Standing ground against advancing waters
Acre by Acre, CWPPRA Projects Beat Back Coastal Demise

What if, in the 1930s, a thief had begun to steal Delaware? What if, acre by acre, year after year, the thief stashed the land of Delaware out of sight and out of reach until the entire state was gone? And what if, still avaricious, the thief next purloined the island of Manhattan and the city of Washington, D.C. and started to stake out Miami and Des Moines and Carson City?

Louisiana has suffered such a thievery of land. During the past century water swept away 1,900 square miles of the state’s coastal zone, an area approximately the size of Delaware. And millennium predictions of losing another 500 square miles — more area than Manhattan and these other cities combined — over the next 50 years did not foresee hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroying more than 200 square miles of marsh in a single season.

Louisiana’s coast, America’s wetlands

Like many a victim of stealthy theft, Louisiana did not detect the extent of its loss until a small decline here, a slight reduction there, coalesced into a crisis the scope of which could not be ignored. And although the address is Louisiana, land loss strikes at interests of national concern.

Since 1990, the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) has provided federal funds to support projects combating Louisiana’s land loss. To date CWPPRA has constructed 76 projects. Eighteen projects are currently under construction and 47 additional projects are approved and in the design phase.

Although small relative to Louisiana’s vast, imperiled landscape, CWPPRA projects protect or restore areas of critical local and national concern. Benefits that CWPPRA projects contribute include

• protection or reclamation of wetland acreage
• protection or creation of estuarine and marine habitats
• natural buffers that mitigate wind, wave and storm surge damage to communities, infrastructure and hurricane protection structures
• protection of oil and gas pipelines and distribution networks
• storm floodwater storage
• filtration and purification of water
• nurseries for fisheries
• wildlife habitat
• data to create a baseline of wetland conditions and to evaluate the efficacy of various approaches to wetland restoration

Saving good earth for the future

“Every piece of land you can save or protect is land you can keep,” says Kirby Verret, a longtime activist for coastal issues. Verret’s heritage as a Houma Indian gives him a distinctive perspective on Louisiana’s environmental problems. “My forefathers understood that if you take care of nature, nature will then take care of you.”

The cards may appear stacked against taking care of nature in coastal Louisiana. Long-term forecasts predict hurricanes increasing in size, frequency and severity, posing an unrelenting threat. Because restored wetlands are subject to the same forces of degradation as are natural wetlands, restoration is an ongoing process, not a static state. And the costs to restore and protect the environment seem continually to rise. Demand for services following recent hurricanes outstrips supply, driving prices up. The cost of fuel, significant in waterborne delivery of materials and in construction processes, spirals upward.

But there are people throughout the coastal region who clamor to express their optimism, to declare the value of CWPPRA projects. “If nothing had been done —” Verret says, and lets the sentence hang, knowing that large expanses of open water now adjoin marshes where nothing was done for too long.

Instead Verret points to places like Lake Boudreaux and Bayou Dularge. “CWPPRA projects in these areas are critical to taking care of the land,” Verret says. “They reduce erosion, halt saltwater intrusion, and strengthen our marshes. The name of our parish, Terrebonne, means good earth. By conserving our land, we can look ahead to passing along our good earth to future generations.”