Louisiana is a world leader in coastal restoration. Many would even say number one. The media is full of stories about the coastal land loss crisis in Louisiana, the dire predictions of climate change and sea level rise, and polarizing accounts of controversial projects, but what is also true is that Louisiana is making tremendous strides in piecing this ragged shoreline back together little by little.
Over the next four episodes of Sea Change, we're going to feature Wetlands Radio. The series is a deep dive into Louisiana's coast - both how it came to be imperiled and also, the incredible things a mighty group of people are doing to fight land loss.
In part one, how did we get here? From deep geology, to efforts to control the Mississippi River, to the boom days of oil and gas, we discover the backstory that led to the start of coastal restoration.
EPISODE CREDITS
This episode was hosted by Executive Producer Carlyle Calhoun and Wetlands Radio producer Eve Abrams.
Wetlands Radio is produced by Eve Abrams and funded by BTNEP, the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program through the Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program. To hear Wetlands Radio episodes in their entirety, visit btnep.org.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. 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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TRANSCRIPT
How do you tell the story of the Louisiana coast?
FRAN: once upon a time. There was a beautiful wetland ecosystem thriving with native plant species and crawfish and shrimp and gators. And then the Europeans came and industries started popping up, and canals were dug, and there were cuts made in the marsh, and suddenly, instead of it being a thriving ecosystem, it was more of a resource to be extracted, and now there's a mighty group of people working to bring it back to its former glory.
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I’m Carlyle Calhoun and you’re listening to Sea Change.
That’s the start of the first episode of Wetlands Radio, an audio series about Coastal Restoration. Over the next four episodes of Sea Change, we’re going to feature Wetlands Radio. It’s a deep dive into Lousiiana’s coast – both how it came to be imperiled and also: the incredible things the state is doing to fight land loss. And helping guide us along Louisiana’s coast is Eve Abrams, who produced Wetlands Radio. Hey Eve!
EVE: Hello, hello! Thanks for having me, Carlyle. I have learned a TON about Louisiana’s coast – why and how it’s vanishing, sure, but also what the state of Louisiana is doing to save it, which is surprisingly a LOT.
CARLYLE: That’s great to hear because when most people hear about our coast, they hear it’s disappearing. So bring on the good news! Where do we start?
EVE: I think: the Mississippi River, which people have been trying to control for about as long as Europeans have been on this continent. Al Duvernay, a retired paleontologist, pegs the most consequential meddling to a century ago. When the nation responded to one of its worst natural disasters.
AL DUVERNAY: So in 1926 it started raining in the fall, and pretty much didn't stop until spring -- sometime in April, 1927. Flooded everywhere up and down the Mississippi River. Broke [EA2] a lot of stuff, killed a lot of people. That got the Federale’s attention. All of the geniuses in Congress and whatnot, they said, you know, we need to do something about this. And so they set about building levees on both sides of the river all the way up and down the Mississippi River Valley.
Which saved a lot of lives, but also: cut off the river’s ability to overflow its banks and build land –which is how Louisiana exists in the first place.
So the water’s sediment could no longer reach swamps and marshes. In other words, the levees severed the river from the wetlands.
So 1927 is the year Al Duvernay begins telling the story of Louisiana’s coast.
AL: What I'd like to do is show some maps of this land loss issue.
Al is in his early 70’s. Strong and active with fierce blue eyes. He volunteers a lot with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. One person there called him a “super volunteer.” He’s the fix-it guy, the builder. Also: the one who gives presentations about land loss using these very maps -- all zooming in on Buras, Louisiana. Way down near the toe of Louisiana’s boot.
AL: So this is what it looked like in 1927. This is what it has looked like for probably 1000 years. And it was a very nice place to live. Everything that you needed was right there. You've got cypress swamps, oak and black willow forest on the ridges and fresh water near the river with Goujons and blue catfish bigger than your leg.
AL: Now we move ahead 30 years, about a generation, okay?
Al pulls out his second map, from 1960.
AL: And it pretty much looks the same. I mean, you still, you know, you got the Mississippi River here, you got the Gulf of Mexico eight miles away down there, and it still looks like a fairly healthy marsh. But what you will notice, if you look closely, is a bunch of straight lines now -- canals -- open canals. So what happened between 1927 and 1960 is the oil and gas industry kicked in high gear – especially around World War II, so now we can actually float barges in and drill oil wells out in the marsh.
In order to extract oil as efficiently as possible. Industry sliced and diced the marsh, says Al. A marsh he knows intimately.
AL: And this is the time that I started playing -- about 1960 is when I started playing in this marsh right here, specifically with my dad, cruising all around these bayous, exploring, fishing and hunting and like that. And pretty much every time I went down there, there was some barge dredging a canal. It was just constant.
Al pulls out his final map.
AL: So we move ahead 30 years from this map right here, to 1993
EVE: whoa
AL: whoa indeed.
EVE: Oh, my God, like the land just disappeared.
AL: The land just disappeared.
EVE: poof
AL: Basically nothing left of the marsh. So when we start talking about, you know, the land loss in the last 100 years and all kind of stuff, not so fast, bottom line. This all happened in 30, 40, years.
AL DUVERNAY: If I were to write a recipe book of how to destroy the wetlands, it would look like what we've done the last 50 years. Step one, turn off the sediment machine. Step two, slice and dice the marsh.
Step three: harvest the fruits of our geologic past. Because so much of what’s happened in southeast Louisiana is because of what’s below the surface.
CARLYLE: That story is coming up.
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JACQUELINE: So usually, the Once Upon a Time for Louisiana, when you hear it, it starts 10,000 years ago, because that's about the age of the deltas that are here.
Jacqueline Richard, geology professor at Nunez Community College, sets the geologic table for us.
JACQUELINE: I like to go, as a deep time geologist -- that's what my training is -- I like to start Louisiana's story back about 260 million years ago when Pangea broke up,
Pangea, the super continent that -- like Jacqueline said – existed hundreds of millions of years ago.
JACQUELINE: So once upon a time, Pangea broke up. Right? The continents moved
Before that, they were all smooshed together.
JACQUELINE: South America was quite literally where we are right now. It's kind of butted up here, where the Gulf of Mexico would eventually be, and then Africa was sitting right next to the eastern seaboard. So you could walk from, like North Carolina to Africa
Or what would become North Carolina and Africa. Anyway, gradually – over millions of years – these continents moved, and a skinny ocean formed between them. Like oceans today, it was salty.
Meanwhile, at the same time these continents were moving, the planet heated up.
JACQUELINE: the temperature between the Jurassic time period and the Cretaceous time period was really hot, much warmer than it is today. And so as they were separating, and you have this little, skinny, narrow ocean, a lot of that water evaporated. And as you evaporate water, lots of minerals get left behind, with the most common being salt.
And as the continents kept moving apart -- over millions of years – other layers formed on top of the salt – like limestone and chalk. These layers are now miles beneath our feet.
JACQUELINE: And so the bottom -- our basement rock, right? I know we don't have basements in Louisiana, right? But that's at the bottom. So our basement rock is all salt here.
Remember that salt, buried under layers of rock, miles below our feet. We will come back to salt. But for the moment, fast forward—to around 70 million years ago. Pangea’s gone; divided into the seven continents we know today. And the Mississippi Delta as we know it today, isn’t a thing yet. It didn’t exist.
JACQUELINE: So the original Mississippi River Delta, the OG Delta, was up at the tip of Illinois, so where Cairo, Illinois is. That's where the original Delta was. All of this was underwater. This was all part of the ocean.
So when did our delta form – the one which IS Louisiana?
DON: Well, I think you really have to go back at least as far as the last ice age. You know, that's not that long ago. It's like 12,000 years ago.
Marine scientist Don Boesch says that’s when the glaciers were melting, causing the seas to rise, and
DON: the river began dumping its mud, sediment into the shallow areas and building land. So all of Southeastern Louisiana, really is new since that time. So it's really young, young environment on Earth,
JOE: back when the river system was free flowing, it carried a phenomenal sediment load
Joe Wyble works for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. He’s the first of many who take the land-building story from here.
JOE: So kind of counterintuitively, we needed the river to flood to build the land.
ROSINA: The river would run free, and it would shift where it would come through and flood the landscape
CLINT: And it was that shifting back and forth movement of the river, and for lack of a better word, the spraying of water and sediment, and nutrients.
DON: Like a wild firehose, it’s changed its position.
AL: So the Mississippi River comes over here and basically fills up the basin into nice, high ground, high-ish ground.
ROSINA: so it create these different lobes, right?
AL: So it will fill up there and then switch over here, fill up here, and switch over back and forth.
ROSINA: but when flood waters would recede, there was always this rich sediment that was left great for the plants and the trees and the animals.
Rosina Phillip is the traditional knowledge holder for her people – the Atakapa-Ishak/ Chawasha (shawasha) -- in Grand Bayou. Rosina says her ancestors lived in harmony with these natural processes. Their thoughts on flooding?
ROSINA: It's a gift to the people. The waters, the life-giving waters, would be giving more land to the people.
DON: When Europeans came, the French came to settle and colonize the area, they first of all realized the real importance of the Mississippi River because of draining this whole continent,
But, as Don puts it
DON: they were rudely awakened by the challenge, and that is the river floods.
You know the story from here. Europeans colonized a place called Bulbancha. They built a city they named New Orleans. They built levees. They became Americans and built more levees. Also they built cars, and extracted oil to run them. And this brings us back to salt. Remember the salt? Buried miles below us, under other layers of rock. Geology Professor Jacqueline Richard says:
JACQUELINE: salt doesn't like to act like a solid rock. Even when it's been there for millions of years, it's really low density. So when you push down on it, it wants to move upwards.
Up through all the rock layers on top of it. Environmental Scientist Scott Eustis pictures this
SCOTT: like a layer cake and then salt domes which are less dense push up through those layers
Turning the layers on their sides and making it much easier to drill for what’s trapped underneath them. The remains of tiny marine plants and animals, that over millions of years, became oil.
JACQUELINE: When those salt domes came up, they tip the layers around them. And all of the oil and gas kind of comes up to that top most point
SCOTT: and so around the edges of salt domes, you'll get circles of pockets where oil and gas has come up.
JACQUELINE: Your offshore rigs, a lot of them are all centered around those salt domes, because that's the easiest place to find it.
SCOTT: Sometimes you can look at a map of oil wells in southern Louisiana and see a ring, a circular formation. Or if you look at Avery Island, for example, you can see the oil wells are arranged in a circular pattern.
JACQUELINE: So those salt domes were really critical for our economic drivers today.
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JACQUELINE: That's the part that always amazes me, right? Is, you know, we're out there doing all of, you know, all of our economic things that we're doing, but you don't realize how many 10s, if not hundreds, of millions of years it took to get to that point.
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In other words, the conditions it took the Earth hundreds of millions of years to create, took us – people – around 100 years to consume.
CARLYLE: That’s coming up next.
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Back in the 1960’s and 70’s, the petroleum industry in Louisiana was booming. New businesses sprung up: building barges, supplying equipment, cooking meals for tens of thousands of people whose lives were transformed by new and lucrative jobs in gas and oil[1]. The money flowed: to banks, real estate, car dealerships, you name it.
Oil and gas was GREAT for Louisiana’s economy. Until it wasn’t.
By 1983, there was so much oil flooding the marketplace, that the price per barrel, across the globe, plummeted. In Louisiana, this meant hundreds of companies went out of business or went bankrupt. Thousands of people lost their jobs[2]. This was the bust. The bust for oil. But in a way, it was the birth of coastal restoration.
MARK: the coastal restoration program is basically a mitigation program for decades and decades of land use decisions that extracted value from these lands and waters and put nothing back.
Mark Davis is an environmental lawyer. Has been for decades. Picture silver hair and wire-frame glasses.
MARK: This was a time of atonement, if you will, for the past, and that the future must be approached differently.
Mark’s a water expert in Southeast Louisiana. In other words, the guy you want to talk to learn how coastal restoration became a thing.
MARK: It wasn't because a governor woke up one day and said, Oh my goodness, the coast is in trouble. No president did that, no senator. It was really people pointing the way.
EVE: So are you saying that coastal restoration is happening because of a consortium of individuals with good intentions and good ideas?
MARK: It's the only reason it's happening.
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The coast also needs restoring BECAUSE of people.
MARK: For many many years, we've viewed wetlands in particular as a wasteland. A place that you should do anything you could to extract value from. I mean, we're dealing with a landscape that was dominated, particularly by people who never questioned that it was the right thing to do.
AL: and there are those who will point to the Bible and say that we were given that right.
You may remember Al Duvernay, retired paleontologist. (Retired from Shell Oil Company, as a matter of fact.) Anyway, he’s talking here about this belief: that god gave the earth to humans – to rule and manage.
AL: Dominion. And that is such a bastardization of that word, because dominion over the creatures, the plants and the earth and all that kind of stuff has nothing to do with destroying it.
Which is precisely what we’d been doing. So… back in the 80’s
MARK: What became the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana was born out of the collapse of the oil patch, when people went back trying to make lives as fishermen, as guides, as this or that, and they found things weren't where they had been. You had to travel farther to find the fish, alligator eggs weren't where they were. If you were going to be a guide, well, you needed a new map. And also, as people lost their good paying jobs in the oil industry, they not only went back looking for work, they went back finding trouble. Families were under stress, alcoholism went up. Really, Coastal Restoration, in many ways, was first really felt in social services.
Meanwhile, for the first time, scientists started noticing vast changes on the coast.
DON: There's a gentleman, a New Orleans guy as well -- Woody Gagliano is his name, and he did a lot for helping us understand the scale of the problem.
Don Boesch, retired Marine Scientist and ecosystems expert – says: back in the early 70’s, Gagliano
DON: did for the first time systemic surveys of land change over the whole coast, using satellite imagery and so on. And when you totaled it up, I mean, it was enormous.
So much land was disappearing. People could see it.
MARK: It was fishers, it was environmentalists, it was local government people, who came to the realization that something was happening and no one was paying attention to it, in part because it was nobody's legal responsibility to.
So, with a tremendous amount of effort, this broad consortium of people changed that.
MARK: in 1989 we passed the foundational laws that we are still working with today to restore the coast. And then in 1991 we passed the coastal wetlands planning protection and restoration act, CWPPRA, which made it the federal government's business to partner with the state.
For over 3 decades now, it’s been Louisiana’s official business to restore the coast.
But what does that mean?
AL: Yeah, you know, semantics is, is a tricky business,
Al Duvernay, retired paleontologist.
AL: because when you say, restore, what does that mean? Does that mean that I want to make this 2020 map look like the 1947 map? That's impossible.
CLINT: You know, restoration you might think about a chair that you got from your grandparents.
Clint Wilson, dean of LSU’s College of the Coast Environment.
CLINT: Oh, we're going to restore that chair so it's going to look like it did when my grandparents bought the chair in whatever year. Well we can't do that.
AL: So technically, we're not really restoring, but the implication is we are building land like it's supposed to build, and even more importantly, not destroying it. But that's too many words. So you say restoration.
CLINT: Is there kind of a sustainable footprint that we can envision and then work towards? That's more the way I think about it, because we don't have the money, we don't have the resources in terms of the amount of sediment coming down the river. And also you've got the anthropogenic footprint.
Meaning: people. All our communities, industries.
Don Boesch says: we can’t go back in time, but we can work with the river. And with the laws of science.
DON: We need to use these processes that stem from gravity, from physics and waters flowing downhill, geology, the erosion of rocks and the movement of sediment-- use that knowledge and use those understandings to help us rather than fighting them always, which in the past we have done.
This is what coastal restoration means. Mimic the earth’s natural processes -- to rebuild land and ecosystems.
What coastal restoration doesn’t mean is stop doing the things that got us here in the first place – things like drilling for oil.
KELLYN: For some time, coastal restoration has been a non-partisan issue.
Kellyn Lacour-Conant is a restoration ecologist.
KELLYN: Everyone agrees: yeah, we need land to live, to operate our businesses on, we need protection from storms, but those great, great coastal restoration projects will only buy us so much time.
Kellyn’s worked for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, and for the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. And Kellyn thinks “coastal restoration” doesn’t get at the root of the problem.
KELLYN: There is a disharmony between society and the environment.
From where I'm standing, coastal restoration, if it's approached in just a way of damage control and buying time, and it's not addressing extraction or unsustainable industry practices, then it's really just a band aid on a gunshot wound.
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MARK: You're trying to both do new things and undo old ones. And it's not enough just to snap your fingers and say, make this go away, or make this happen. You cannot regulate your way back to sustainability, but you also can't get to sustainability without regulating people's behavior going forward. The road to a healthy coast is not paved with good intentions. It requires conduct.
And here’s what’s truly surprising: Louisiana’s conduct? It’s been… good.
Maybe you didn’t know – I certainly didn’t know – but Louisiana is a world leader... in coastal restoration. Some folks told me: we’re number one. I asked coastal ecosystem expert Don Boesch about this.
DON: well, it has to be number one, because they had – you know – a gun to their head.
Meaning our land loss is so extreme, Louisiana had to do something.
We’re going to stick with Don for a moment, so a wee bit about him. These days, Don has white hair, and a short, boxed beard and moustache. A network of laugh lines frame his eyes when he’s smiling, which he often does. Don grew up in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. He studied biology and marine science, and ran Louisiana’s first marine laboratory, known as LUMCON. For 27 years, he presided over the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science. And that’s what he was up to in 2010, when BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, and oil started gushing, unchecked, into the Gulf.
DON: I was wrapped about where the oil was going because it was going to places that I knew and places I could pronounce, better than the people on television.
One day, Don was in a meeting.
DON: and I get an email from my assistant, my executive assistant, saying, sorry to interrupt you. You really need you think you return this call as soon as possible. It's from the White House.
See... President Obama was setting up a committee to investigate the root causes of the BP Oil Disaster, and he wanted Don on it. He agreed, and says the committee was amazing. They uncovered a ton, made recommendations, and when they were done, Don thought his duty was over. But then he got another call. This time from the US Department of Justice. Who was suing BP for violations of the Clean Water Act. They asked Don:
DON: How about being a witness? So I was, I was the government's key witness on the environmental impacts in the in the case
Which was presided over by Federal Judge Carl Barbier
DON: who, turns out we went to the same high school for a while, and he was a year older than me. I don't think he knew me, but I knew him of a kind. You know, he's a New Orleans guy. He likes the outdoors
In other words… Don knew how to talk to him.
DON: you know, if I got -- as a scientist -- on the stand and began talking about toxicity of infecting the chromosomes of this little fungiless fish --he would have had a clue what I was talking about. But when I told the judge: you might be aware of these cockaho minnows, which he knew, because if you’re a fishermen in Louisiana, you use them for bait. So he sits forward and listens to that and then I was able to explain to him why the toxic effects on them was important to the food chain. And he started asking questions. Now I didn't know this, but they told me later that when the judge starts asking questions, if you're on the other side, you're in trouble, because you can't object to their questions. I object to that question. You can't do that with the judge.
Now Judge Barbier didn’t decide the case. Instead, he told BP
DON: you don't want me to have to decide. You better settle, and they did, and that's so as a result of that, billions of dollars have gone into restoration in the Gulf,
EVE: yeah, that seems to be the major funding source to do all of these restoration projects,
DON: right so it and made me even more interested in what they're doing with the money, because I feel it's kind of almost like my money, you know, I helped get it.
What we’re doing with the money is outlined in Louisiana’s Comprehensive Plan for a Sustainable Coast. Otherwise known as the Coastal Master Plan. A 50 year, 50 billion dollar blueprint for (quote) “large scale efforts that are essential if we are to protect communities and sustain our landscape.” I’m reading here from the 2012 Master Plan, by the way – they’re updated every six years – and they list project after project aimed to restore our coast. These projects happen every year, are happening right now. And once they’re funded, they go from the Master Plan into computer modeling – to predict how these restoration projects change things. There are all sorts of projects.
ALLIE: We have barrier island restoration. There’s hydrologic restoration.
JOE: river diversions, dredging
CLINT: Structural protection
ALLIE: Shoreline protection, marsh creation
JOE: levees, water control structures
CLINT: What Louisiana is in number #1 is our Coastal Master Plan.
This is Clint Wilson, dean of LSU’s College of the Coast Environment
CLINT: it's a science and engineering-based plan that is specifically aimed at prioritizing projects that either build or maintain land on our coast or reduce the risk to our industries or our communities.
And who – you may wonder – writes this plan? Brad Miller works for them and starts us off.
BRAD: CPRA has a P and R in it. The P is protection, the R is restoration. CPRA. So not only do we rebuild wetlands, we're also responsible for the protection of the citizens in the coast.
ALLIE: going backwards a little bit, CPRA, the coastal protection restoration authority, was created after Hurricane Katrina.
DON: when there was such damage caused by the hurricane, and for the first time, a realization that you can't just manage flood protection and coastal restoration separately. You had to bring them together. So we created, Governor Blanco, created this coastal protection restoration authority,
BLANCO: We’ve entered a new era of coastal protection with reminders all around us of the tragic results of inadequate flood protection.
This, of course, is Governor Blanco -- addressing the first CPRA Board Meeting in January 2006. Just five months after Katrina.
BLANCO: Our citizens are looking for the confidence that comes only from a strong and safe system of protection. Your work is critical for the future of Louisiana. We must get this right.
And many would argue, in the 20 years since Katrina: we have.
Allie Olsonoski, of the Environmental Defense Fund, gives a presentation on this very topic in a huge, echoey auditorium.
ALLIE: despite the fact that Louisiana might have a reputation for a variety of different things around the country, what is very cool, and what has been a hallmark of CPRA and their entire program, is that all of this work is based in science.
Allie says: lots of really smart people work hard to ensure that the funding we have – again most of it from BP – is used to get the best possible results.
ALLIE: say what you will about other things that we got going on, but the coastal program is very special and very unique in that the projects you see in this master plan are backed by hard data and with a very robust methodology.
DON: And one of the things that's done to Louisiana's credit is it's been able to maintain, until now anyway, some pretty strong political consensus. These plans have to be then endorsed by the legislature, and they have.
Again, Don Boesch, marine scientist and key environmental witness against BP
DON: And the other thing about it, which I have to say, I can say this as a native, it was very unexpected and uncharacteristic of Louisiana to have this plan that's based on science. But they did so that the fact that it's been d, and it's managed to also get this political consensus is a very important but precious thing. It's delicate.
And in today’s politics, endangered. Some say the Master Plan is the greatest thing Louisiana’s ever done. The question, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, is: can we keep it?
CREDITS
Thanks for listening to Sea Change! This episode was hosted by me, executive producer Carlyle Calhoun and Eve Abrams. Our theme music is by Jon Batiste and our sound designer is Emily Jankowski.
And Wetlands Radio was reported and produced by me, Eve Abrams. Editing help from Rosie Westwood, Rachael Berg, Ann Gisleson, Marie Lovejoy, Garret Hazelwood, Melody Chang, and Laine Kaplan Levenson. Original music for Wetlands Radio was written and performed by Greg Schatz. Funding was provided by BTNEP, the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program, through the Environmental Protection Agency's National Estuary Program. To hear all 12 episodes in Wetlands Radio, head to BTNEP.org That’s B-T-N-E-P. org.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Sea Change is also supported by the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
