racing across Barataria Bay, wind and spray in our faces, and it strikes me how strange it is to be traveling through the very same waters I was just staring down at from a half mile above. Meanwhile the Ocean Doctor is interviewing Ryan, and the cameraman is bouncing on the bow, trying to get good shots of both men.
“Look at my GPS,” Ryan says. “It still shows this as land. Not long ago this was 6.3 miles of solid grass. Now I can point my boat right over those 6.3 miles and never see a blade.”
Ryan pulls up to a spot where wooden posts thrust up through the water. Dozens of huge black and white Frigatebirds, the same type of birds I saw from above this morning, lift off. I have never seen this many Frigatebirds outside of Central America. They rise from the posts in slow motion, beautiful and gawkily elegant, as Ryan cuts the boat’s engine.
As we drift, he explains that the posts are not just a perch for birds, but also a kind of grave marker for an old bayou camp.
“Locals would come here—right here—and fish and trap and hunt and have fish boils and crab boils and shrimp boils and they would walk out their back door and hunt ducks. And now look—there’s not a blade of grass for miles.”
It’s true; we might as well be in the middle of a lake. In every direction we can see places where land used to be and where we now see only clouds reflected in the water. In the distance small strands of marsh islands barely keep their heads above the tide, just the hair of their grasses showing. In spots we passed earlier you could see dead trees going under.
“This is not something that is happening over centuries,” Ryan says. “Just a few years ago I could look as far as I could see and there was grass. Now it’s all underwater. Whatever the reason—sea level rise from warming, the land sinking due in part to oil extraction—it really doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s happening.”
I knew the seas were rising, of course, but before I came to Louisiana I didn’t know that the seafloor was sinking through a process called subsidence. Over the centuries, sediment dumped by the Mississippi has weighed down the Gulf floor, causing it to literally sink. And as the land sinks and waters rise, saltwater invades the marsh, killing cypresses and other plants that help stitch the wetlands together. Louisiana’s erosion rate is the worst in the country and the equivalent of sixty football fields of wetlands are lost every single day. Which means that if you stand in one place long enough, it might just turn from land to water.15
Among the things killing the wetlands are straight lines. Nature, of course, isn’t very fond of straight lines, and for centuries creeks wound sinuously through this area. But humans long ago decided that winding was not a good way to travel. They dredged straight canals to replace the creeks without considering the consequences. Straight lines are also required for the ten thousand miles or so of pipeline that travels through the wetlands, carrying oil from the offshore rigs to shore, unintentionally ushering saltwater deeper into the marsh.16
This morning, looking down from the copter, I could see how these straight lines crosscut the marsh, and I could also see the rectangular holes of water where oil rigs used to be. The juxtaposition of wild marsh and planned grid made me think back to being a kid at the beach. I loved playing on the small sandbar islands that revealed themselves at low tide: when the tide started to come back in, I would aid the rising waters by digging lines across the sandbars with my heel, creating canals for the incoming tide to run through. I would dig a dozen of these lines across the sandbar islands, flooding them before their time. The same thing is going on here on an enormous scale.
Ryan has stopped the boat for a reason. Though two of us aboard are professors who lecture for a living, we will learn now that we’ve got nothing on the boat’s captain. Ryan, it turns out, is not just a man with energy and passion. He is also a man with a cause.
As we bob on the water Ryan talks movingly about the loss of people’s livelihoods, the loss of animal habitat, the loss of human culture that has accompanied the disappearance of the marshes that made this one of the most biologically productive estuaries in the world. The barrier islands and outer marshes have always been the frontline of defense against hurricanes, and now they are the frontline against the oil, too, keeping it from working its way into the heart of the wetlands. A second defense, Ryan explains, is the Mississippi River itself, which had done more than its part to keep the oil at bay, its massive outward flow pushing back against the Gulf’s inward surge. He worries that this might change once the river’s seasonal strength wanes.
“The river protects these marshes,” he tells us. “But it’s also what made Louisiana. The sediment it brought here, the nutrients that helped grow these wetlands.”
And the river would still be doing this if it were not hemmed in by the levees.
“What we have to do is redistribute,” he says.
He doesn’t mean the wealth, God no. He means the water. “Free the Mississippi,” it turns out, is Ryan’s rallying cry. He is not talking about radical freedom here, since without the levee his lodge would be underwater; what he is really looking for is a series of diversions so that the river can feed the marsh at various points, rather than dump all it has to offer in one great slug out in the Gulf.
“You know, it’s funny,” he says. “A little while ago I was in Alabama on Lake George with some friends, and they said, ‘Oh, I wish those boats wouldn’t go so close to the shore or they’ll cause erosion.’ And right then it dawned on me what the rest of the country thinks erosion is: a little bit of dirt falling down a bank. But when we speak of erosion down here we are speaking of millions of acres of land going away, never to return. And the only thing that is going to make this land come back is the same thing that built it in the first place. The Mississippi River. All we have to do is let the river go through these marshes like it did for eons of time when it built Louisiana. We have to break it out of the levee and reintroduce the river through different diversions and spillways. We could start slow, maybe one diversion channel, but that would be sufficient to bring in the freshwater and to grow the freshwater aquatics and to keep the saltwater at bay and start to rebuild Louisiana. If we let the freshwater start flowing into the wetlands it would start growing the land that very first day.”
I think of how the river looked this morning from above: corralled by its levee, segregated from the wetlands. In Ryan’s vision the river would spread out more naturally, like a watery hand, feeding the marshes with nutrients it has gathered during its powerful crawl and sludge from Minnesota down through the country’s middle and finally to the Gulf. Of course, far from “natural,” this would be a massive engineering project on the scale of building the levee itself. But it would be engineering toward a different end, toward releasing the river, to an extent, and letting it do what it once did naturally.
“It is such a beautiful solution and it doesn’t just solve the problem of erosion,” Ryan continues. “It protects us from hurricanes, and oil, and it tackles the problem of the dead zone in the Gulf. Right now we have a dead zone the size of New Jersey out in the Gulf, where the Mississippi dumps all the crap from a thousand farms—the manure and fertilizers and insecticides—along with the nutrients. This creates algae blooms and removes the oxygen and kills all sea life too. But if this same nutrient- and fertilizer-thick water runs into the marshes, the result is completely different. Everybody says, ‘We got to stop the nutrients; we got to stop the fertilizers,’ but you know, we really don’t. All the wetland plant life will use the nutrients, filter the leftover fertilizer, and when it comes out the other end it will be pristine, crystal-clear water. If we let the river go where it’s supposed to go, we will be using those nutrients
