Saving A Paradise Ep. 1: Louisiana’s Coast Is Disappearing

Added: 2026-05-19

[00:00:05]There is only one Mississippi River Delta.

[00:00:11]It stretches over almost 3 million [music] acres including the largest area of brackish marsh on the continent where fresh and salt water mingle where the river pours into the gulf where through the millennia land and sea have battled for supremacy.

[00:00:32]They're the richest places on the planet.

[00:00:36]Foster Propel is an outdoorsman in [music] Plaquemines Parish and a lover of this place. There's more life in wetlands and marshes [music] and swamps than almost anywhere else on the planet.

[00:00:49]The Delta [music] teems with life.

[00:00:58]A vital flyway for migrating birds.

[00:01:04]Home to a more than $1 billion seafood industry.

[00:01:09]A sportsman's paradise. Well, it's very rich. It's one of the richest places in North America, if not the richest [music] place in North America. And by far America's biggest drainage system.

[00:01:23]The basin empties rivers and streams from parts or all of 31 states and two Canadian provinces. What some engineers call the plumbing.

[00:01:34]>> [music] >> Through the centuries, annual spring floods belched land-building sediment over the river's banks. Geologist Chris McLinden says it delivered [music] mountains of material. If you took the Himalayas and >> [music] >> shaved them off at sea level and flipped them upside down they'd be 5 miles deep and that volume of material is comparable to the amount of sediment that the Mississippi River has delivered to [music] the Gulf Coast.

[00:02:05]Over the course of the last 7,000 years or so, [music] the river crafted the South Louisiana Delta.

[00:02:13]Take a trip back in time.

[00:02:15]4,600 years ago, [music] the land we are on today mostly didn't exist. Lake Pontchartrain was a shallow bay.

[00:02:25]The river [music] changed course toward New Orleans.

[00:02:28]Over the next several hundred years, massive amounts of sediment crafted most of what we now [music] think of as Jefferson Parish.

[00:02:36]The new marsh nearly closed off Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf.

[00:02:41]Over [music] the next 1,000 years, the river poured sand and dirt into the Gulf, [music] and you could have walked to the Chandeleur Islands. 2,000 years ago, the mighty river [music] found a new path to the Gulf, shifting back to the west and building the areas around Houma and Thibodaux.

[00:03:00]But land to [music] the east starved for fresh water, lost its battle with the sea.

[00:03:06]1,000 years ago, the river shifted [music] course again, building what we now call Plaquemines Parish. Barataria Bay has been a delta probably converted to open water, another delta probably [music] converted open water, and now the a a delta in the process of converting to open water right now.

[00:03:26]>> In the name [music] of flood protection and commerce, man locked the mighty river in a straitjacket of levees, robbing [music] the delta of sediment while also preventing the river from changing course. Over the course of the last century, geologists [music] tell us Louisiana has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of its marshes, islands, and swamps.

[00:03:46]>> [music] >> That's an area about the size of Delaware.

[00:03:49]On average, the state sheds another football field of land every hour and a half.

[00:03:56]No one factor is to [music] blame. To tap into the black gold under Louisiana, man dug oil field canals. They interrupt the natural tidal flow as salt water intrudes into fresh water areas.

[00:04:09]>> [music] >> Cut off from the river, the delta subsides. A University of California study recently found that South Louisiana is sinking more quickly than any other river delta >> [music] >> on Earth. It's a rich soup that is [music] growing here.

[00:04:27]And losing our coast, we're going to it's a it's an environmental catastrophe and a cultural catastrophe [music] losing all this.

[00:04:36]For areas at risk from hurricane storm surge, >> [music] >> it means the loss of natural defenses, a buffer against storms.

[00:04:45]And for all the attention paid to Katrina failures, [music] other hurricane cities might envy not just New Orleans' new flood walls, but also its coast. Mark Davis >> [music] >> is a Tulane environmental law expert. If I'm sitting in Miami, I don't have a coast I can try to, you know, keep between me and hurricane landfalls.

[00:05:04][music] If I'm in Norfolk, Virginia, I don't have the same capacity to, you know, create a >> [music] >> sea level rise storm buffer between me and the Chesapeake Bay. Without action, more of that buffer will steadily vanish. Depending on sea level rise, the state's coastal master plan [music] warns Louisiana risk losing as much as 3,000 square miles more over the course of the next half century.

[00:05:31]The state just endured a bruising fight over the largest coastal project in [music] history, choosing to kill the plan to divert a portion of the river into the marsh.

[00:05:45]But Louisiana has fought back in other ways with land-building projects that reconstructed or nurtured [music] 55,000 acres, stitching back together more than 70 miles of barrier islands, turning open water back to land. If we want to save this estuary and this coast, [music] we have to come together. If we continue fighting over it, we we really don't have a chance.

[00:06:08]>> Foster Creppel remains optimistic that the state can [music] find a way to save its great delta.

[00:06:15]>> This delta is something that's constantly giving and taking. It's [music] always in flux. It's not a stationary thing. It's not a mountain in Colorado. It's a organic delta that was built [music] entirely by freshwater, saltwater, animals, plant life and decay, [music] everything that's here.

[00:06:38]Cuz it's such a rich place.