This Disappearing Place, pt. 1 - On the Bayou with Blink

Photo from: http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2017/05/mississippi_delta_by_air.html

[post by Christine Baniewicz]

Richie Blink, outreach coordinator for the Louisiana coastal wetlands advocacy group Restore, switched off the outboard motor of our flatboat and let it coast. A few moments later, the metal hull of the vessel slid up into a soft stop against some of the newest marshland built in the state.

“So, we’re in a project right now that was designed to slow down the flow of the water,” Blink explained. For context: Louisiana’s coastal wetlands began to rapidly disappear in the seventies. Caused variously by oil and gas industry development, saltwater intrusion, land subsidence and climate change, land loss continues to plague coastal Louisiana to this day.

Blink, a native of Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, is a part of a growing contingent of folks interested in reversing this trend. Among other organizational duties, he now pilots motorboats full of students, local government officials and writers like me up and down the Mississippi River and its distributary channels, offering an up-close and personal view of both the gravity of the environmental crisis and the measures that groups like Restore are taking to respond to it.

This particular project, Blink explained, harnessed the land-building power of the river itself. Using a floating excavator, engineers dug up mud and clay from the shallow bay of open water and piled it into dozens of short dirt terraces. When viewed from above, these earthen “speed bumps” look like a tidy row of rectangular dashes running parallel to the Mississippi, about twenty miles north of the river’s mouth where it empties out into the Gulf of Mexico.

Once the terraces were in place, engineers cut a small diversion in the eastern bank of the river, causing freshwater—filled with suspended sediment—to flow towards the Gulf through this new, muddy obstacle course.

The result? In less than ten years, barren terraces that were once separated by more than twenty feet have caught and held new sediment from the river water. Their banks have expanded and now nearly touch in some places. They are covered in roseau cane, elephant ears, and even whip-thin willow tree saplings.

Blink propped one of his white shrimp boots up against the metal lip of the boat. He was maybe thirty-five, with a soft round baby-face and blue eyes. “This project has done a really really good job of slowing down water,” he said. “And allowing sediment to fall out.”

Still, the landscape seemed fragile. It was hard to imagine the newly emergent plant life and thin, spongy little islets capable of weathering powerful hurricane-force winds and storm surge. When I asked Blink if these kind of projects could keep pace with sea level rise over the next century, he became tense. He admitted that, with the National Climate Assessment forecasting anywhere from one to four feet of sea level rise by 2100, it was hard to guarantee that they could build new land that would last more than thirty-five or forty-five years.

Ultimately, though, he stood by the project. “This is a whole lot of really valuable habitat,” he said. “And it's hard to put a number on that.”

He paused, considered the brown water rippling just beyond the prow of the boat. “Oyster fishermen, recreational fishermen, shrimpers, landowners, trappers—there’s all sorts of different groups that have a stake in this,” he said. “Maybe they want things to stay the same, or they don't want fresh water because it's going to impact their bottom line.”

Blink shook his head, took his muddy boot down and planted it on the flat bottom of the boat. “To me,” he said. “It seems like humans have a short memory. Like we're thinking either five years in the past or five years in the future. We don't have that long outlook that would help us do better as a species.”

I blinked a few times, tried to follow his logic: so, we as a species should embrace long-term strategies like this river diversion and terrace project, despite the short-term (and sometimes severe) costs for folks like fishermen, but actually, wait—these strategies are not-so-long-term after all, but rather only provide a viable habitat for another three or four decades before succumbing at last to erosion?

The confusion on my brow must have been apparent. Blink retreated towards the steering wheel, almost hiding behind it, and gave an apologetic smile. “Did I even answer your question?”

The others in the boat twittered. I shrugged. “You gave me a lot of things to think about,” I said.

Shortly after, Blink restarted the boat and “let her run,” piloting us at a quick clip through the labyrinthine bayous with an ease that betrayed his childhood spent fishing these waterways with his Dad. I watched him move through the water and wondered how much pressure he must be under, how stressful it must be to steward and advocate for this disappearing place. I thought about how forgiving he'd been earlier when discussing the oil industry's impact on region--"it's not in their best interests to [restore the wetlands], they're in the business of bringing oil and gas to the table, and not restoring the marsh," he'd said. This stance sat in odd contrast to his quick dismissal of fisher- and oyster-men's concerns, painting them as slow and short-sighted, even selfish. I wondered how much of this strangely judgmental stance had to do with policies imposed by Restore's primary funders, the Walton Family Foundation, a charity co-chaired by WalMart's Rob Walton and billionaire Stewart Resnick. Resnick, the owner of the giant agricultural corporation Paramount Farms, "has been instrumental in campaigns to...increase water exports to corporate agribusiness, developers and oil companies."

Restore, as an organization, is surely beholden to this powerful patron. Blink and his colleagues have no choice but to work under the auspices of men like Resnick, whose profit streams are inextricably linked to the oil and gas industry.

I considered all of these huge, disparate competing forces bearing down on Blink there at the helm. He was the son of a shrimper from a little river town called Empire. I suddenly felt very sad. I wondered if Blink's busy schedule allowed him any time to grieve his disintegrating home.

Someone behind me asked Blink how he knew where we were amid the seemingly identical channels of brown brackish water and straw-colored cane.

Blink smiled, his right palm against the wheel. “It’s like you walking down the hallways of your house,” he said. “You just know.”

--
 Sources linked in-line where possible. Scientific source for oyster-fisheries impact by such projects:

Sonia, Thomas M. et al. "Predicting the Effects of Proposed Mississippi River Diversions on Oyster Habitat Quality; Application of an Oyster Habitat Suitability Index Model." Journal of Shellfish Research, vol. 32, issue 3, pp. 629-638, 2013.