Saving A Paradise Ep. 2: The Farmers Fighting To Save Louisiana’s Coast

Ajouté : 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]At the first sign of some potential threat, goose necks seem to stretch in unison.

[00:00:08]Then the sky fills in a blizzard of white and black wings.

[00:00:15]Here is the story of one of North America's great migration.

[00:00:20]Our cast of characters numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

[00:00:25]Snow geese and ducks descend on the South Louisiana Delta. Most often in places far from city life.

[00:00:33]Most people, [music] unless they're in a boat or a duck blind, never experience it.

[00:00:39]One of the hottest of these hot spots is near the mouth of the Mississippi River in the bird's foot delta.

[00:00:47]Biologist Todd Baker is a project manager for the state's coastal protection authority. When you come to the bird's foot delta, this is the terminal end of the Mississippi flyway in North in North America. You get birds from the Arctic, from Canada, all over North America migrate down to the mouth of the river.

[00:01:07]In the winter months, the birds journey down the Mississippi flyway, a migratory superhighway for more than 300 species.

[00:01:15]Annual surveys estimate 3 million snow geese choose Louisiana and Texas for their winter time retreats. You can look over your shoulder and see something at every turn.

[00:01:26]>> [music] >> Yet no place loses these wetlands at the rate Louisiana is shedding its coast.

[00:01:32][music] Every hour and a half, geologists tell us, the equivalent of a football field of land disappears. So, this used to be the original navigation channel for for the state of Louisiana, for the Mississippi River. Baker steers down Pass a Lout, one of three main arteries running from the river to the Gulf. In the 1800s, the key shipping channel. For commercial traffic, it's pretty much unusable. Recreational boating uh still gets out here.

[00:01:59]>> Over time, the channel silted in. Partly from material the Army Corps dredges and deposits here to keep the modern channel open for shipping.

[00:02:10]At the end of Pass a Lout, the marsh surrenders land.

[00:02:14]It loses its battle [music] with the sea.

[00:02:19]Here, what's been called the loneliest lighthouse once guided mariners home.

[00:02:25]Installed in 1855, Hurricane Katrina bulldozed through this spot and decapitated the lighthouse. The lighthouse itself tells the story. 25 years ago it was about a mile or so inland. Today, it's in the Gulf.

[00:02:40]>> The land went out, depending on what you're talking about in time, but it used to go 2 or 3 miles out.

[00:02:44]>> Five years after the hurricane, a man-made disaster inflicted more harm.

[00:02:51]The Macondo oil well blowout belched millions of gallons of crude into the Gulf for 87 days until crews finally capped it.

[00:03:01]>> BP had a tremendous impact on this landscape. This is the closest land mass to the oil spill. It was the first land mass hit from the oil spill, and it was hit multiple times, and it's very difficult to get out here, so cleanup was pretty slow. So, the impacts were pretty severe.

[00:03:16]>> The wetlands surrendered more land. Is this a consequence of the oil? The oil spill greatly sped up the rate of erosion down here.

[00:03:27]Other parts of Louisiana's coast, far from the river, face their own set of challenges. A similar population explosion plays out southeast of Lake Charles in the marshes of the Rockefeller State Wildlife Refuge.

[00:03:43]Scooter Trahan manages the refuge.

[00:03:45]>> The outlook for the future is is try to maintain what we have.

[00:03:50]The Rockefeller family donated the refuge to Louisiana over a century ago.

[00:03:55]At its founding, it stretched over 86,000 acres.

[00:03:59]Today, it's roughly 70,000. You can see it's all shell fragments. Some years the gulf chews away 300 ft of beach.

[00:04:10]Shoreline protection that the state installed has stopped some of the bleeding.

[00:04:15]Trasler says they are like farmers of the marsh. 52 large structures control water levels and salinity. As an added bonus, they help provide flood protection for populated areas to the north. Is it going to prevent all flooding? No, but it's going to help get the water out quicker. It's a win-win for man and duck. Trasler explains lowering water levels to just the right depth makes the water shallow enough for the birds to feed.

[00:04:46]A series of hurricanes over the last couple decades walloped the surrounding area and the refuge. They're in the process of repairing the damage. With all these water control structures, levee systems, it's taken 100 years to build this.

[00:05:03]And and so here, we're trying to basically rebuild all this all this infrastructure in a few years. And so it it's going to be a challenge.

[00:05:16]Meeting these challenges, preserving [music] this place, involves a constant battle. It's adapting to the situations Mother Nature throws at us. As well as man, you know, we have altered this system so much.

[00:05:31]For a lot of these natural scenic places along the coast >> [music] >> to be maintained, we we have to help.

[00:05:39]The Birdsfoot Delta could use some help, too.

[00:05:42]Todd Baker pushes an idea to buy this place some time. It's in the state of retreat right now, has been for several decades, and we're just going to open it up and get that sediment pumping back out to the marshes and let it build. A state project would unclog a portion of Pass a Loutre, dredging 2/3 [music] of the channel, sucking 16 million cubic yards of sediment, equivalent to three and a half Super Domes of sand and mud.

[00:06:08]>> It's going to clean out Pass a Loutre, clean out South Pass, and let Mother Nature, let the river build marsh like it used to out here. It would not come cheap, $176 million. [music] The state coastal authority hopes to fund the project with settlement money from the 2010 oil spill.

[00:06:26]Baker concedes there are doubters. The delta is sinking so quickly, is it doomed? We get that a lot of times. It's why bother? Well, this is a habitat [music] that's unique to all of North America. We don't have a delta like this anywhere else in North America.

[00:06:41]Go with that line of thinking, we're saying it's okay to take this ecosystem and say it's functionally extinct. We're not going to do anything anymore. If Mother Nature had her way, the river would have shifted course long ago. We, as human beings, have locked this river into where it's at. So, it's not a natural system anymore.

[00:07:01]>> [music] >> In the springtime, the migrating birds reverse course, retracing their path up the Mississippi Flyway before they make yet another journey in the fall and winter for as long as this place exists.

[00:07:16][music]