This Disappearing Place, Pt. 2: L'eau est La Vie

by Christine Baniewicz

On a three-acre plot of land out in rural Rayne, Louisiana, a group of dusty, sun-baked environmental activists are approximating a semblance life after oil.

Photo from L'eau Est La Vie Facebook Page

L’eau est La Vie Camp, whose French name translates to “Water is Life,” is the center of operations for a coalition of grassroots environmental groups campaigning against the Bayou Bridge Oil Pipeline. The 162-mile-long pipeline, currently under construction, will link up with the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline to transport crude fracked oil all the way across the boot of the state, from Lake Charles in the west to St. James just outside of New Orleans. Its proposed path cuts a line directly through the marshlands of the Atchafalaya Basin and Bayou Lafourche. The company building it, Energy Transfer Partners, leads the industry in unintended oil spills, according to Reuters, leaking more than 3,406 net barrels of crude oil into the land and water around their pipelines over the last six years.

Concerned that this new pipeline will pollute drinking water and further exacerbate already crisis-level land loss in the wetlands, local organizers responded by training civilians to spot permit violations along the pipeline route, filing lawsuits and injunctions, and building L’eau est La Vie Camp.

Cherri Foytlin, a member of the Indigenous Environmental Network and one of the lead organizers with the grassroots campaign against the Bayou Bridge Oil Pipeline, calls the camp a “model of just transition.” As in, a transition from life as we currently know it—lived wholly and completely dependent upon fossil-fuel—to some new kind of way.

The base-camp warehouse space, little more than a tall concrete-slab garage in the middle of an otherwise undeveloped field of wildflowers, certainly feels like a way-station. An intermediate place. An improvised kitchen—sans plumbing—occupies about half of the space. Metal shelving units house pots and pans and mugs, boxes of cereal, fruit and veggies going soft under a thin scrim of dust blown in from the perpetually open roll-up doors. A couple of jugs of water along the far wall, for when it’s time to wash dishes. A couple of nested ten-gallon paint buckets, rigged with a plastic foot-pump, for when it’s time to wash hands. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme, claims a tall poster tacked to the fridge. Above it, hung all around the space from the exposed metal rafters, are giant canvas banners from previous demonstrations at pipeline build-sites. They are covered with orange butterflies, cypress swamps, waterfalls and hashtags—#NoBBP, #WaterIsLife.

The rest of the space is open: a ring of camp-chairs and a folding table for organizing meetings. One shelving unit is full of q-tips and eco-friendly bug spray, plastic bins full of tampons, sunscreen, rubbing alcohol, band-aids. Another one’s loaded with rolled-up sleeping bags, camping tents, and tarps—so visitors coming from far away can spend the night with the rest of the organizers in their row of tents at the property line.

Occupying most of the far wall is a broken-down cardboard box with an arterial-looking map drawn on it with multicolored permanent markers, tracing the path of the pipeline. The map demarcates waterways, river crossings and major highways. All along the black pipeline route, organizers have pushed thumbtacks in at specific sites and linked them to log pages via foot-long lengths of neon-pink string. The pages have handwritten dates and notes on them—drill bits spotted on road, active worksite.

It would be easy to mock the mid-90’s, DIY-punk-aesthetic of the place, were it not for the integrity and unity of purpose underpinning everything from the compost pile to the activists’ thrifted, hand-altered camouflage pants. These folks are walking their talk. Their organizing work is about saying no to the pipeline, but their daily lives at the camp are all about saying yes. Yes to something less convenient but more sustainable. Yes to the certainty of climate change in our lifetime. Yes to responding to it in some new kind of way.

Clear cut wetland forest in the Achafalaya Basin for Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Also example of a spoilbank (see below for more on that). Photo by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, 2018.

Despite the somewhat radical methods of the mostly-millennial-aged contingent of campers out in Rayne, what we know about oil and gas development driving land loss in Southern Louisiana is nothing new. As early as 1983, scientists like Eugene Turner were documenting causal relationships between the oil and gas industry’s massive network of dredged canals and subsequent land loss in the wetlands (Scaife 433).

In a 1997 study that remains relevant more than twenty years later, Turner and his colleague Aaron Bass investigated land loss over sixteen years in three major marshland areas—Terrebone, St. Bernard, and Barataria basins. Using high-definition aerial photos taken of each basin in 1974, 1988, and 1990, Turner and Bass gathered data by laying a large transparent plastic sheet, gridded with graph points scaled at 0.8 km intervals, over each photo. Then, they recorded whether each point on the transparency overlaid water or land. They analyzed this data in conjunction with information gathered on the number and dimension of canals dredged in each basin, and their results were shockingly clear.

Graphic from Turner "Discussion," pp. 1332

 The percent of land lost in each basin directly correlated with canal density. In other words—the more canals, the more land loss. “For each hectare of canal dredged,” they write. “There was the same loss of 2.85 hectares (including the dredged canal) in all three basins” (901). In addition to the land loss directly to the construction of the canal itself, the two cited several indirect reasons for this correlation. One reason, they speculate, has to do with the density of the dirt packed and piled up beside these canals, called spoilbanks. “The weight of these spoilbanks,” they write. “Compacts the underlying wetland soil…and forms a more impenetrable material” (901). As a result, flood waters from hurricane storm surges breach the spoilbanks, but then become trapped, unable to retreat back into the Gulf of Mexico. This waterlogging of the estuary can be detrimental to plants, and their root systems left too long under water suffer from oxygen deficiency and die. And even after flood waters eventually drain, the remaining marshland water is too salty, thanks to evaporation, for many of the native plants and animals to survive.

According to the organizers behind the #NoBBP movement, Energy Transfer Partners plans to put pipeline through 600 acres—or more than 200 hectares—of Louisiana wetlands. Depending on the depth and width of canals they’ll need to dredge to lay the pipe, ETP stands to create more than 1100 hectares of new open water in the Atchafalaya Basin and Bayou Lafourche by 2034, according to Turner and Bass’s metric.

This number, of course, does not account for any damages done by all those barrels of oil likely to spill from the pipeline, nor does it factor in sea-level rise, of which Louisiana has some of the highest projected rates on the planet. These variables, which would certainly exacerbate land loss over the next fifteen years, stand to wreak tremendous havoc not only in Louisiana, but throughout the nation as a whole, which depends on us for nearly a quarter of its natural gas supply and a fifth of its oil-refining capacity.

But we can’t refine oil or transport natural gas for the rest of the country if all of our infrastructure is underwater. So unless the nation—from Florida to Maine, from Virginia all the way out west to California—unless everyone living there will be ready, in sixteen years, to function with a quarter less gas and a fifth less oil, then the Bayou Bridge Pipeline poses a serious problem for us all.

Photo of permit violation on a spoil bank in the Achafalaya Basin--toxic discharge/oil sheen on basin waters with point source unclear, but likely coming from the spoilbank. Photo snapped by a water protector, posted on Louisiana Bucket Brigade's Public Facebook Page, 2018.

I went out to L’eau est La Vie a few Saturdays ago. About a dozen miles south of the nearest big interstate, I-10, it's nestled between crawfish ponds and tall stands of water oak and Chinese Tallow, down a dusty, uneven, half-paved road lined with yolk-colored buttercups and purple spiderwort. When I arrived, parking my car on the grass beside the organizers’ handful of vehicles, it was around one o’clock. Everyone seemed to be gathered around a big square table in the shade of a tall awning erected next to the garage/kitchen/organizing space. The camp dog, a thickset brindle pit bull, barked at my arrival and loped over to lick my hand.

The mood was tense. One of the organizers, a tallish guy with deep-set eyes and an air of authority about him, told me that there had been a lot of cars driving slowly by that day. One truck had passed back and forth down the narrow road eight times. They were in the process of trying to run the guy’s plates through a friend of a friend, but it did little to cut the mood of exhausted vigilance that permeated the camp. While this brand of intimidation was less frequent than plain old curiosity from locals, the organizers had reason to fear conflict. Many folks in south Louisiana, after all, believe the pipeline will create jobs and economic security and disagree with the “very vocal” opponents of the project.

Wanting to make myself useful, I offered to do whatever dishes might be dirty inside the garage. A twenty-something woman in a black tank top—she called herself Sloth—smiled, said that would be great. Another guy, with curly brown hair and dust coloring his temples, showed me into the kitchen and got some hot water started in a huge kettle over a propane-tank burner.

Although I didn’t think about it then, I find myself now returning to that propane tank, that line of cars on the grass, those tubes of fluorescent lights that switched on in the garage after dark. For all their insistence on a fossil-free future, the campers in Rayne still depend upon oil. All of us do. And while I am wholeheartedly in support of moving our world towards renewable resources—solar and wind power, for example—I also worry that such a transition will take a minute to make.

In short: I just don’t think we’re ready to live without it yet.

So although it seems, on the surface, that someone with worries like me about how much we need oil would be all for this new pipeline. And maybe I would be, if I’d never read the work of Eugene Turner, if I didn’t know that more pipelines mean more canals, and that more canals mean less land, and that less land means more water means more difficulty accessing the wellheads and pumping stations and refineries that we already have, that we desperately depend on to power everything.

Saying no to this new pipeline—and yes to restoration strategies that address the environmental impacts of canals and spoilbanks—at the very least buys us all some time to prepare for the new kind of life we will all have to start living by the end of the century, when our finite reserves of oil finally fizz out and the climate becomes ever-hotter and more unstable. To continue to permit the construction of new pipelines, without addressing the need to backfill old canals and level spoilbanks (Baustian 636), is a recipe for disaster.

Atchafalaya Basin build site for BBP. Photo by Louisiana Bucket Brigate Water Protectors, 2018.

Works Cited

Bass, Aaron S. and Eugene Turner. "Relationships between Salt Marsh Loss and Dredged Canals in 

Three Louisiana Estuaries." Journal of Coastal Research, vol. 13, no. 3, 1997, pp. 895-903. Print.

Baustian, Joseph J. and R. Eugene Turner. "Restoration Success of Backfilling Canals in Coastal Louisiana Marshes." Restoration Ecology, vol. 14, no. 4, 2006, pp. 636-644. Print.

"Judge Halts Construction on Bayou Bridge Pipeline." ABC's KATD.com, 23 Feb. 2018, http://www.katc.com/story/37580406/judge-halts-construction-on-bayou-bridge-pipeline. Accessed Apr. 2 2018. Web.

Marshall, Bob. "New Research: Louisiana Coast Faces Highest Rate of Sea-Level Rise Worldwide." The Lens on Nola.com, 21 Feb. 2013, https://thelensnola.org/2013/02/21/new-research-louisiana-coast-faces-highest-rate-of-sea-level-rise-on-the-planet/. Accessed Apr. 2 2018. Web.

Meny, Josh. "Training Helps Water Protectors Become Diplomats for their Cause." ABC's KATD.com, 24 Feb. 2018, http://www.katc.com/story/37584382/training-course-helps-water-protectors-to-be-diplomats-for-their-cause. Accessed Apr. 2 2018. Web.

Rich, Nathaniel. "The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever." The New York Times, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/02/magazine/mag-oil-lawsuit.html. Accessed Apr 2 2018. Web. 

Scaife, W.W., Turner, R.E. & Costanza, R. "Coastal Louisiana Recent Land Loss and Canal Impacts." Environmental Management, vol. 7, no. 5, 1983, pp. 443-442, https://doi-org.ezproxy.uno.edu/10.1007/BF01867123. Accessed Apr. 2 2018. Web.

Turner, Eugene. "Discussion of: Olea, R.A. and Coleman, J.L., Jr., 2014. A Synoptic Examination of Causes of Land Loss in Southern Louisiana as Related to the Exploitation of Subsurface Geological Resources. Journal of Coastal Research, 30(5), 1025-1044." Journal of Coastal Research, vol. 30, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1330-1334. Print.

Veeder, Howard. "Letter to the Editor." DailyComet.com, 2 Feb 2017, http://www.dailycomet.com/opinion/20170202/letters-to-editor-feb-2-2017. Accessed Apr 2 2018. Web.