farmers in Iowa. And, you know, soybean and corn in the middle of the United States and the sort of nitrogen chemicals that they use, are in dialogue intentionally or not with shrimpers and oyster men and massive water quality collapse in the Gulf, right? So it's that all of these economies, people, systems, petrochemical. Extraction use and consumption. We're all kind of linked up around the system.
So Petrochemical America was kind of literally drawing the lines that connect, our oil driven economy to the impacts in the landscape and the landscapes that we have made.
Carlyle Yeah. And I'm so glad you brought up your collaborative book, project Petrochemical America, You worked with a photographer, so they're, photographs from what is often referred to as Cancer Alley. And then you provided a lot more context.
what I thought was so interesting about the project is you looked at the layers of history. that got us to the point of when that photograph was taken.
And then part of the book looks to, okay, well, what now? If we think in a more hopeful way, What could the future look like for this region? And I think that's what our future coast is about, right? It's like looking at the history, all the layers and layers of history that got us to this point,
but instead of kind of drowning in the issues, the two of you said, Well, actually, what if we're hopeful? What if we do everything right? What is possible for our coast?
Don: Right. Well, you know, we have so much doom and gloom. We have these maps that's showing the state, you know, all in red, all the land loss and so on.
How, if we did everything right, what could it be, And so I started off by taking really a hard look at. One of the major determinants of the future sea level rise, right? I think we all know that Louisiana is very susceptible to sea level rise, I'm already very familiar with the, the science on which the projections of sea level rise are based and so on.
So I had a good look at those. And first, first thing you understand is that how much the sea is going to rise depends on our greenhouse gas emissions and how, how warm the planet is. So I made the case of. The tying that back to state the state's policy as you and your listeners know, Governor Edwards had, you know, done something quite bold of establishing a goal to reduce emissions in Louisiana
And that's really giant. That's important because Louisiana is such a big emitter of greenhouse gases. So then we looked at more realistic. You know, emission scenarios, what we're likely to achieve. And what I found was that the state, and I'm not, this is not a criticism and all they did it for good reasons to be safe, we're using really high projections of, of likely sea level rise that assume that we wouldn't do anything about greenhouse gas emissions, sort of a worst case scenario.
And they did that because they were trying to make sure that we protected people in the coastal area. That's perfectly understandable. But if we're really interested in understanding what the marshes are going to do. We don't want to know how bad it could be. We want to know how bad it probably will be.
And so I honed in on that. And what I discovered is that, if you look at that more realistic view of sea level rise, there are a number of things that actually could work in the long run to help us restore and sustain the coast. Take, for example, the river diversions like the mid Barataria sediment diversion that's taken place, you know, there are estimates of how much land it would build and and how long it would last, but those are using fairly high assumptions of sea level rise. If we were more realistic, those diversions will work even better. They'll create more land and it will last longer. So I tried to bring some them. Optimism, but based on reality into the into the mix. And then we can begin working with Kate to kind of develop a visualization of this. And what I learned as a scientist from from that experience from Kate and her team they're able to help us bring it into multiple dimensions, not only the vertical dimension, but, you know, people and uses and, and, and all the other things that come with it. So it gives us a more expansive understanding
Of what what the future might look like in a way that people can relate to people can see and understand and more powerful way.
Carlyle: Yeah, because these big ecosystem projects can be hard to wrap your head around. Like the mid-barataria bay sediment diversion project you just mentioned. It’s a huge huge project. the largest ecosystem restoration project ever in the country. it just broke ground this summer, and it’s happening on the river just south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish. Basically, they are punching a hole in the levee so that the Mississippi River will be reconnected to Barataria Bay – and sediment from the river will actually be able to get to the wetlands that are disappearing, which will help them rebuild over time. So your collaboration, Our Future Coast, focuses on how powerful these kinds of restoration projects can be that harness the the river, right? so really nature-based design, which is the focus of a lot of your work, Kate. So, Kate, I wonder what it’s like when you combine that type of a design approach with Don’s scientific research approach? It seems to offer a more hopeful vision for the coast…
Kate: Yeah. So I'll start with just the, the notion that first of all, these kinds of collaborations, which are You know, landscape architect science, you know, planning these should be. Very, very regular and the norm. So this, this should not be the exception. This should be the norm.
And so what I felt like our future coast did in a very exciting way was to just take this concept of scaling to another level, right? So we have the scale of the entire Delta. We were able to scale it to a number of basins and visualize what's happening in each of the basins. And then we're able to scale to Barataria and then come up with, you know, a suite of interrelated projects, something like 16 that in combination had this catalytic effect by being combined.
So I also feel like a project like Our future coast began to combine projects and think at a landscape scale, which is the scale that is the most desperately needed and the hardest
you know, that's why I'm, I'm excited about it, because I feel like it provides a different road map for how to think about these intractable challenges. And of course, the, our future coast, you know, what I would just Be very clear about that sort of had a bias towards nature-based solutions, just because, you know, I, I feel like, well, we've had, uh, you know, more than a century, for, you know, this kind of ideology to play out.
And as much as, you know, the massive levies we see today, have reduced flooding in certain areas. They've also unintentionally created. Huge existential problems, which are, you know, um, throwing this much needed sediment off the coast of the intercontinental shelf and treating the sediment that's needed to nourish wetlands almost as a waste product.
It's created this kind of false sense of, you know, I'm protected. and it's cut off this notion of, landscapes that are living and changing. Um, and it's kind of locked into place. You know, sectors and stakeholders but I do feel like. In a way, part of the aspiration of the project was to say, okay, well, what if we unlocked this gray infrastructure and we enabled some change and fluidity to happen in a way that was very, very mindful of the economy and the, you know, needs of, local residents, Because right now we're, economy is also locked into place in static.
So we, in a way, I feel like the two are intertwined, right? The physical landscape that's stuck and locked into place, the political landscape that's stuck and at, at loggerheads. So in a way, you know, for me, landscape and letting that kind of system rebound and return to some of the bounty it once had, seems also like a hopeful way to think about, you know, a revived economy.
Carlyle: And let's talk about since, since a lot of our future coast, you all did focus on the Barataria, Basin, which is, you know, lost a ton of land and in the future going to see a lot of changes with the mid Barataria Bay Diversion Project.
So Don, Can you talk about some specific examples of what you all looked at in the Barataria Bay? And maybe first just start by describing what this place is for people who don't know.
Don: Well, yeah, sure. Well, Barataria Bay is a, an embayment, uh, between the Mississippi River and Bayou Lafourche, uh, and includes parts of Lafourche Parish and Jefferson Parish and, and part of, parts of Plaquemines Parish. And, it is, a very important, system, has been historically, uh, for Louisiana, it was kind of the backyard garden and, and, food resources for New Orleans and most people don't understand that it's actually it's actually it's been changing very dramatically the bay was You know back in the in early in the 20th century even relatively a small body of water was mostly marshes And that bay has just gotten bigger and bigger and expanded and the salinity's intruded And and the like, uh, so it really needed to to to get some serious attention And and the linchpin of that, of course, is re Connecting it with the river.
And that's what the Mid Barataria sediment diversion is all about. So that was kind of a core element of it. And we first of all have to give the state and CPRA, the coastal protection restoration. Sorry, a lot of credit. I mean, against all odds, they have a very long vision and develop this plan for the state.
So we kind of use that as the foundation, including the diversion. So we didn't, we can't claim any, any credit for dreaming up the sediment diversion. It was part of the plan.
What what is Kate tried to indicate what we tried to do is tie them tie these things together is that how would you work with that plus the plus the barrier island restoration plus diversions higher up in the basin? How do you deal with a storm surge? That's going to affect the highway 90 that crosses the basin to the West.
And we were trying to show why some things would be maybe more effective than others and how they could be tied together.
Carlyle: We've been talking a lot about big systems, but let's bring it back to talking about people.
So, Kate, Do you think of the kind of work you do of landscape architecture is kind of a public service and …you're focused not only on using design to help protect people from the impacts of climate change, but also on how communities live and how design can help reconnect people with nature?
Kate: Yeah, yeah, I definitely feel like there's a very different way of conceiving what Landscape architects do, and how we think, which I've hopefully tried to advance in many, many ways in the past decades. you know, so much of it is about kind of restitching what has become fragmented and that may mean what, what are the systems that have become fragmented in the landscape, i. e. oyster reefs separated from, you know, the eelgrass separated from, uh, Shoreline, so that's like a physical thing, but then it's also how, you know, communities have become fragmented by super highways or communities have been fragmented through redlining or other other, you know, planning instruments.
So, you know, I'm not you know, Naive to think that, oh, the world was once a perfect place and we're gonna find our way back to that perfect place, you know, quite the opposite. Um, but I do feel like part of the role of the landscape architect is to be a bridge. So that might be bridging in the case of our future coast sort of science in design.
In the case of communities, it might be bridging. To neighborhoods that have been separated, through other physical infrastructure, it might be connecting up, you know, people with the waterfront that wants sustain them. So that's, for example, what we're doing, um, scape is about to complete and a very large, kind of, uh, innovative green, blue infrastructure project here in the New York region called Living Breakwaters. so that's kind of an example of how I think, I guess, which is that, you know, need to bring together, you know, in this case, we built a kind of a rock core breakwater with, like, really cool.
Intricate ecological features and plan and section, that reduces risk and that, sort of helps to rebuild the shoreline replenish the shoreline, reduce erosion. Um, and then that breakwater. Is also, you know, going to be seeded with oysters and, and it's already attracted finfish and, and seals and like this whole explosion of marine life.
So, in that way, that is a physical project in that it is a, you know, uh, about one and a half mile string of, of these ecological breakwaters, but it is also a social project. Organized around people because we have you know, curriculum design for high school students to learn hands on science and to learn harbor restoration and water chemistry and all sorts of things through hands on learning. It's a people project because it supports teachers. It's a people project because. The fishermen are super excited about it, you know, so it's, it's also just very much about bringing people back to the shoreline as much as it is you know, an innovative kind of coastal infrastructure.
Carlyle: Yeah. And you brought up oysters, which, are something that, have been a big part of the ecosystems and economies of where all three of us live. Um, here in Louisiana, oysters are still huge. We are the country’s biggest supplier of oysters. But still oysters used to be even bigger here t the Gulf Coast used to have these massive oyster reefs.
There was even one referred to as the Great Barrier Reef of the Americas. And Kate, you live in New York and Don, the Chesapeake Bay is your backyard, right? Two places that also historically had like. I mean, trillions of oysters, right? Like huge oyster reefs and oysters were big economies. I think we, a lot of us think about oysters just being delicious to eat, but they were once like. really big parts of coastal ecosystems beyond what we can imagine now, probably. So can you all talk about kind of the power of oysters and then the oyster restoration projects you’re both working on what you’re both working you on with, oyster restoration pro?
Don: Sure, you're right about these major changes. Oysters are, are really important because they're sort of ecosystem engineers. They build things and make things happen and, and can change over time. And, you mentioned, I live in the Chesapeake Bay region now and, and the name Chesapeake means great shellfish bay because when the, when the, colonists first came here they spent most of their time running into oyster reefs. There were so many of them around. and, uh, Kate, I'm, I'm proud to say is also, grew up here in Maryland. So she knows what I'm talking about. And, and so, uh, and they were, they were depleted to like 1%, uh, or less of what they, what they were from over harvesting and diseases that were introduced by transplanting, you know, foreign oysters into the area and things of that sort.
So we've made a mess of this. But we've actually begin to reverse things by doing some targeted, uh, uh, restoration, building upon what we've learned about how oysters, build reefs and so on. And, and, and so that's been very effective and it's strong, like, as Kate said, it's drawn all sorts of other fish and crabs and other things around it.
It's, it's really quite remarkable, but it's, they're also important for our, in our system for filtration of the water, because we have this problem with, uh, you know, excessive nutrients and a lot of algal blooms. And so they filter the water and help, help clarify things. One of the things, although this wasn't in the plan for these targeted restoration areas, one of the things we're seeing now is that they also are the nurseries for the other oysters.
So we're seeing a rebound in the number of oysters that are Settling from, you know, from the plankton as larvae elsewhere, because now we've built this population and protected them of older oysters of adults, mamas and papas. And so they are that that's really this broader effect. The other thing on this breakwater approach that Kate talked about, and this is, and this is being done precisely being done also in Louisiana is to recognize that oysters can be a very effective species, means of shoreline protection and particularly an area that's in which sea levels rising rapidly because the land is sinking or sea is rising because guess what?
You can place them down, you place rocks down and they're there and they're going to gradually submerge and so on. But if you have oysters with them they grow upward. You know, as sea level rises, they trap sediments, they help protect the marshes nearby, they break the waves from hitting the marsh edges that cause the erosion.
And so, in part of the master plan, part of the efforts that are going on, both by the state, as well as by, um, as well by its environmental groups. Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, for example, is a very active program of recycling the oyster shells, and actually getting, citizens, people, volunteers out. To own this, to be part of this process of reestablishing these, these breakwaters, if you will, to help still the waves that are causing the marshes to erode, trapping sediments and growing upwards and, and producing larvae, you know, for the broader oyster population. So that's the sort of approach that kind of really, if we thought about it, we could really make a big difference with.
Carlyle: Yeah, kind of living shorelines, part of the idea of living shorelines. And Kate, I've seen a lot of your projects referred to as “oyster tecture”
Kate: Oyster texture. Yeah, that was, uh, uh, kind of a term, um, that I developed in 20, it seems like a long time ago now, but it was 2009, seems like another lifetime, but basically this, you know, an oyster texture is a A frame, which is about it's it's trying to kind of center our attention that. That there's no more, you know, natural nature, so to speak, that these species need a helping hand to return. So, at least in the New York Harbor, you know, the amount of, silt in the bay just basically smothers any native population of oyster out that would even be able to settle on the bay. So, you have to lift them up out of that kind of zone. So, these species... It's not just like nature will come back if we leave it alone. We've so dramatically altered our water chemistry, temperature, flow systems that, that to me, oyster texture is a, is a way of communicating that, that we need a kind of a living infrastructure or design to help these species get, get a foothold.
I'm also just such a huge fan of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and the work there. And I really feel like with more people involved, this just becomes more and more of a movement in the sense that people get more tuned into what's happening, and what the kind of solution space might be and seeing alternatives by literally working.
To create those alternatives.
I just wanted to touch on one thing you mentioned, which is that, that, that the reefs in Louisiana used to be like the great barrier reef of the Americas. And let's just take a moment to contemplate that, that, that this was once a system that was so vast that it, essentially enabled this society to take hold here, right? It enabled the food, the coastal protection, you would say from storms and so on. And, and just to contemplate the fact that at the same time that these systems and similar in New York was around 25 percent of the harbor was Reefs, you know, the same moments that these systems were in dramatic collapse, zero to one percent, zero to one percent of their historic extents. At the same time, we're extracting oil and we are creating the conditions for more extreme hurricanes, more, kind of weather action, more rain bombs, etc. So it's like just as these Very protective ecosystems. We need them the most now, but we are now in a double whammy where we've eliminatedthese ecosystems to the point of almost near collapse at the very moment where we are. I've created and fabricated this intense vulnerability to climate extremes. so, you know, we do need to kind of amplify and ramp up the efforts to both reduce carbon, emissions and our. Transition to a just decarbonized economy and also to rebuild these intact ecosystems, forests, reefs, marshlands, et cetera, mangroves as quickly as possible.
Carlyle: Yeah, and I think that's what the two of you have done together is to say, yeah, what if we do both of those things? What if we don't stay on the same destructive path that we've been on? What if we start to rebuild these protective ecosystems? And as you said, nature's not necessarily just going to do that on its own now because of how much we've drastically changed this planet. But that we don't always have to destroy nature, we can help nature protect us from the impacts of climate change. And as you both have talked about this, too, uh, You know, Louisiana has historically been an oil and gas state, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it can't transition to a less destructive future.
Don: when you kind of break that out and realize that oil and gas is on its way out. At least in terms of a fuel, we might see to make some petrochemicals that we definitely need, but its use as a fuel has got to go, and that we need to think about that future transition in a positive way, because we don't want the people Uh, and the economies that have depended on it.
We don't we can't abandon along coastal Louisiana. We shouldn't abandon them We should be rethinking how they can be involved in these new economies More restorative economies dealing with the transition of how we what energy we use and how we use it Uh, we really need some really critical thinking and leadership about that
Kate: And I guess just to build on Don's just excellent response is just that, you know, we have to think about nature and the economy together. Right now, you know, we've got 100 years of developing kind of Carbon consumption and extraction with essentially nature as a kind of a waste, the waste disposal system, and that just has to change.
And so I would just end on a very, very optimistic note that I see there's just incredible opportunity here, like, rather than be stuck in place in a stuck system, river system, you know, looking at,the past of oil and gas that is being phased out. On multiple scales that there's this great opportunity to think about the bounty of the system that could be and also the incredible opportunity and federal dollars and private investment that is flowing in big pipelines towards communities and industries that want to push
the parameters and look to the future and think about, renewable energy, greener, cleaner energy and and so comparing and combining that with the great work that CPRA is already doing and the things are happening, the coast, you know, it's it's hard to not be optimistic. And I think it's really more of like a mindset change that than anything else that is needed to unlock that opportunity.
Carlyle: Yeah. I love, I love that as an ending thought, but Don, is there anything else that you would like to add?
Don: No. Just amen.
Carlyle: Well, thank you both so much for being here. This has been just a fascinating conversation and I really appreciate y'all talking with us today.
Don: Our pleasure.
Kate: Thanks
OUTRO
HALLE: Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was produced and hosted by Carlyle Calhoun. Editing help was provided by me, Halle Parker. Our sound designer is Maddie Zampanti.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
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Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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