Region Two: The Land and Its People

Both shaped and threatened by the influence of the Mississippi River and Gulf of Mexico, Region Two comprises the Barataria, the Breton Sound and the Mississippi River Delta basins and sits at the southeastern tip of Louisiana. Encompassing all or part of eight parishes (St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, Lafourche, St. Charles, St. James, St. John the Baptist and Assumption) and stretching from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet to Bayou Lafourche, this land is rich in cultural diversity and natural resources.

With its bottomland hardwood forests (90,000 acres), cypress-tupelo swamps (146,000 acres), vast marshes (658,000 acres) and coastal barrier islands, the region reflects the habitat diversity characteristic of Louisiana's fragile and complex ecosystems- systems that are inextricably connected to the muddy Mississippi.

For thousands of years, as it served to drain 40 percent of the continental United States, the Mississippi River has applied a rich load of nutrients and sediment to the Louisiana lowlands, forming, changing and replenishing the rich wetland habitats that flourish on Louisiana's coast.

In Region Two, however, that elementary connection between river and land has been strained. Here the nation and the region's people have struggled with the river for dominance-confining it between levees for flood protection, dredging its channel for commercial navigation to the heartland, and blocking the river's constant urge to change course.

While this century-long struggle for dominance between man and river may seem to be eternal, it is, in fact, comparatively recent. It was surely not an issue with Louisiana's earliest known residents, the Chitimachas, a Native American culture dating back over 1,000 years, or with the French explorers who first arrived at the Mississippi Delta in 1682. The earliest settlers also accepted and endured the whims of the river and the coastal storms. But this was to change as a diverse group of Europeans, Acadians, African slaves and Isleos from the Canary Islands arrived to make coastal Louisiana their home.

French settlers, beginning in 1717, were the first recorded builders of flood control works in the Lower Mississippi Valley, constructing a series of levees to protect the French Quarter in New Orleans. By 1735 the new residents of the area had built levees on both sides of the river, extending 30 miles above and 12 miles below the city of New Orleans. As the 19th century approached, the work to control the Mississippi was in full swing. The Barataria and Breton Sound basins were logged and the cypress transported to satisfy New Orleans' appetite for lumber. The early 20th century oil and natural gas discoveries offshore and in the coastal wetlands demanded that new channels be dredged and the natural waterways modified for navigation and pipelines. New communities formed around commercial fishing, tourism and the needs of the oil and gas industry, which eventually would generate more than 18,000 wells and 2,200 miles of pipeline in the region's marshland.

But with hardly a notice, a destructive alliance had formed between the influence of man and the natural forces of subsidence, wind and water. Louisiana's coastal marshland was under assault. Now the state and the nation confront this reality: the protection and opportunities bestowed by these wetlands are vanishing, and the economy, infrastructure and culture of Region Two risk collapse.