For the fourth and final episode of our collaboration with Wetlands Radio, a series about coastal restoration: ways we can all help repair our coast. So...what does a bottle of Two Buck Chuck and slinging back oysters have to do with building land? Find out how one man's trash transforms into coastal treasures. And then, to close out the series on coastal restoration, we learn about the crown jewel of Louisiana science: a research project that exemplifies how everything is connected.
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
You’re listening to Sea Change. I’m Carlyle Calhoun. And this is the fourth and final episode of our collaboration with Wetlands Radio, a series about coastal restoration. We’ll begin by talking about building land by… recycling. You know that saying? one’s man’s trash is another ones’ treasure? Well, two New Orleans organizations have put that thought into action. And then, to close out the series, the crown jewel of Louisiana science, a research project which exemplifies how everything is connected. Wetlands Radio producer Eve Abrams takes it from here.
EPISODE
By the time I meet up with August Walker at Deanie’s Seafood Restaurant in the French Quarter, he’d been up for hours.
AUGUST: We start at four, sometimes two.
August is a big guy with a big beard and a huge smile. He’s wearing rubber boots and a shirt lined with green reflector strips.We walk through the restaurant’s side door
AUGUST: What’s up? How you doing today?
DEANIE’s GUY: You good? Everything good?
And over to four black bins with neon green tops. August lifts the lid on one.
EVE: What do you see?
AUGUST: They full. See this after the weekend, so they gonna all be full.
Inside the bins? Shells. Oyster shells.
August wheels each bin out to his truck, and lowers what’s called a lift gate
AUGUST: This is how we get it in and out the truck. It makes the job a little more easier, you know, because, you know, oyster shells are very heavy.
200 pounds per bin heavy.
Into the truck go the bins full of oyster shells – along with your random lemons and cracker packages — and off come empty bins.
AUGUST: if they got four full I bring back four empty.
The truck is packed, and one thing I can’t help noticing… is the smell
AUGUST: Yeah, they got a serious, serious funk. And the flies love em!
Five days a week, August makes the rounds to some 35 New Orleans restaurants.
AUGUST: Thank you, bro.
It’s all part of the Oyster Recycling Program run by the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, or CRCL. They’re one of around 10 oyster recycling operations in the country. Currently, they collect shells from New Orleans and Baton Rouge restaurants. One day, they hope to expand westward – to Lafayette or even Lake Charles. But for now, each week, the program sends some 65,000 pounds of shell on a journey back to the water.
RYAN: I mean, it's just sort of the right thing to do.
Ryan Prewitt runs Peche, another New Orleans restaurant which recycles its shells. As you can hear, Peche is a popular place to eat. Picture an open floor plan with wooden beams, brick, and a casual, welcoming vibe. It’s a destination both for tourists and locals -- who likely don’t know that eating lunch there amounts to participating in coastal restoration. Ryan says recycling oyster shells is a way for both the restaurant and its customers to be a part of the fishery and not just extractors of resources.
RYAN: It's incumbent upon people and businesses to make sure that they recognize that they're part of a bigger system. Like the oysters that we're eating are growing on the oysters that are in the water
See, oysters start life as tiny larvae, swimming around in salty or brackish coastal waters. In order to grow, they have to attach to things – hard surfaces, like rocks or other oyster shells. Once attached, these young oysters, now known as spat, spend the rest of their lives growing in that exact spot: filtering the water, providing habitat for other animals, and eventually, sending out their own larvae. People have been returning shells to the water for -- forever – but urban restaurants, by bringing oysters away from the coast, interrupt this cycle. Recycling them, does two things. One:
RYAN: It creates a full cycle for the oyster, where this creature grew out in the water, was consumed in the restaurant, and then returned in shell form, back to begin that regenerative process once again. I mean the alternative is that it all goes into a landfill.
AND two, it protects Louisiana’s coast.
RYAN: The way that the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana bags them up or puts them in cages and returns them to the water is frequently used as a buffer against shoreline erosion.
So far: 8,400 feet of buffer in the shape of a snaking line of underwater reefs protecting the land.
Here’s how it works.
Five days a week, after his restaurant pick-ups, August drives about a half hour downriver from New Orleans to Violet, to
AUGUST: CRCL, restoration headquarters
EVE: and what do you see?
AUGUST: Oh, a landfill of oysters. Shells
It’s a shell-scape -- huge piles of oyster shells sprinkled with yellow lemon slices and other restaurant detritus and more flies than you can possibly imagine. Then there are the buzzards.
AUGUST: The buzzards they eat the inside of it. They cleans it out for you. But I don't know if they eat lemons. They do a nice job too. They do a wonderful job. (slam)
August rolls out each bin from the back of the truck… and dumps it out into a pile
Ambi
He hoses the shells off
AUGUST: washing them out, cleaning out the mud and it keeps the smell off.
The shells sit there in the sun, bleaching, for at least 6 months.
Ambi
Then, volunteers rake cured, clean shells into 30 pound bags,
AUGUST: and that's the ones in the Green bags, when it goes to the ocean.
to reef building projects
Ambi
where volunteers load the bags -- around 200 tons of shell -- onto oyster boats. The boats motor out to where a brand new reef will go --and unload them into the water, about 2 feet from the marsh’s edge. Sometimes, they place the bags of shell right up against the marsh --in order to help join two edges of marsh which were once connected but have eroded into separation.
So far, CRCL has built 7 reefs – each one in partnership with a community who decides where the reefs will most benefit them -- often protecting culturally significant land, like the lemon tree mound in Grand Bayou Indian Village. Or sacred mounds in Pointe aux Chien.
CRCL monitors their reefs for five years. Are larvae attaching and growing? Is sediment getting trapped between the reefs and the shore? Are plants growing there? Then there’s the big question: is the land protected?
And what they’ve found is... yes.
These so-called sanctuary reefs – which are and not intended for consumption – slow down wave energy. Which means they slow down erosion. Compared to neighboring, unprotected marsh, CRCL says their oyster reefs cut erosion in half.
So far, CRCL has built 7 reefs-- often protecting culturally significant land, like the lemon tree mound in Grand Bayou Indian Village.
CRCL monitors their reefs for five years. The big question: is the land protected?
And what they’ve found is... yes.
These sanctuary reefs – which are not intended for consumption – slow down wave energy. Which means they slow down erosion. Compared to neighboring, unprotected marsh, CRCL says their oyster reefs cut erosion in half.
JACQUELINE: So the reef build that we did Monday was fantastic for a couple of reasons. So building an oyster reef helps slow down wave action.
Geologist Jacqueline Richard, says: because reefs provide habitat for new oysters, they expand and, theoretically, protect the coast in perpetuity.
JACQUELINE: A living shoreline, a living reef will continue to grow at the pace it needs to to stay that magical little distance it likes to be from the water surface so it can keep up with sinking and sea level rise way better than any quote, unquote, permanent engineered structure that we can build. So the reef build is a really fantastic way that humans can work directly with nature. We're putting the components together to hand it over to Mother Nature, because she knows the right things to do.
AMBI: shucking
Back at Peche, I head to the oyster bar where I meet Lorenzo Morrero
I'm Zo, the master shucker and a bad mother sucker.
Zo knows his oysters. How they taste, sure, but also why recycling their shells matters.
ZO: You put them back into the water to attach to make more oysters. So we recycle they go back to the Gulf, back there. They make like reefs. It's an ecosystem that's really powerful with oysters. The way they growing, they good for the water,
And they’re delicious. Zo’s favorite? Louisiana Area 3.
ZO: They're beautiful. You taste one already?
EVE: I tasted the Alabama.
ZO: you gotta taste the area three.
I am happy to oblige.
ZO: The color, the texture is right, not milky, beautiful, salty,
Yum!
Restaurants pay around $300 a month to recycle their shells – sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the number of bins and how many times a week they’re picked up. But CRCL hopes that cost will soon disappear. Because In 2023, the organization helped craft a state law that gives a tax credit to restaurants who recycle their shells.
In the last eleven years, over 16,000,000 pounds of shell have been collected.
I ask you: is there a more delicious way to connect to coastal restoration?
Carlyle: I can’t think of one!
Coming up next.. Eve Abrams introduces us to another material rescued from the landfill, and used to restore the coast!
Music: Wetlands
Meet Franziska Trautmann, the 27-year-old CEO of a glass recycling operation called Glass Half Full. Franziska goes by Fran. she has long hair dyed pink in the front and a small gold nose ring.
FRAN: I'm from Carencro, Louisiana. It's right outside of Lafayette, and just growing up in South Louisiana, you always hear about our coastal erosion crisis, and so that was always in the back of my mind. And when I went to college, I knew that I wanted to do something related to the environment.
Fran actually started college as a biology major. But she switched to chemical engineering because she didn’t want to just study change. She wanted to find solutions.
And then over a bottle of wine, Max and I, you know, were like: Hey, this is going to the landfill. What if we could do something about it? And when we connected that to coastal restoration, it was like, it was just an aha moment
Max is Fran’s partner. The wine was a bottle of “Two-Buck Chuck” from Trader Joe’s -- Charles Shaw wine. The year was 2020; Max and Fran were still seniors at Tulane University.
FRAN: and then we found a small machine that could turn glass into sand. We need sand for coastal restoration. And that's when it all kind of just started to click. We didn't know if it would work. You know, we had to figure that out. But we said if, if glass comes from sand, and if there's machines that can turn it back into sand, and we need sand for coastal restoration, why can't that be the thing that we do?
At the time Fran and Max came up with this idea, there was virtually no glass recycling in New Orleans. In a city known for indulgence, this meant vast quantities of potential, future sand was going straight to the landfill.
Fran leads me into their warehouse in the 9th Ward of New Orleans.
FRAN: So this big blue machine is the pulverizing system. It's made up of a hopper where the glass goes in and then it hits a conveyor belt. It travels up the conveyor belt and then meets the hammers, so it'll be smashed, basically, but also rounded at the same time, so that you know, when you handle the sand in the glass, it's not sharp, it won't cut you. And then it travels up another conveyor belt and gets separated by size, and the medium is really the main product that we use in coastal restoration.
Small sand goes into sandbags to prevent flooding, (which they give away ahead of storms.) Large sand gets turned back into glass. But that medium sand goes into huge bags that weigh 2,000 pounds– that’s one ton each. From the Glass Half Full warehouse, the bags travel to restoration projects – like one in Big Branch National Wildlife Refuge, where Glass Half Full worked with US Fish and Wildlife Service and the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, CRCL.
FRAN: We bagged our sand in biodegradable burlap, and then we use it to kind of mimic where the coastline should be, and then CRCL plants native plants behind it, and our wall of sandbags protects the plants and blocks wave action and traps sediment so that the plants thrive. So it's really nature-based restoration efforts where we're kind of like mimicking or speeding up the natural processes of bringing marsh grasses back into the area and rebuilding marsh areas.
Thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, a slew of research shows Glass Half Full’s sand works just as well – sometimes even better - than native sand in restoring habitats.
FRAN: I always have to remind myself and remind other people that when we started this and when we had this idea, we didn't know if it would work. We didn't know this was going to be successful. We didn't know that the research was going to show that it could be used for restoration.
But the idea made sense to them, so… they went for it. It was an act of hope.
FRAN: There has to be an act of hope. And I think it is --it's an action. It's a way of doing things, it’s a way of thinking of things. And, yeah, I think it gets back to us wanting to find solutions instead of problems. Glass Half Full just wants to play our part, and I think we're going to need a lot of different people to play their part.
Remember: Fran started Glass Half Full as a senior in college. It was just an idea, a spark of inspiration.
Fast forward five years and Glass Half Full has recycled over 10 million pounds of glass. They’ve turned it into sand for 6 coastal restoration projects, among other things. And they just opened a new, much bigger recycling facility in Chalmette – a step toward expanding glass recycling across the Gulf Coast region.
Fran is 27 years old. And her optimism is fully intact.
FRAN: I think my generation needs hope, and we've consistently seen the older generations sort of count us out, you know, oh, the damage is done. What? What could we possibly do? And the only thing our generation can do is have hope, because otherwise we'd be doomed, and so I'm just trying to play my small part in that, I think, and show people that, you know, small individual actions can make a difference and can add up. For us, it's: bring us your glass. Maybe join us in a coastal project, see the coastline and the marshes and see what part you can play. You know these actions, just add up over time and cause a much bigger effect.
Which is precisely what the Louisiana Coast desperately needs: a much bigger effect.
Wetlands music
CARLYLE: Coastal land loss can seem so big and so hard to solve, but recycling my glass and shells… I can do that! In fact I should be eating more oysters and drinking more wine. For the coast… of course.
EVE: Yeah, totally. And I think the bigger idea here is to change the storyline from doom and gloom and toward solutions.
CARLYLE: Right. Which starts by believing a more positive outcome is possible.
EVE: Exactly. Because what we do matters. everything is connected.
And that’s actually what this last story is all about. We’re gonna start in New Orleans -- in City Park, with Joseph Evans, horticulturist, permaculturalist -- a real plant guy
JOSEPH: This is one of the oldest surviving live oak groves in the country. What is ultimately one of our greatest national treasures. To me, it's like the Grand Canyon. It’s a – it’s an extraordinary place.
Joseph is an expert in sustainable, regenerative landscape design. He suggested we talk in this grove of oak trees. He wanted me to understand something.
JOSEPH: I just want to tie us to that deeper context of what New Orleans was. The very first map that I ever found was in this one from 1849. This is not long ago. What is critical to understand about this is that New Orleans was not a bowl. It had biological diversity at its richest. But within 50 years of this, the entirety of this map of forest and settlements had been clear cut and drained. The same thing that has happened to New Orleans has happened across our region. We've taken bulldozers to a garden.
What does this have to do with coastal restoration?
This is the coast.
Music end
This is the coast. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. I live in New Orleans, and I don’t think of myself as living on the coast. But zoom out – (zoom) to the state, (zoom) the region, (zoom) certainly the country -- and clearly, I live on the coast.
Realizing this --that the very urban city I live in -- an hour drive from salty waters and waves – realizing this place is the coast: it’s just one example of a bigger truth that scientist after scientist told me: everything’s connected.
Montage
NATALIE: Everything's connected.
KELLYN: Everything is interwoven though when you think about it.
GENE: Everybody's connected. And we're part of it. We're not outside of it, controlling it
NATALIE: You have to have the native plants as the basis of your food chain, and then the native insects, like caterpillars that feed on those native plants. And then the various animals that feed on those insects. And then the other animals that feed on those animals.
KELLYN: I think in today's world, we've siloed things off so much; we are individuals. We forget that there are butterfly effects.
ROSINA: Because the past informs my future so it’s still here.
NATALIE: Everything you do, you can make an impact.
GENE: Soil, people, animals, plants: we're all related.
I want to take some time now to tell you about an extraordinary body of scientific research called CRMS. Both because some scientists think CRMS is one of the greatest things Louisiana has ever done. And also: because CRMS embodies this idea that everything is connected.
So let’s go to the coast – Louisiana’s literal coast, where marsh meets water. Where you can only travel by boat. Because here is where you find the crown jewel of Louisiana science, this engine for understanding our coast. I’m with two biologists gathering data for CRMS.
RACHEL: CRMS is the Coastwide Reference Monitoring System.
EVE: Coastwide Reference Monitoring System
RACHEL: Yeah, so the parts of that is it is coast wide – with 400 sites across Louisiana. Reference means it's a reference network, meaning you have sites inside and outside of project areas, restoration project areas. So that's the reference part. And then we're monitoring. And it's a system.
Biologist Rachel Villani has worked on CRMS for 15 years. Currently for USGS, the United States Geological Survey, who, with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, run CRMS, which officially began in 2006, nearly 20 years ago.
RACHEL: I think it's one of the best things Louisiana has ever done, personally, my personal opinion on that.
EVE: Can you say why?
RACHEL: It's just very forward thinking, and it's like, just, there's a lot of collaboration involved, and just the amount of data we have is super valuable.
To see some of that data gathered, I get in a small boat with Rachel and Gayle Kees (keys), another field biologist. We motor out -- into the marsh, to two of those nearly 400 CRMS sites dotting Louisiana’s coast.
EVE: Where are we?
RACHEL: We're at CRMS 147, down in Breton Sound. We're really close to the Gulf, right over there.
EVE: Oh, are those oil rigs out there?
RACHEL: Oh, they are, yeah, yeah. If we went about three minutes that way, we'd be out in basically open water. We're not going to do that. It's way too windy. We're in a little protected cove here where there's sometimes an otter.
A small, narrow boardwalk emerges from a sea of rushes. Rachel tells me these tall green plants are
RACHEL: Juncus roemerianus, it's very stabby, so watch your eyes,
Rachel is one of those people who seems prepared for everything. She’s wearing a baseball cap, sunglasses, science-y pants replete with pockets and zippers, and several layers – the top one: a blue and green plaid shirt. Today, Rachel’s measuring elevation and accretion—which is the gradual accumulation of land.
Rachel and Gayle unload their gear, including a 65 pound tank of liquid nitrogen (sound) – which Rachel uses to take core soil samples.
RACHEL: We have an insulated hose and a copper pipe on the end that we call a bullet because there's a bullet point on the tip of it welded on there. That copper pipe is in the ground. I'm gonna turn the nitrogen on, and then it'll freeze the soil around the copper tubing
Nitrogen sound
Rachel pulls the pipe out of the ground, and frozen to it -- exactly as it was underground -- are layers of sediment. She looks for a white, clay layer called feldspar.
RACHEL: we put this white powdery clay down 15 years ago at this point, and it just stays there, and then we can come back year after year and measure it.
EVE: so now you're measuring how much soil is above the feldspar line.
RACHEL: Yeah
EVE: so feldspar is basically like ground zero when you started the research?
RACHEL: We know when we deployed this clay layer, and we know when we're here now, so we can tell how much sediments been accumulated
Rachel calls out measurements and Gayle enters them into an iPad.
RACHEL: 175, 180, 179
EVE: so essentially, that means they're 179 millimeters more land here than there were when you started measuring?
RACHEL: Yeah, that is how much sediment has been added onto the surface since we put that clay down. That doesn't tell us how the elevation has changed, though. That's what the R Set rod is for. That's why we do them together.
The R Set rod is a half inch rod driven deep into the ground with a jackhammer – until it won’t go any further. There’s an R Set rod at every CRMS site. Think of it like a permanent table leg. On top of it, they attach a table – basically a flat piece of metal with holes in it. Into each hole they slide a pin, like a toothbrush dropping into a toothbrush holder. And by measuring the length of these pins -- from the table to the ground – you get the elevation.
EVE: So the pins are perpendicular to the ground.
RACHEL: Yeah. They're fiberglass pins. There's nine of them. They're numbered one through nine. Pin one goes in the hole for pin one. Every time it's the same pins, it's always the same pins. We'll always use the same table. We always use the same person. So we try to eliminate as much error as actually possible for consistency, because it's such micro elevation you want to not have any error if you can avoid it. So we try to keep everything consistent. Pin, one. Pin, 15675672569569,
pin, 3568568, pin, 4564564, 564564, pin, 5562562, pin, 6566566, pin, 7579579, and eight. 85825829584584,
Carefully laying on a plank over the stabby Juncus roemerianus, Gayle reads each pin. Rachel records the measurements in their iPad.
EVE: is that centimeters?
RACHEL: millimeters
EVE: millimeters!
RACHEL: Yep. So we're getting a measure of how much has been accumulated, and what is the elevation now.
In other words, these scientists are gathering data about how much land Louisiana is gaining – in teeny, tiny amounts.
And there’s lots of other data. Dozens of scientist work on CRMS, compiling hourly water levels, temperature and salinity of the soil, vegetation surveys, high resolution images of the entire coast.
All of it is stored in the state’s data repository known as CIMS, the Coastal Information Management System. And anyone can access this data through the CPRA website or the CRMS website.
USGS uses CRMS data to make super accurate maps. The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority uses CRMS data for Master Plan modeling.
Many CRMS sites are on privately owned land
RACHEL: but the data is all available free online, so there's a lot of uses for a lot of different people across all parts of coastal Louisiana.
I mean we do a lit review every year, and there's easily 50 plus papers every year that come out citing CRMS in some way or another.
50 papers, by the way: is a lot. Meaning CRMS fuels our knowledge of the coast. How it’s changing and how restoration is going.
RACHEL: And because CRMS has been going on for almost 20 years, now, we have this super long-term data set that's really powerful and is the envy of other coastal states.
EVE: Is it really?
RACHEL: Yeah. Yeah.
I just want to pause and let that sink in. Louisiana invented a collaborative, scientific system for gathering a vast amount of specific data about our coast – plants, water, salinity, elevation and on and on. This data fuels research, gets published in scientific journals, and helps us better understand how our world is changing. No other coastal state has a system like this.
In these 12 episodes of Wetlands Radio, we’ve talked so much about what people have done on Louisiana’s coast: levied the river, drilled for oil, carved up canals. But people have also done this: science, restoration, collaboration. It brings to mind something Mark Davis told me. Remember, Mark directs Tulane’s Institute on Water Resources, Law, and Policy.
MARK DAVIS: you know, our coast looks the way it looks because we've let it happen. Blame and liability are important conversations to have. The more important conversation is who's taking responsibility for what needs to be done.
The answer needs to be us. We live on the coast. And everything’s connected.
ROSINA: we're all beings that live on the same planet.
Rosina Phillipe, Council Elder of the Atakapa-Ishak/ Chawasha.
ROSINA: There's no Planet X, you know, we all inhabit this same life world in different places, but you know, we're all here on this planet.
And in this deltaic, alluvial sliver of the planet, land continues… to slip away. We know what to do. We – the state of Louisiana, we – are experts in restoration. We’re number one. We know to mimic nature. We know to respect gravity and water and native plants. To cherish sand and oysters and marsh. To fill canals. To harness the river’s power. But it’s not just the coast that’s imperiled; it’s science. We are living in a very good time to take action. To claim responsibility: for what happened before we got here and for what we will leave after we are gone.
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. 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 (Meer - O) Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.