The media is full of stories about the coastal land loss crisis in Louisiana, dire predictions of climate change and sea level rise, and polarizing accounts of controversial projects.
What's less known is that Louisiana is really good at something. A world leader, in fact. When it comes to coastal restoration, some say Louisiana is number one. Because project by project, Louisiana is piecing this ragged shoreline back together.
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 is doing to fight land loss.
In Part 2, we’re going to talk about building land, a vital part of coastal restoration, and often a very controversial one. We get into the thorny politics of human-led land building projects, but first, we look at how the river builds land when left to its own devices. A process many are trying to imitate.
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. 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.
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TRANSCRIPT
Part 2
You’re listening to Sea Change. I’m Carlyle Calhoun. And this is part two of our collaboration with Wetlands Radio, a series about coastal restoration. Today we’re going to talk about building land, which means we’re also going to get into some thorny territory… meaning politics. But first, producer Eve Abrams looks at how the river builds land, when left to its own devices. A process many are trying to imitate.
Music: Wetlands Radio
Alex Kolker lives in an old house in Uptown New Orleans. He leads me to the back, to his kitchen.
ALEX: This was one of my covid spots, right?
There’s a wall of windows looking out on a leafy backyard, and a wooden table with Alex’s computer on it.
ALEX: Like a lot of people in covid, I spent too much time in front of the computer, you know, time trying to figure out what was happening in the world, time watching shows that I probably don't normally watch. And I was looking at crevasses near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
See, Alex is a coastal geologist with LUMCON, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. And he spends a lot of time examining satellite images of the Earth. His favorite images come from the European Union satellites.
ALEX: So I do geek out on the coast regularly. I will say that, but it was covid, and I probably geeked out more than I typically do.
Alex actually lives a few blocks from the river, but he was looking farther downstream.
ALEX: I was looking at a few places near the mouth of the Mississippi River, and then I noticed this one new area, and it looks like, looked like they had taken it was like a small access canal, and it looked like someone had taken a bulldozer to it, and it went from a small and maybe a teeny bit of a winding canal, to this wide open, straight canal, and almost overnight.
And he thought: that's really big.
ALEX: So I kept so I kept checking it and I started also looking not just at the canal itself, but whether or not it was building a delta. Because these canals, these channels, carrying a lot of mud and sediment, they can build deltas. And of course, this is a big part of the state's coastal restoration plan to restart the natural land building processes that connect the river to its wetlands.
What Alex is talking about are diversions. He’s saying: this new pass -- or crevasse or channel or cut -- is behaving a lot like one of the Master Plan’s land building strategies, human-made projects that divert water from the river.
The most famous and controversial diversion is the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. You may have heard about it in the news. Billions of dollars were allocated to pay for it, other restoration projects –lots of them – were devised around the Mid-Barataria diversion happening. Construction even began. But then Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s new governor, killed it. People near the project didn’t want this diversion built.
Which makes me think of this maxim about good restoration projects. A coastal scientist told it to me: start with the best science, but filter that science through what’s acceptable to the public. Maybe – in this case, public acceptability is what ultimately killed the project.
Anyway: Louisiana has built other diversions: the Caenarvon Freshwater Diversion and the Davis Pond Diversion. These were designed to infuse freshwater into the ecosystem, not build land. But they’re building land nonetheless. Because that’s what the river does.
JACQUELINE: So the river itself carries over 480,000 tons of sediment down here, like every day. So that sediment would come out of the river, moving quickly, come out to the marsh start moving slower and slower as it hits the grass and the vegetation, and that sediment drops out and builds the land up. And that's really critical here, because this sediment is so fresh and so new –
That it’s sinking, says Geologist Jaqueline Richard. That’s because the land is transforming –going from loose sediment to becoming solid rock.
JACQUELINE: So say, like sand to sandstone. So it has to undergo compaction and cementation. So as the water leaves, minerals that are in that water stay behind and glue those grains together, basically. So that's what's happening below our feet. That's why we're sinking, because it's a natural geologic process. And usually that sinking is offset by new sediment coming in. So everything is in balance, but we have cut off right that source.
By building levees. Which is why, says Renee Bennett, at the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the CPRA wants to replicate this process with diversions.
RENEE: when the Mississippi River levees were put in, the river didn't have that opportunity to flow in different directions and deposit this material naturally. And so the river diversion projects that are being proposed under the state of Louisiana are trying to mimic what would have happened in the naturally occurring environment.
AL: you know, basically recreating the natural land building process that the river has been very patiently doing for the last 10,000 years.
Retired Paleontologist Al Duvernay says, in fact, there are
AL: natural diversions going on as we speak. Neptune Pass, it opened up, and it's building just a butt load of land. I mean, every day, every day as we speak.
In fact, we’ve spoken about this pass: it’s the very one coastal geologist Alex Kolker spotted on those satellite images, and has been studying ever since.
ALEX: This stretch of the river is called Neptune and so therefore they called it Neptune pass. In the early days, I wanted to call it the Who Dat pass, because I figured if someone else could call another cut the Mardi Gras pass, I can call this the Who Dat pass. But that got overruled by the Corps
The Corps is the US Army Corps of Engineers. They’re essentially in charge of the Mississippi River, in part because of its huge economic importance to the United States. The Corps’ mission is to control floods, make sure the river is navigable -- for commerce and trade, and to preserve and restore the environment.
Water ambi
I wanted to see Neptune Pass, this naturally-occurring, free diversion, up close – to see how diversions build land. So I got in a boat with Alex on a trip organized by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. Captain Ritchie Blink welcomed us aboard in Empire, Louisiana -- about 60 miles downriver from New Orleans.
RITCHIE: we're gonna head across the river, downstream in about five or six miles is Neptune pass. It's moving just an incredible amount of water, and it's building a sub Delta that is just nobody alive has seen anything like this. It's probably 11 or 12 square miles. When you measure on Google Maps, it's amazing.
Captain Ritchie is wearing mirrored sunglasses and a green fleece jacket. He steers us down the Mississippi and cuts left, through the east bank at Neptune Pass. This far down, the Corps doesn’t maintain a levee -- which is why this diversion happened. No one needed to make a cut. The river did it.
ALEX: Welcome to Neptune Pass. You can see there are currents where the river meets the channel
Neptune Pass is indeed big.
ALEX: This channel is expanded by a factor of 10 or more over just a couple of years. And yeah, this would be, if it was its own system. This would be the 10th largest river in the country.
We head toward Bay Denesse and Quarantine Bay --through what Ritchie Blink says are 126 new acres of land. We pass abandoned oil infrastructure – essentially metal left rusting in the water. Overhead, we spot white pelicans, and a northern harrier.
RITCHIE: Oh there’s a roseate spoonbill at 3 o’clock.
Boat reaction: Oh yeah!
Willows line the shore.
RITCHIE: Where this tree line begins is where the new ground is at. up in front of us would have been a huge bay, something like three or four miles across. You can see now it's -- we're firmly within a healthy sub delta within the larger delta.
EVE: So this land on either side of us used to be water?
RITCHIE: yeah, but you can see all this marsh over here is, this is converted Bay bottom. And I mean, Bay Denesse is effectively, like two thirds of the way filled in. Neptune pass is a major reason for that.
EVE: So this was Bay Denesse?
RITCHIE: This was Bay Denesse. Yeah. And you can see out there there's lots of water fowl. There's glossy or white face Ibis on the other side there, there's great egret. Looks like some white Ibis that are out there too, and that's pretty healthy Marsh. There's a Delta duck, potato, bull tongue, species like that, that are starting to pop up out there.
Music
As we head back, conversation shifts away from how effective diversions are at creating land to how often people try to stop them. There are the fears about changing water salinity – which makes fishing grounds less hospitable to certain animals, like shrimp or oysters. There are fears about how those changes will cascade through communities – financially and culturally. And of course, there are simply fears over what unleashed water can do.
At Neptune Pass, The Corps of Engineers has been under a ton of pressure to temper the immense flow of water diverting away from the Mississippi River. The Corps says: Neptune Pass was increasing at an alarming rate. Boats and barges were in danger of getting “sucked in” -- so to speak – or stuck on the bottom of the river, as they navigated changing currents.
Remember: making sure boats can safely travel the Mississippi is one of the Corps’ key missions.
So they built a stone structure to lessen the amount of water diverting into Neptune Pass.
But Captain Ritchie, who is passionate about coastal restoration, says we need to be squeezing every single grain of sediment out of the Mississippi to build land
-- not engineering that sediment to drop into the ocean. Which is what he says is now happening at Neptune Pass.
RITCHIE: What's going on is the Corps of Engineers --they've put effectively like a sediment excluder into Neptune pass. A full evulsion was happening where the river was wanting to change course there,
Something the Corps has vigorously tried to prevent over the last century.
RITCHIE: and they came and put 100 barges of boulders into this cut. It's like a giant wall. It's like trying to get in your house by jumping onto the roof. So that's what it does for the sediment. It makes it really hard for the sediment to get through here. And so now only fine sediment’s coming through, and some of the heaviest stuff, yeah, some of it getting through, but it makes it really hard. So they shot the thing in the foot.
On the other hand, the Corps could have closed Neptune Pass altogether, but they didn’t. Instead, they stabilized the crevasse to stop it from getting bigger. And they are allowing the Mississippi’s waters to divert there. Just less. About 6% -- down from 16%. Which is actually slightly more water than would have been diverted in the Mid Barataria diversion.
It’s worth pointing out: people don’t live at Neptune Pass, nor where the water’s going: in Bay Denesse. But people DO live in Mid-Barataria. And this is the other thing about diversions – both natural and human-made. They divert. They change things. And change is hard when you’re dealing with a landscape where people live.
CARLYLE: This is all pretty complicated stuff. Eve, your series, actually touches on some pretty recent news. You mentioned the mid b diversion, which has been a cornerstone of the master plan. Like you said, Governor Landry cancelled it and since then, he also cancelled another diversion, the MId Breton Diversion. This is all a really big deal. Not only for coastal restoration but for the future of South Louisiana. We wanted to talk to an expert who knows a lot about this and what these diversion cancellations mean for our future.
EVE: Yep. And I have the perfect person. Allow me to introduce Michael Massimi. He's a coastal scientist and actually he's also Wetlands Radio's project manager. My partner at BTNEP, the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program who sponsored Wetlands Radio. And BTNEP was the rare naturalist organization who was skeptical of the Mid-Barataria diversion. Michael sees both sides of the issue and he helped me really broaden my understanding of it, and this is why I wanted us to talk to him about diversions. So Michael, welcome to Sea Change.
MICHAEL: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
EVE: So the promise of these diversions was to let the river build more land –over time. Which would also support other projects in the Master Plan because the river would continue supplying them with fresh water and sediment. Building them up, helping them last. And then another giant promise of these new diversions is that they would eventually protect people. But it became such a contentious battle on both sides. There was so much passion. What do you make of the way it's ended up?
MICHAEL: You're right. It was almost religious fervor for the strongest proponents of both for and against the diversion. But I think that, you know, where we've ended up is we need both. Um, we need, we need sediment, we need fresh water, we need nutrients out of the river. I don't think anyone is saying that we don't need diversions at all. I think that what happens now is a reconciliation and we look at projects that have more widespread acceptability. You know, you have to start with the best science, but you don't end there. That gets filtered through the lens of public acceptability.
And certainly in the media, the fisheries’ concerns are always at the top of mind. That's what gets portrayed a lot: you know, if these pesky fishermen would just get outta the way, we could have some great restoration. But there's really a lot of other concerns. Basically it's the scale of the project. The larger the scale, um, the more impact you're gonna have on the landscape. And so I think what happened in this case with this diversion was maybe they just took too big of a bite at the apple.
EVE: so the Mid-Barataria diversion was going to be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the United States. Can you talk about why ambitious projects are so hard to get done?
MICHAEL: Um, well, there were multiple – if not red flags, yellow lights –leading up to this project, and fisheries concerns was certainly one of 'em. The oyster industry clearly stood to be impacted the most, but also shrimp, and there were some flood concerns too, and by the time they moved forward to implementing the diversion had a groundbreaking in 2023 lawsuits started to pop up. So there was a federal lawsuit and also a state lawsuit, some environmental groups. So they had a big hurdle to jump to try to implement this thing.
EVE: And it seems like, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of these concerns were about really more short-term implications versus thinking in terms of decades. You know, the more existential questions about will this landscape exist and therefore be habitable. I mean, how do you, in coastal restoration, you're constantly dealing with the concerns of the people who live here now -- How do you balance that with thinking about preserving this landscape for the future?
MICHAEL: it's definitely a tightrope to walk and I don't envy the decision makers at CPRA for having to make that decision. But at BTNEP you know, we've always felt that the people who live in the area to be restored should have a say in the type of restoration that should happen there. And to their credit, the CPRA did a lot of outreach and, you know, information tours down in Plaquemines Parish, but I don't think they ever really turned public opinion to the point that they would need to -- to get the, the diversion implemented.
EVE: was the problem that it wasn't really emanating from the people, but more a top-down decision that they were trying to sell to the people?
MICHAEL: Um, I, I'd say that's a pretty accurate assessment. You know, the shrimp guy and the oil and gas guy don't always agree on what to do in the estuary, but when they do, that's a very powerful thing. And those projects are the implementable ones, the ones that can easily have widespread agreement and go from planning. To design an engineering and implementation without a whole lot of road bumps. And when it's more of a top-down approach, that's I think, where we run into problems with being able to implement these solutions.
EVE: So where do you think we go now? Like, what is the future of the coast look like now that this project was canceled?
MICHAEL: I'm optimistic. You know, we didn't lose the coast all at once. Um, it was kind of a death by a thousand cuts type of a process over many, many decades. And sure if you look at one marsh creation project that rebuilds 500 acres somewhere in some estuary and you go up in an airplane and look down on it, yeah, they look small. But we're not doing just one. We're doing hundreds of them. And probably near a hundred thousand acres have been restored using this technique. So I think the smaller scale diversions to sustain what you've built with marsh creation is a viable path into the future.
Music
We have an urgent crisis. But I do think that the efforts we've taken so far to this point are showing results on the coast, and we are moving the needle. And these marsh creation projects individually don't add up to much, but collectively are changing the amount of land on the landscape and slowing the rate of loss and in some cases, reversing it. So, I would argue that the urgency argument would point more towards a reliance on projects that get you immediate results rather than ones whose impacts are decades down the line.
CARLYLE: The marsh creation projects MIchael’s talking about are dredging projects. With the state’s massive diversion projects off the table, dredging is the main tool we have right now for building land. And that’s what we’re going to talk about next.
EVE: Dredging can help build all sorts of land – dunes, ridges, marsh, beach. But it always involves the same basic idea.
RANDY: it's like, we take the sand and the material, the mud and shell, we move it from point A to point B.
This is Randy Keown
RANDY: But everybody calls me Captain Randy.
Captain Randy is in charge of a huge dredge operation helping to build marsh near Lake Borgne. And he is dressed for the job: sunglasses, hard hat, yellow reflector vest and an orange life jacket.
The dredge operation is for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
Here’s how dredging works. There’s a ship parked over what’s called a borrow area. Or as Captain Randy puts it, point A. This ship actually is the dredge. It’s also a kind of floating home for the people who work on it. There are living quarters, showers…
We have a complete galley that feeds meals three, four times a day.
Crews of more than a dozen people work for two weeks straight and then take a week off. But the dredge is always running.
RANDY: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365, days a year
The dredging happens below the ship, underwater. Captain Randy says picture
RANDY: a vacuum cleaner with teeth. That's basically what it is.
EVE: What are the teeth for?
RANDY: That's to cut the material. Because you get into some material where you got shale and sand mixed, and then you get into some it's just slush, then you might run into some that's got clay.
Onboard the very loud ship, Captain Randy shows me how the dredge sucks material up.
RANDY: This is right here is the heart of the dredge. There’s that 27 inch pump. That’s what sucks the material up, sends it out to the discharge pipe all the way to the spoil area
In case you didn’t catch that: a 27 inch pump sucks up the material and sends it to the discharge pipe, all the way in the spoil area – which is Point B. Spoils, as in loot or bounty. Which in this case, is dredged material mixed with water. It travels through polyethylene pipeline – a few thousand feet of it, some floating, some submerged – to where the CPRA is building a marsh. There it spews, out of the pipe and into ever more shallow water.
RANDY: Right now we're pumping out 1700 cubic yards per hour.
Basically enough to cover around 9 and half football fields.
RANDY: We got a lot of slush. It has a slight mixture of sand. The slush material, it'll take a little while to settle out.
Meaning: spread and accumulate. You know, build land. Randy’s team moves the pipe every day – at least once or twice, depending on the material coming out of it.
RANDY: it's always good to get an even spread. That's why we move the pipe around a lot, because if you just pile it up, then they're not getting, you know, they want to build a marsh. They don't want to just build spots.
“They” like I mentioned, is the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the CPRA, who run around 10 dredging projects a year. So far in 2025, there have been 13.
Brad Miller is a CPRA Project Manager. Which means he’s in charge of land building projects -- like the one we just heard about.
Brad says a crucial part of his job is finding the right material to build with.
BRAD: Sand is hard to come by.
EVE: Sand is hard to come by?
BRAD: Yes? It takes a lot of effort to find the right sand, and enough of it
See, the Mississippi River carries much less sediment than it once did, in part because of dams up and down its banks. On top of that, there’s a world-wide sand shortage. Which might explain why the windowsill in Brad’s office is lined with small glass jars. It looks a little like a spice rack.
BRAD: This is from head of passes. This is a cool one. This is Bayou Dupont. This was the first time we use sand out of the river for Marsh creation.
Instead of cinnamon and pepper, Brad’s jars are full of dirt and sand, mementos of past projects.
BRAD: This was one of the first Caminada Headland projects. This is sand from Ship Shoal. Ship Shoal was an old shoal of the river. So it was a delta 8000 years ago
Quick geography review: Over the last 10,000 years, sediment carried by the Mississippi River built up land in the shape of lobes. Which –-look kinda like stretched out ear lobes. Every thousand years or so, a lobe grew high enough that the river changed course, finding a new path and forming a new delta lobe.
BRAD: So as it switches, you have these old Delta lobes, and then the Delta lobes erode over time. And then at the end of them, where all the sand was becomes a Barrier Island. And then that Barrier Island eventually erodes away and becomes a shoal
EVE: So a shoal is like an underwater Island?
BRAD: Exactly, yep. So you got your delta lobe, then the headland attached to it, then that erodes away, and you have a Barrier Island. And eventually that erodes away and you have a shoal.
EVE: Which means the sand from Ship Shoal Brad keeps in a jar: when he got it – it was under water. Then it was dredged, brought 30 miles away -- by barge -- and pumped out: to build new land.
What you hear in the background, is me travelling on that land – riding on the back of an ATV driven by CPRA field biologist, Todd Hubble.
TODD: We're on the Caminada headland heading toward the BA 171 or the back Caminada restoration project.
EVE: And what do you see?
TODD: Right now? Beautiful beach.
EVE: We’re near Port Fourchon, on Elmer’s Island. The site of two adjacent restoration projects: a marsh and a beach. Beyond them is the Gulf, where oil rigs dot the horizon.
TODD: this area a year ago, two years ago, year and a half ago, after the pumping, was just a mud flat. So everything you've seen has been growing less than two years for sure
EVE: Which is a welcome sight…You see: just because you pump sand or clay into the shape of a beach, or a marsh, doesn’t make it a beach or a marsh. Building land is one thing. Building a habitat… that’s something else.
TODD: it's the animals and plants that make it the habitat. Only thing we as people do, we help provide a foundation for that type of habitat to grow.
EVE: Todd is part of a small crew of biologists who track how that foundation -- dredged from the bottom of the Gulf, and brought here, to the very edge of Louisiana – is doing. Armed with mosquito repellent, hats, sunglasses, and long-sleeved shirts, Todd and three other biologists gather data on the restoration’s progress.
JUSTIN: 2.15, 1.44… (Fade down)
TODD: So what they're doing right now is they're looking at the different type of vegetation and the numbers they're calling out on each other, or the how much they think of percent cover each one is
JUSTIN: 2.15,
TODD: It's a random spot along a vegetation transect, basically a line that cuts over the project area, and on this one, it's kind of scarce on vegetation, but we gonna look at the species that we see in there. We could get some heights of the dominant species, take a picture or two, write it all up in a data sheet. Rinse and repeat for the next one.
The idea is to come back over time, the same guys, to the same plots, to see how the habitat changes, and hopefully grows.
EVE: A few miles northeast from the Caminada restoration site, on neighboring Grand Isle, is a much older, very established habitat. Caminada was built by dredging; Grand Isle was built by the river. I follow a spry 77 year old named Jean Landry through the isle’s maritime forest.
JEAN LANDRY: We feed a lot of insects and a lot of birds, and we are that bed and breakfast that they need after that long flight across the Gulf of Mexico.
EVE: A maritime forest is essentially a forest by the coast. Trees and bushes grow up next to the ocean, so they’re used to strong wind and salt spray.
JEAN: even though we only have 1/10 of the forest left of what was here 200 years ago, it still is an important factor when it comes to a hurricane rolling through.
EVE: One reason for that is the roots of the forest help hold together the island – Louisiana’s last inhabited barrier island.
And to better understand even more reasons plants are so crucial to coastal restoration, we need to travel about 80 miles north to a plant nursery in Thibodaux, Louisiana.
ASHLEIGH: So all the plants that we have first, they're all native. So that means, you know, they're from this area, historically. And all of these are supposed to be here. All providing a benefit.
EVE: Ashleigh Lambiot (lamb-bee-ought) is the native plant nursery coordinator for BTNEP – the Barataria Terrebonne National Estuary Program, and full disclosure -- BTNEP sponsors Wetlands Radio. Also, they are experts at growing native plants. Specifically trees for Louisiana’s Ridge restoration projects. And the seeds for those trees… she collects them!
It's like an adventure going out and finding all these native plants and seeds.
ASHLEIGH: So this is a hackberry tree. When there's big bunches of them, Generally you're just grabbing handfuls, and then we get the twigs out later.
EVE: Ashleigh pulls handfuls of hackberry seeds into a collection bucket.
ASHLEIGH: All the seeds that we use, we try to source as close to the coast as we can. A lot of our stuff comes from Grand Isle.
EVE: Remember Grand Isle? Louisiana’s last inhabited island?
ASHLEIGH: These mother trees we're collecting from, they experience all these weather conditions. They experience some salt water work, from storms pushing things in, they have all the winds off the storms from the Gulf. They're kind of more used to that habitat. So the thought is, genetically they’re passing some of that down to their offspring, and so the closer we can get to the coast we want, so hopefully that lineage can live on and keep providing some of those benefits.
EVE: I wanted to see how that lineage was doing on the state’s newly created land.
ASHLEIGH: Want me to jump out and try to pull us in?
MATT: Can you hold this in the front? I’m gonna drag us in. Go ahead and lift the motor all the way up.
EVE: So I got in a boat with Ashleigh and her BTNEP colleague, Matt Benoit, to check in on a ridge restoration site -- west of Venice. Just shy of where Louisiana drops into the Gulf.
EVE: So this, I presume, is Spanish pass?
ASHLEIGH: yes.
EVE: Unlike marsh restoration projects, which are planted with grasses, Spanish Pass was planted with the baby trees Matt and Ashleigh grew 2 years ago.
It’s a harsh environment. There’s no shade, no buffer from the strong wind. In the nursery, Matt and Ashleigh coddled their plants. Out here, they’re on their own.
MATT: Yeah, there's no no assistance once he's get planted in the ground, no one's coming back behind and watering. It's all up to Mother Nature.
MATT: Okay, let's see what we can see.
ASHLEIGH: Persimon
MATT: Yeah
ASHLEIGH: look at that.
MATT: There's another one right there.
Ashleigh: Oh. Yay! Look at this. Oh right, so this is a red Mulberry. It's got several nice shoots coming up. We got nice new green leaves coming in. That’s phenomenal, and then it looks like we have a hackberry right next to it. Yay. Plants. Beautyberry of course, looks so nice. Woo hoo! There's fruit on this mulberry. It's flowering. So, I mean, that's the goal, right there. So these are the mulberry flowers, which will turn into the fruits. And so these are an amazing resource, you know, for all the birds coming through, different animals. And also, this is a new seed source for more plants, so they can make this process of going forward and putting out new plants. And obviously, if it's surviving here, hopefully the offspring will as well, and there will be even more mulberry. I just can't get over how big the Wax Myrtle is.
MATT: look at this one
ASHLEIGH: Oooh!
MATT: cute little satellite trees coming off of it.
ASHLEIGH: Yeah! They’re the pioneers. Forging the way in a very harsh environment, they're doing a great job. Look at it!
SEA CHANGE 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. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
