Saturday, March 24, 2018

Louisiana's Vanishing Coast

"...like disintegrating lace..."

That's how the authors of the NOLA series on Louisiana's vanishing coast describe what's left of the land and marsh that make up our southern parishes.

I've been searching for reliable sources to read so I can learn more about this subject and this NOLA series, partnered with the New York Times, is my starting point. In a series of articles the authors introduce us to various communities and people in south Louisiana who are watching not only their land but also their homes and their culture and way of life disappear.

It's heartbreaking and from this early stage of my reading it doesn't appear there are any clear answers.  It doesn't appear that any amount of money thrown at this problem will be able to solve it.

The series of articles point fingers at a number of culprits: rising sea levels due to climate change, a series of destructive storms, oil companies who built and widened canals but never repaired them when they left, the construction of levees to control the Mississippi, and even plagues of insects and rodents who destroy vegetation.

This article about the community of Jean Lafitte, located just south of New Orleans, chronicles the efforts of the mayor, Timmy Kerner, who has adopted the strategy of improving his community to the point that it would be more economically feasible to save it from erosion than to let it go:

His strategy was to secure so much public investment for Jean Lafitte that it would eventually become too valuable to abandon. In a decade, he had built a 1,300-seat auditorium, a library, a wetlands museum, a civic center and a baseball park. Jean Lafitte did not have a stoplight, but it had a senior center, a medical clinic, an art gallery, a boxing club, a nature trail and a visitor center where animatronic puppets acted out the story of its privateer namesake.  
Some of the facilities had been used sparingly, and many at the grand opening questioned whether the seafood pavilion would be much different. To the mayor that was largely beside the point. What mattered was that the structure existed, that its poured concrete and steel beams made Lafitte that much more permanent. "Do we lose that investment, or do we protect it?" Kerner asked...

The authors, Kevin Sack and John Schwartz, point out that a fourth of our wetlands are already gone and in fifty years 2,000 square miles could also go.  In human terms:

The Gulf Restoration Network, a nonprofit conservation group, calculates that there are 358,000 people and 116,000 houses in Louisiana census tracts that would be swamped in the surge of a catastrophic hurricane by 2062. The Geological Survey predicts that in 200 years the state's wetlands could be gone altogether.

As Sack and Schwartz report it, the community of Jean Lafitte and everything else south of that New Orleans levee has basically been abandoned to the elements with the Corps of Engineers advocating relocation of the people.  But that's not to say that nobody is trying to solve the problem. There are lots of committees, levee boards, ecologists, politicians, environmentalists, and other experts working to find and agree on solutions.  And then there is the ever present problem of funding.

There are so many factors at play in this issue. This NOLA series is a great place to start learning about it, which is what I'm trying to do.

After you read about the community of Jean Lafitte, be sure you read this article about the Leeville community on Bayou Lafourche and the cemeteries that are washing out to sea.  It's heartbreaking.

While there are plenty of problems in Louisiana and we've long been known for our  notorious politicians and various aspects of corruption, (and tell me where, please, will you NOT find that?) this is one issue on which we should all be united.  Whether you believe in global warming or climate change or not, whether you believe this land loss is due to greedy oil companies and their negligence, or whether you believe it's just a natural course of events, what we all need to remember is that this is our state: our culture, our way of life.

There are few places more beautiful in my mind than south Louisiana. The swamps, the bayous, the people and their way of life, is unlike anywhere else.  How can we let this go?

There has got to be a way to restore and preserve our coastline and our state.

If you have a good source or recommendation for further reading on this, please share with me in the comments!

Further Reading:
Insects Feast on Louisiana's Coast (NOLA: Feb. 2018)
Buried at Sea: As cemeteries on Louisiana coast wash away, so does history (NOLA: March 2018)
Our Drowning Coast (NOLA: Feb. 2018)
Why the Master Plan will not Protect Louisiana (LSU Law Center: Feb. 2017)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Crusty Old TV Tech again. Jean Laffite sounds like a town the bureacracy built from the description in your blog. I will have to do a little research on it to form an opinion on its demise. Interesting story.

However, one thing is clear. Do the good people of Choudrant, or Dubach, or Pineville need to pay through their state taxes to keep the Gulf at bay in Vermillion Parish? For, what you are proposing is nothing short of a Dutch solution, permanent land reclamation, with the steep pricetag that entails. Does Louisiana (North and South) need to spend its scarce resources in perpetuity on land reclamation? Remember the fuss in Shreveport over state funds in the Superdome bond issue, or the eternal disappointment over delays and prevarication relative the "North-South Tollway" in the 60's and 70's, which EVENTUALLY became I-49? Yeah, eventually the Army Corps did get around to making the Red navigable some 80 years after it stopped being so. Levee boards WERE a Parish responsibility at one time, it seems to me this is a similar problem. I see this as being a hard sell in Coushatta, or Haynesville, personally.

And BTW, I think sunrise over Lake Bistineau (or Caddo Lake!) holds much more native beauty than the swamps down South, but maybe I'm not fully dispassionate on the subject :-)

Pat Austin Becker said...

Oh, you are so right about our regional lakes! Beautiful!

I'm with you; I need to research and learn more about all of this. I do know this land loss is a conversation that has been going on for a long time. I also know it's true we are losing land. Beyond that....

It's difficult to find things that aren't biased one way or the other on this topic, it seems, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places. I'm going to keep digging. I don't think I know enough about this yet to be an advocate for one thing or another.

Anonymous said...

Crusty Old TV Tech. Keep up the good blogging fight Pat. You are shining lights in corners of Louisiana that need illumination.

Though I may no longer live in the land of my ancestors, I'm still beholden to the heritage that raised me. Summer days in the woods of East Texas and North Louisiana. Camp Forbing/Lassa. Church camp near Ruston. Where have they all gone? Who listens to the call of the owl at night in a cabin on a lake? Who fishes for bream at Bistineau? Who drives through Sibley and sees a little country store, and wonders? Generations of Scotch and Scotch-Irish settlers from Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas settled North Louisiana. Who will tell their tales to future generations of Louisianians? Minden, settled by Germans from the (IIRC) Palatinate. Zwolle and the Spanish who settled it. The Caddos and their confederates. Natchitoches and the Spanish, then the French. Ah, the history of North Louisiana, rich and broad like the Red River it is.