Originally posted on WWNO on May 15th. View original post here.
These days when fishing guide Ryan Lambert motors away from the boat launch in Buras, he’s fishing in the what locals call “the land of used-to-bes.”
As in, that used to be Yellow Cotton Bay, or Drake Bay, or English Bay… and dozens more. It’s all one big open body of water now because the marshes, cypress swamps and ridges that separated these water bodies for most of his life are gone.
In fact, NOAA gave official sanction to the term “Disappearing Louisiana” recently, announcing that Yellow Cotton Bay, Bay Pomme d’Or and 20 other place names were being removed from maps and charts in this part of Louisiana for an honest reason: they no longer exist.
Buras fishing guide Ryan Lambert took us out to the west side of the Mississippi River, just off the Empire Waterway.
“This used to be a community,” said Lambert, as we motored through the area. “I mean, they had people who lived here. If you look in the distance you can see the pilings where the houses used to be all through here; there used to be three different bayous that would run through the marsh. And, across the bayou from one another — which is a slingshot away — they could go to each other’s house and have crawfish boils or shrimp boils and crabs. They would go out their back door and run their trap line and duck hunt. Well, now there’s not a speck of land for miles and miles and miles out here; they’re going, their way of life is going, all because of coastal erosion.”
When the nation finished putting the Mississippi River in a straight jacket of levees in the mid-1930s, scientists knew there would be a price to pay.
Most of southeast Louisiana, shut off from the river sediment that had built it over thousands of years, was now on a long, slow walk to the graveyard, a process that would take centuries.
It would take that long because sediment-starved deltas have two other ways to offset subsidence: the annual cycle of plant growth provides its own type of sediment, and the high tides — and even storm surges — bring in sediment from near shore deposits.
But even those lifelines were about to be broken.
Around the time those levees were completed a new threat to the region was gaining steam, one that would compress that centuries-long death march into a sprint of just decades.
The oil and gas industry had learned that the layer of wetlands along Louisiana’s coast covered enormous wealth. In a few short decades, more than 50,000 wells would be drilled, thousands of miles of canals dredged, and tens of thousands of miles of pipelines laid.
Soon, the wetlands began falling apart. Ponds became lagoons, which became lakes, which became bays — and the coast began receding northward.
“Starting in the [19]30s and 40s — but really in the 50s, 60s, 70s — we’ve sliced and diced the marshes up, and that’s accelerated the rate of degradation,” saysDonald Boesch, President of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences and a New Orleans native.
For most of that time no one seemed to mind. Since 80 percent of the coastal wetlands were privately owned, the destruction was taking place beyond public view and wetland regulations were 40 years away. Besides, the energy industry had brought millions of jobs and a higher standard of living to a poor Southern state, and it was only following the long American tradition of turning what was considered useless wilderness into productive property.
“These are lands that at one time were considered wastelands — of virtually no economic value, says Mike Lyons, General Counsel to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association. “So, people were looking for ways to make these lands productive. We happened to be blessed with oil and gas in the state, and that was the way that people saw as making these wetlands productive.”
That didn’t begin to change until the late 1960s when Woody Gagliano, a young LSU geologist, finished a project on the delta that reached a startling conclusion:
“The gospel then was that, well, this big river is dumping all this sediment and it’s always built land for five thousand years, [so] the land’s going continue to grow and the river may move around a little bit,” says Gagliano. “But everywhere I went in the field I saw just the opposite.”
That news was not applauded, or even believed, by the state’s political leadership. “We raised the issue for the first time,” says Gagliano. “The response was: ‘Forget about that.’”
The oil industry had a presence in each of the state’s 63 parishes, and already was the most powerful player at the state capitol.
But Gagliano didn’t stop, and soon discovered the rate of land loss had actually reached 50 square miles per year.
“Woody Gagliano raised the issue about the rate of loss, and then his company actually did these first “change maps” that were done,” Boesch said. After that, no one could really deny it.
