Holding The Line

“Meet me at the Bayou Bienvenue boat launch in Chalmette at noon,” read the message from Monique Verdin. By one o’clock we were on a boat, idling the engine in front of Bayou Bienvenue’s pre-Katrina floodgate. At just 12 feet above sea level, it’s hard to imagine how such a feeble defense ever inspired much confidence; the boat captain refers to it as a “failure of imagination.” Beyond it stands the new, state-of-the-art levee built after Katrina, an imposing structure, which seems far more reassuring to the naked eye. But looks can be deceiving, as the captain points out—this levee was built according to the Army Corps’ post-Katrina calculations, which did not take into account the accelerated rise of sea levels in recent years.  Given the drastic changes affecting our landscape, environmental researchers are struggling to keep up, as Dr. Alex Kolker readily admits while we watch the torrential May rains beat on his office window. As expertise continues to lose ground to uncertainty, how do we keep the faith when even our sturdiest foundations tremble beneath the weight of precarious times?For some, such circumstances make it impossible to know where to step, but in southeast Louisiana, people like Monique Verdin and Dean Wilson know we don’t have the luxury of paralysis. Wilson, a native of Spain, came to the Atchafalaya Basin to make his living from the land and the water. These days, though, he spends most of his time in front of a computer screen. Fighting legal battles with oil companies and some of the so-called environmental organizations they employ was never part of his plan, but the choice for him was never difficult. As he puts it “I love my children and grandchildren more than than I love myself”. For those on the front lines, fighting environmental destruction with their eyes wide open, faith in the age of climate change is not a matter of certainty, but a love fierce enough to transcend the need to know the outcome before committing to the work. 

Monique Verdin  Citizen of the United Houma Nation & Filmmaker

Environmentally speaking, Southeast Louisiana is a womb for the world. It’s a place where so much life comes into to be born. Our estuaries are a breeding ground for so many kinds of fish that it’s feeding the entire Gulf basin, as well as being a place for migratory birds. As the Mississippi River comes down, it is supposed to be purified by our marshes as it returns to the sea. Man has had a different agenda. I am a citizen of the United Houma Nation. The Houma are a united force of indigenous peoples who have been living here in the Mississippi Delta for as long as the Mississippi Delta has existed—Atakapa, Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Accolapissa. The Houma people have been promised a lot, and in the end, we haven’t been left with anything. We’re not even able to provide for ourselves anymore. The one thing about living at the edge of the bayou, was at least you had everything you needed to eat, but when you have an oil spill—in 2010 we all witnessed a black tide roll in—you know what it’s like to not be able to fish from the water, and to have tell your baby, “Don’t put your hand in there because it’s toxic.”Some of the first oil and gas wells that were found in southeastern Louisiana were found on my family’s ancestral territory. Our land rights were taken from us, and now that territory is losing land at one of the fastest rates in the world. We are a coastal people, and we have no land north to run to. Our jobs are tied to the water, as well as to industry. [Natives] work in refineries, they’re welders, they’re boat captains, they’re boat builders. I live in a community that has two oil refineries, and one of worst air qualities in the nation. Oil and gas decides a lot, especially here in southeast Louisiana where our hands are tied. We have some of the nation’s oldest and largest refineries here, and are connected to pipelines that go all over the country. There are already more than 80,000 miles of pipelines onshore in Louisiana; now, Energy Transfer Partners (the same company that built the Dakota Access Pipeline) is wanting to run the "Black Snake" with some of the dirtiest crude from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota through the Atchafalaya Basin, without a proper Environmental Impact Study.The conflict, when you think about it, is that the restoration of South Louisiana’s coast is dependent on the deepwater oil and gas royalties, which fund the restoration process. I came home from [the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris and learned that as President Obama was patting himself on the back, and his administration were all proud of themselves for taking deep water exploration off the table for the Atlantic, they were opening Gulf Waters wide open to the highest bidder for these deepwater oil and gas leases. Shell is drilling some of the deepest waters in the world here in the Gulf of Mexico. So we’re signing this climate agreement, but then continuing to invest long-term in deepwater carbon extraction. The whole Paris Accord is “Well, yeah...maybe we will kinda-if-when-we feel ready to.” We as south Louisianans have the skill set, and we have the resources. We have the sun, the wind, we have tides, we have the ability to transition. It’s time for us to step out and take the lead in that, instead of being left behind and told “You have oil and gas, or you have cotton, or you have sugar cane, or you have nothing.”

Dr. Alex Kolker  Researcher at Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium & Associate Professor at Tulane University

I teach at Tulane University, but my main appointment is at LUMCON (Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium), which is effectively the marine lab for the state of Louisiana. We are coastal geologists looking at how humans, among other factors, influence the shape of the coast. We look at where sediment and water flow, we look at groundwater, we look at coastal restoration. The projections of global sea level rise have increased over the last ten years. Those kinds of predictions have changed the kinds of questions we’ve asked as scientists, and one question I have is whether we can even keep pace. I think we can, but my students and I have to work very hard, and it does change your perspective as a scientist. There was a day when people might have thought they would spend their whole career solving one problem, and then at the end of their career, they would look back and write a conclusion and say they’ve solved this problem. Now, the problems might change over the course of our career so substantially that we have to adjust as researchers. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that, but I do know that you always have to be on the ball, you always have to be adapting. There’s never a dull moment.There are scientific questions in my work that have serious policy implications. I was on the framework development team for the Master Plan, a plan to restore the coast with big policy implications. The 2017 plan uses much higher rates of global sea level rise than the 2012 plan, and that has very substantial policy implications about how we can and can’t manage the coast. Things that might have been sustainable in the 2012 system wouldn’t be sustainable in the 2017 system because it looks like climate change is accelerating. The oil industry and fossil fuels play a huge role in that, so obviously, that brings up some interesting policy questions.  On the technical level, as opposed to policy, oil people and the coastal scientists actually ask similar questions. The oil industry does very high-quality technical work and can be very technologically advanced. I think a lot of the early work on the Mississippi Delta was funded by oil companies who wanted to understand how deltas work; they still fund research in the area. I presented my work on subsidence to the New Orleans Geological Society, which is not exclusively from the oil industry but draws heavily on oil industry people. And while my work shows that subsidence in certain parts of Louisiana are very tied to oil and gas production, they were very receptive. No one from the oil industry has ever called me up and said “Don’t study that question.” I try, as a scientist, not to blame individuals; they wouldn’t be drilling if there wasn’t the demand. And the demand is driven by people who have exercised voices through the democratic process. What causes people to listen to various messages ... that’s a psychology question. Obviously there are people on the policy level who don’t take climate change seriously, and there are people who up-front deny climate change. ‘Why’ is a question I can’t answer. Why do people root for sports teams? I don’t know. There is no logical reason people should root for a sports team, but they do it all the time, right? Why do some people look at certain facts and say, “I don’t believe those facts”? That’s a psychology question, and it’s among the more pressing psychology questions we have today. 

Dean Wilson  Executive Director and Founder & Atchafalaya Basinkeeper

I grew up in Spain. My mother was from Spain and my father was from Ohio. In the early 80’s, I wanted to go to the Amazon. I decided to come to Louisiana to get used to the heat and the mosquitos... I figured it would be hot enough. But I fell in love with the swamps. I never made it to the Amazon, I began professionally fishing and hunting in the Basin. I started in 1987 and did it full time until 2003.Being a fisherman in freshwater, you work for yourself and some time with the children. You get up in the morning before dark, you go out by yourself, and you live by the season. When the water was high, I went for crawfish, which was how I made the majority of my money. After crawfish season was frogging. And then in the winter there was buffalo fish, garfish, carp, catfish, white drum. For about a month and a half out of the year we could fish for bowfin. You can make caviar out of bowfin eggs; I would make it for my family, so we could eat caviar, and make patties like hamburgers with the meat to fill my freezer for the rest of the year.In 1991, I learned that they had changed the easements that were supposed to protect the wetlands forever. The cypress mulch industry contacted the landowners and, with the help of some environmental groups, they changed the language of the easements to allow them to cut down the trees. They began logging in 2000 and by 2003, I was involved in trying to stop it.Atchafalaya Basinkeeper is a member of an umbrella organization called the Waterkeeper Alliance. We have our own board of directors and bylaws, but associating with them means we have to comply with quality standards. If someone violates the Clean Water Act, for example, and the government doesn’t enforce it, then we have to take legal action to protect the watershed. Using the name Waterkeeper shows that we aren’t a project that takes money from industry to greenwash, helping industry create the perception that everything they do is fine and/or doesn't hurt the environment. There is a lot of corporate funding going into groups, into greenwashing. Like the fight we’re in with the Nature Conservancy right now, which is trying to revive a project involving river diversions to build land away from the coast in the Atchafalaya Basin, using public funds to benefit a handful of landowners. It’s criminal, because the Atchafalaya is a spillway for flood protection. When you fill it with dirt, you’re destroying flood protection.At Basinkeeper we have all kinds of people. We have commercial fishermen, hunters, lovers of nature from all over the world. We even have members who work for oil and gas. One owns an oil company and one owns a supply company for oil and gas. They believe that things have to be done right, and by the law. There’s room to do business without destroying the environment around them. They love their kids and grandkids more than they love themselves.My fear is that Louisiana will never come together. Too many people love themselves more than they love their kids and grandkids. These people have no soul. They only care about their careers and themselves, and they control the State. The oil companies are unrestricted, they are granted permit after permit.Now, I’m too busy fighting the fight to keep fishing and hunting. I miss not being at the computer everyday, and the challenge of making a living off the land. You don’t get something, you don’t eat. That’s independence. I miss getting up in the morning to find a spot no one knows anything about. You might be dreaming all night about that spot, and in the morning, as you run with your boat to your secret place, you see the herons and egrets flying to their own secret places. The birds were probably dreaming all night about their own secret spot, just like me. You become part of nature. You become part of the whole thing.