The Voice of the Wetlands Festival, Part 3: The Cajun and the Lake

I am continuing, as requested, to post the series on the Voice of the Wetlands Festival, 2008, that I first wrote for OpEdNews.com between October and December. Here is Part 3.

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Voice-ofthe-Wetlands-F-by-Mac-McKinney-081102-995.html

original article: November 3, 2008

The Voice of the Wetlands Festival, Part 3: The Cajun and the Lake

By Mac McKinney

(To read Part 1, click here)

(To read Part 2, click here)

Sunday morning, October 12, Houma, Louisiana:

I have been experiencing the Voice of the Wetlands Festival for the last two days, enjoying the music and learning more about the ecology of the wetlands. But now my wife and I have to cut short our visit, even though the festival will resume at Noon, and head on back to New Orleans International Airport to catch a mid-afternoon flight. But the plight of southern Louisiana has not been lost on me, nor hopefully, on you, the reader.

The wetlands of Louisiana are being destroyed by 1) blocking off the annual sediment deposits from the Mississippi River, 2) the building of endless canals crisscrossing the southern Louisiana wetlands that then invite the insidious spread of destructive saltwater intrusion, and of course, 3) by contractors being allowed to bulldoze, fill in and pave the wetlands in the interests of commercial development. But there is another factor that also affects, not only the wetlands, but all the waterways - rivers, lakes, bayous, etc., and that is urban, industrial and agricultural pollution of these waterways. This became clear to me as I was driving back from the festival this Sunday morning.

As we were leaving the outskirts of Houma, first I was able to get a good look at one of the many canals dredged out in Louisiana, canals that have become part of the environmental problem. This one was running under Floyd Duplantis Bridge below:

















Floyd Duplantis Bridge on the outskirts of Houma, Louisiana

Here is the canal itself:
















A canal running under the bridge. Note the large pipes running down into the water. I assume they are suction and discharge pipes connected to a pumping station just to the right in what I guess you can call a spill-over pond, or even secondary canal, because it runs parallel to the first canal as far as the horizon, as you will see in the second photo after the one of the pumping station directly below:

















What must be a pump station for controlling canal water volume. Note the pollution and heavy surface vegetation that suggests water deterioration, even toxicity.

Looking south at this same "spill" canal, if I can technically call it that, you see that this thick film of aquatic vegetation coats the entire surface, suggesting a stagnant, perhaps even putrid body of eutrophic water. What happens when storms and hurricanes cause this canal to, in turn, exceed its boundaries and flood over the land, soaking into the soil, or even into other bodies of water?

















The pea-green "spill canal" that the pumping station dumps water into

Continuing on back toward New Orleans on Highway 90, we eventually passed by the small city of Raceland, situated on Bayou Laforche in Lafourche Parish, and then a few minutes later saw a pier/souvenir shop complex just off the highway to my right. Curious to see if the shop was open, I pulled into the parking lot, grabbed my camera and hopped out. The business itself was closed so I walked toward the pier where a medium-sized, shallow-draft tour boat was moored, with no one about.















Pierside at Lac des Allemands

When I walked to the water's edge and peered right, I could see the pier wall extending south quite a ways, actually merging into a rather quaint canal adjoining the lake, with houses on both sides, the water level already almost lapping into their yards, creating a sort of mini-Venice between the highway and the lake. And this was likely just as prone to all the flooding problems that beset the good people of Venice, Italy.















A small community living on a canal adjoining the lake

When I turned and looked directly at the lake itself, I could see an extensive body of calm, blue water, with a small island in the foreground, probably once part of the landscape protruding into the lake, and dim tree lines in the far distance, quite a majestic view. After taking a few photos I turned back toward the highway and started to take a few more shots in that direction.

















Looking out over Lac des Allemands

Meet Lee Richoux

At that same moment, a car pulled into the parking lot, drove right past me, and then started to make a large U-turn. I could see there was just the solitary driver inside. On the spur of the moment, I decided to hail him down to ask what the name of this lake was as he approached me again. As he stopped, I walked over to the driver's side as he rolled down his window and started shooting the breeze with him. I didn't try to record the conversation or photograph him, although at some point he realized I was a journalist without my telling him, and at that point I began to take some notes.

His name was Lee Richoux, and he was an elderly albeit sturdy and ruddy-faced, long-time resident of this enchanted part of Southern Louisiana that includes Lafourche, Terrebonne and St Charles Parishes, a one hundred percent Cajun man he related, and he spoke with a pleasant, rich Cajun voice, almost musical, at first simply replying to my query as to the name of the lake right behind me. "Lac des Allemands." (which means "Lake of the Germans" – not only Acadians settled in this area, but Germans too.) This topic gave him an opportunity to soon wax indignant about the long and still ongoing tragedy befalling this lake, which, I had been totally oblivious of until now:

"In the last seven or eight years we have seen great destruction occurring to all life in the lake, the birds, fish and vegetation. Lac des Allemands used to be a great haven for birds."

Now, he explained, the continuous salt-water intrusion coming up through Lake Savador has wrecked havoc on the bird population. "Vast flocks of every imaginable species of duck, French, Northern Pin, Teal", to name a few, as well as an abundance of egrets, he continued, used to hone in on the lake from their flyways from up north as Winter approached. Now they are close to gone, Lee lamented, conscious that the kind of aquatic life and vegetation that they depend on has been depleted by the insidious intrusion of saltwater.

To verify Lee's claims about the lake, I went online later and did some research. I couldn't find an outright salinity report on des Allemands, but unfortunately enough, Lac des Allemands is classified as a "eutrophic freshwater lake system", meaning that is in a later stage of erosion, although this doesn't necessarily mean it is high in salinity. However, there is a heavy nutrient content, with, particularly, more nitrogen and phosphorus than in an oligotrophic lake, which is an earlier, healthier stage in the life cycle of a lake, when there is an abundance of oxygen as well as fish, who depend, of course, on the oxygen.

An oligotrophic lake lacks what is called "high primary productivity", an ecological term that can best be described as the development of a large, blue-green algae population, which will increasingly degrade the water quality. Where there is a large algal bloom, there will be less and less fish and, consequently, less of the birds who feed on fish, such as the heron. Ultimately, a eutrophic lake will develop more and more vegetation with a larger and larger littoral zone (of aquatic plant life), and gradually transform into a marsh. This may be the ultimate fate of Lac des Allemands, which has dense algal blooms for nine to ten months of the year.

The degree of nutrients pollution in the lake is largely a man-made phenomenon. A study by C. A. Stow, R. D. De Laune and W. H. Patrick, Jr. from the Laboratory for Wetland Soils and Sediments, Center tor Wetland Resources, Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, entitled, "Nutrient Fluxes in a Eutrophic Coastal LouisianaFreshwater Lake" reports:

Increased urbanization, industrialization, and modern agricultural practices threaten to alter the balance of Louisiana's vast coastal wetlands. Effective management practices are becoming necessary in order to allow maximum resource usage while preserving the integrity of this wetland ecosystem. There is a need for an understanding of the basic regulatory mechanisms governing water quality in shallow coastal lakes in order to insure proper resource management of these water bodies. Effective management decisions must be based on a good understanding of the chemical, biologic, and geologic processes occurring in such systems. This study reveals factors that regulate nutrient fluxes, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus in Lac des Allemands, a large shallow lake in the Barataria Basin region of southern Louisiana. Barataria Basin lies between Bayou Lafourche and the Mississippi River. Leveeing of these two water courses has eliminated riverine flooding and limited hydrologic input to approximately 150 cm/year of precipitation. Lac des Allemands is a freshwater lake in the upper reaches of Barataria Basin. It has an area of approximately 65 km 2 and a depth ranging from 2 to 3 m. The lake is highly eutrophic with intense algal production from early spring through late autumn. The basin morphometry and fetch of the lake, and low relief of the surrounding area, prevent seasonal stratification. The lake is polymictic. The two main inlets feeding Lac des Allemands are Bayou Chevreuil and Bayou Boeuf. The bayous are sluggish (average velocity = 0.14 m/s) and turbid (average secchi depth = 0.29 m) (Butler 1975) and both empty into the southwest Corner of the lake. (source)

Whether or not increased salinity from Lake Salvador coming up through Bayou des Allemands on into Lac des Allemands is a key factor in the deterioration of the lake and its wildlife habitat, urban and agricultural runoff from New Orleans and other points north certainly is. But not to be completely forlorn, at least the lake still has good catfish.

Lee went on to say that he used to be a local entertainer in places like nearby Raceland, which was certainly reflected in his ease of speech, and he began to shift focus from the lake itself to the larger social and political environment that could allow, not only this one lake, but many lakes and waterways in Louisiana to suffer so much environmental deterioration and destruction. He deplored the culture of greed he now sees prevalent in the land that drives this callousness. He sees the situation both in local government and in Washington as pitiful. "It's the power they want!" he decried, and the money that goes with it that animates the whole American political system, and he described how the system keeps reproducing itself, as newly elected officials and appointees are sucked into its corrupt snares. "They bullshit these poor people", meaning political newcomers. "It's like they throw a spell over them and kidnap them." He could say this because he was speaking from experience.

"I used to be on the inside looking out", Lee recalled, meaning that at one point in time he was involved in local politics, and then life was good, financially. But once he was on the outside looking in, he saw how hard things were, and now they are getting worse.

"It's hard for me to make a living now", Lee quipped, alluding to the chaos on Wall Street and in the banking system, complaining that he can't make any money by investing in a bank, that CDs and saving accounts now pay next to nothing in interest. He doesn't even want to touch the stock market.

And as he looks around him, all Lee sees is growing impoverishment and environmental catastrophe in southern Louisiana. "Things definitely need to change. Our area has been crippled." So he hopes there will be a big change with the elections in November. Those were his last thoughts as he said Adieu and drove off.

I can't help but think that Lac des Allemands is a metaphor for the country right now, as the formerly clear, oxygenated waters of life supporting the teeming American masses have been clouded and degraded by the toxic runoff of financial capital and industrial excess, creating a satiated environment of the wrong kind of nutrients - unbridled power, unbridled concentration of wealth, unbridled pollution - leading to a debauched explosion of noxious weeds, parasite blooms so-to-speak, that are strangling the oxygen out of the land and the population.

*********

After that moment at the lake, I didn't stop again until I reached New Orleans. I was trying to drive back to the Lower Ninth Ward one last time before my flight left, but we got stuck in some heavy traffic backed up around the Superdome for a Saints game. Finally we got through that mess and headed out Claiborne Avenue for the Ward. But we will talk about what transpired there next time.

In the back of my mind I kept thinking of how I had run into, of all things while driving through southern Louisiana today, a remarkable statue of Kwan Yin, as if this was a portent from the Universe:

















Kwan Yin is pouring out her vase of holy dew as she gestures. She is the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, and she stands right off the highway near Houma. Will she bless southern Louisiana and America with her divine love this November (2008)?

Voice of the Wetlands Festival 2008, Part 2: Passion for Music and the Wetlands

I am continuing now with the series of articles I wrote about the threatened Louisiana wetlands and the related annual Voice of the Wetlands Festival, commencing in late October of 2008 for OpEdNews.com.

(To see Part 1 of the Mosquito Blog version, click here.)

Voice of the Wetlands Festival 2008, Part 2: Passion for Music and the Wetlands

By Mac McKinney

(Original Content for Part 2 is here)



















Welcome to Houma, southern Louisiana

What is the Voice of the Wetlands Festival exactly? Well, the details are a little obscure, but the story starts with Tab Benoit, the well-known Cajun Blues singer who won the 2007 Contemporary Blues Male Artist of the Year and B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Awards. He grew up in the middle of Cajun country, Houma, Louisiana to be exact, although he was born in Baton Rouge on November 17, 1967, a passionate Scorpio for the astrologically inclined. He attended venerable old Vandebilt Catholic High, although school must have seemed secondary to his two true loves in life: the guitar and the wetlands. He started taking to both at an early, early age, including rope-swings overhanging the bayous, and has remained committed to both to this day, excelling with the one and struggling ferociously to save the other. And out of this intense emotional cauldron of music, art and deep love for Louisiana's wetlands was born the organization, Voice of the Wetlands.



















Tab Benoit on guitar at the VOW Festival 2008, with Leon Medica on bass, right. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.



















Vandebilt Catholic High on S. Hollywood Road, Houma, Louisiana, where Tab Benoit went to school.

Here are Tab's thoughts on his transformation to a wetlands activist:

Have you ever loved a place so much that you dedicate your life to saving it? You know, I believe that my highest calling is to be a steward of the environment. My first job was as a pilot. From up here the awful truth hits you: these wetlands are disappearing right before our eyes. The wetlands we've lost just since my parents were born is bigger than the whole state of Delaware. You see, coastal erosion in Louisiana picks everybody's pocket. (quoted from Hurricane on the Bayou)

This devastating realization drove Benoit to found, along with other concerned citizens, the Voice of the Wetlands in 2003, a nonprofit group dedicated to spreading the truth about Louisiana's disappearing coastline through, primarily, music. VOW, as they are also known, held their first music festival in 2004, well before Katrina struck, so they were already struggling to raise awareness about the relationship between hurricanes and wetlands loss. In fact, Tab was actually working with director Greg MacGillivray as one of the individuals highlighted on the 2006 IMAX documentary Hurricane on the Bayou, which was to be a critical look at what might happen if a large hurricane hit New Orleans. Just as they were wrapping up the movie, monstrous Katrina did hit New Orleans, life imitating art, compelling them to rewrite and reshoot the film to include Katrina as a living example of what can happen when the wetlands are dramatically reduced in a storm-prone region.

Here are the first paragraphs of Voice of the Wetland's mission statement:

"By redirecting the Mississippi River from it's natural flow, south Louisiana's wetlands are being taken over and destroyed by the stronger current of the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate. The loss of south Louisiana's wetlands contributes to the loss of our unique culture, our heritage, our wildlife, our people and their livelihood."

Voice Of the Wetlands (VOW) is an organization (click here for their website) that is made up strictly of volunteers who dedicate their talent, time and resources to bring global attention to south Louisiana and the world's coastal erosion problem.

Benoit expounds on this more fully in Hurricane on the Bayou:

"Well, basically what went wrong is that in the 1930s, well-meaning engineers (the Army Corps of Engineers) built levees or walls, so-to-speak, along the banks of the Mississippi to protect the farms from yearly floods. Those annual floods deposited the soil that rebuilt the wetlands. Now with those levees, that soil gets flushed into the ocean. All that brown in the ocean (aerial shot of brown-colored stream in the Gulf), soil that could be rebuilding the wetlands the way it used to, before we interfered with Mother Nature.

We also made a mistake by digging canals for boat navigation. These canals brought in saltwater from the ocean, killing the marsh grass and the trees. This whole forest (footage of wetlands forest) is now dead. Without the tree roots, erosion speeds up." (ibid.)

Tab is really referring, without naming names in the movie, to, primarily, the giant oil and gas companies and related industries, Shell, Exxon, Texaco, to name a few of the "land barons" in Louisiana who are responsible, according to the Gulf Restoration Network, for 40% to 60% of the wetlands loss, companies that for decades have been paying scant attention to the havoc they are wrecking on the environment while they pursue the bottom line, much like Great White Sharks swimming around in the ocean mindlessly devouring everything within sight and smell.

In fact, the Voice of the Wetlands itself has been criticized by another, older organization (which now calls itself, in a flash of jealousy rivalry, the "True Voice of the Wetlands") for being too timid in attacking these "sharks", the oil and gas companies, head on. This group is better known as SOWL, Save Our Wetlands, and one thing they are not is shy:

VOICE of the WETLANDS is SAVE OUR WETLANDS

Voice of the Wetlands is Save Our Wetlands and Save Our Wetlands is the true Voice of the Wetlands and the real Voice of the Wetlands. SOWL (http://saveourwetlands.org/) since 1974 has been fighting Louisiana politicians, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Levee Districts, and their corporate masters from developing wetlands into low lying areas extremely susceptible to hurricane tidal surges.

In the 70's-80's SOWL was a Voice of the Wetlands against the Eden Isle and Oak Harbor Subdivisions constructed over 5,200 acres of wetlands on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain, St. Tammany Parish, Slidell, Louisiana. SOWL lost this litigation, and thousands of homeowners were wiped out from the flood waters of Katrina.

SOWL was a Voice of the Wetlands against the Corps' and Orleans Levee District plans for their bogus Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Barrier Project, which under guise of hurricane protection was actually going to destroy 28,000 acres of New Orleans east wetlands into the Orlandia Subdivision. SOWL won this litigation and saved on August 29,2005 over 60,000 future homes and over 100,000 families from flooding as a result of the Corps' disastrous Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MR-GO). The September 28, 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report stated 'if the barriers had been constructed the flooding in New Orleans would have been worst."

SOWL has always been a Voice of the Wetlands against Shell and its greasy allies from walking away from their obligation to remedy the coastal erosion caused by their 10,000 miles of oil company canals and navigational channels. SOWL in 1980's filed suit against Corps for refusing to conduct an Environmental Impact Study under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) before issuing permis for oil canals. SOWL lost this litigation and in 2005, thousands of Louisiana citizens in St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Terrebonne, and Lafourche Parishes were flooded Hurricanes Katrina-Rita as a result of oil canal erosion........

SOWL is a Voice of the Wetlands against Shell's America's Wetlands spearheaded by its chairman R King Milling taking over as chairman of Coastal Protection Restoration Authority (CPRA) of Louisiana, and pushing an oil company propaganda campaign thru the coastal-political bowels of Louisiana. And so it goes. (Reference)

SOWL, we might say, is a get-in-the-trenches, lawsuit-filing, long-time political activist outfit, as distinct from VOW, the newer kid on the block, which prefers to spread its message primarily through education and music and hasn't chosen, as far as I know, to get heavily into the political/legal/lobbying arena. Whether they are going to feel compelled to in the future is another question. Logistically, this may be impossible since Benoit, president of VOW, is on the road performing most of the year, either with his own band or the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars. In fact, being on the road is Tab's way of spreading his message. Everywhere he goes, he asks his audiences to get directly involved in learning about and then saving the wetlands by calling, not just writing, their government representatives. He invites you, me, everyone to come to Louisiana and see what is really going on, and then speak out about it. And just to show you how far Tab's voice has carried, he actually briefed a Congressional committee on Capitol Hill on the plight of the wetlands this past June, hammering home the point that the situation in southern Louisiana is a crisis for America.

Regarding both SOWL's and VOW's efforts, they are both important voices of the wetlands, and both are raising awareness of the devastation taking place in Louisiana and beyond in their own ways.

Solutions Anyone?

What is the solution to the wetlands crisis? Well, this is not rocket science. Tab explains what has to be done rather succinctly in Hurricane on the Bayou:

(Katrina) washed away another 100 square miles of soil. We should have been ready in New Orleans and we should have been ready down here. But we can do better. We already know how.

We'll have to plant hundreds of acres of mangrove and other soil-retaining plants, and some places it will take stone walls, and other spots, rebuilding with sand, sometimes again and again. And most importantly, engineers can use flood gates like this one (aerial shot of flood gate shown) and special pipe-lines and other innovative solutions to allow the muddy Mississippi to once more naturally replenish the wetlands. And as the huge cost of Katrina shows us, good stewardship of the environment is good economics too. (quoted from Hurricane on the Bayou)

There is also other huge problem that must also be addressed: the dramatic loss of barrier islands fronting the Mississippi River delta plain that reduce the effects of wave erosion, salinity intrusion and tidal currents on the wetlands themselves, as well as serving as a first defense in the path of a hurricane. The barrier islands must also be restored.

Just remember something else Tab says in the documentary: "Every three miles of wetlands reduces the height of a hurricane's storm surge by one foot." (ibid.) A couple of feet these days can mean the difference between life and death for thousands of people during a hurricane, so there is no time to waste in rebuilding what has been lost.



















Encroached upon wetlands in Houma, Louisiana. Will America save them or let them be destroyed? CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

The big question now is, will an Obama Admininstration be willing to accept the challenge of restoring the wetlands? Let us hope so. I personally think something on the scale of the great 1930s Tennessee Valley Authority project would be in order to salvage the Gulf states.

Mighty Fine Music

Now let's pick up where I left off in Voice of the Wetlands Festival, Part 1, watching great bands play. On this warm to hot, sometimes cloudy, sometimes sunny Saturday, October 11, the sounds of rock, blues, and Cajun music roared or cajoled through the atmosphere all afternoon and into the night with bands such as Freddy and the Freeloaders:



















Freddy and the Freeloaders, with Fred singing. The band has been around a long time, wowing crowd for decades across America with blues and country music. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

During the intermission after Freddy left the stage, Congressman Charlie Melancon, 3rd District, Louisiana, got up and addressed the crowd. He was one of the few invited politicians who actually showed up, which is not a great omen for government involvement right now, but nonetheless, Charlie had some solid things to say about saving the wetlands. I talked to him briefly later about Ecuador's new Constitution and its Bill of Rights for Nature, which he hadn't heard about but was quite interested in, promising to have his staff look into it.



















Congressman Charlie Melancon addressing the crowd about the wetlands

After Charlie was done, the spectacular Josh Garrett Band hit the stage. Josh was a real guitar magician Saturday, wailing away with his band on some hot and heavy Blues numbers.



















Josh Garrett pouring it on with his guitar. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

After Garrett's intense and sweat-filled performance, the Mike Zito Band from Nederland, Texas, took the stage. Actually Mike was raised in St. Louis, where he was exposed to all those powerful southside Blues influences, but gradually developed his own unique style, eventually settling in Southwest Texas. He has a classic Blues voice.





















Mike Zito on the left, belting out a song. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

Zito was followed by one of the longtime Bluesmen in American music, Jimmy Hall, out of Nashville, Tennessee, originally singing and playing with famous Wet Willie in the 70s, then solo performing for a time, then working with Hank Williams Jr. and Jeff Beck, and now varying his performances and recordings between different groups and his own bands.

The great Blues singer, harmonica player and sax man, Jimmy Hall, with dynamic guitarist Ronnie Fruge to his right. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars

At this point my wife and I left the festival for a couple of hours to have dinner with some friends, and when we came back, the last big gig of the evening was just starting, the traditional Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars set. The Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars was also created in 2003 by Benoit as an artistic vehicle for spreading the word about the Wetlands as they tour, near and far. The illustrious, official members of the band, beyond the many guest performers who play with them, are Big Chief Monk Boudreaux, Waylon Thibodeaux, George Porter, Jr., Johhny Vidacovich, Anders Osborne, Dr. John, Cyrille Neville, Tab Benoit and Jumpin Johhny Sasone. Click here for more info about the All-Stars.

Tonight the famous band, Louisiana's LeRoux, best known for their song, New Orleans Ladies, actually led off the final set, but never really left the stage, instead merging with the players representing the Voice of the Wetlands All-Stars during this festival, who began filtering onto the stage one at a time: Jumpin Johnny Sasone, Tab Benoit, Jimmy Hall and others, and, in a sweepingly grand entrance, Big Chief Monk Boudreaux of the Mardi Gras Indians, dressed in fantastic Indian attire and headdress. Southdown Plantation was rocking madly in the night by the time Big Chief finished his number, and so it went until the end of the set.



















Tab Benoit left, Jimmy Hall center, Leon Medica right. The VOW All-Stars had Southdown Plantation rocking Saturday night. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.



















More of the VOW All-Stars: Hall on sax, Terry Brock (Louisiana's LeRoux) singing. CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO SEE THE ENTIRE PHOTO.

This would be the end of the festival this year for my wife and I, because we were going to have to fly out of New Orleans early Sunday afternoon, and with the festival reopening at Noon, there was no way we could hang around that late. Besides, I had to drive back to the Lower Ninth Ward, but more on that later.

I would also meet, driving back up highway 90, a very interesting Cajun gentleman by the name of Lee Richoux. More on him in Part 3.

By the way, if you would like to look at my photo album of the Voice of the Wetlands Festival, 2008, plus some interesting shots of southern Louisiana, click here to go to my Kodak Gallery webpage. Once there, just click on VIEW SLIDESHOW. You do not have to sign in.

*************

Voice of the Wetlands Festival 2008, Part 1: Mr Bill and the Gulf Restoration Network

I wrote a series of articles about the threatened Louisiana wetlands and the related Voice of the Wetlands Festival commencing in late October of 2008 for OpEdNews.com. Star insisted that I post them here too. I would have done so earlier, but the horrific assault on Gaza preempted doing so for three weeks. But, better late than never, so here is Part One.

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Voice-of-the-Wetlands-by-Mac-McKinney-081021-30.html

October 21, 2008

Voice of the Wetlands Festival 2008, Part 1: Mr Bill and the Gulf Restoration Network

By Mac McKinney

















We are in Houma, Louisiana, Terrebonne Parish

I just travelled to the fifth annual Voice of the Wetlands Festival in Houma, Louisiana on October 10 thru 12, and let me tell you, it was quite an experience. The purpose of this annual festival is two-fold, to put on one Hell of a Southern/Cajun music festival, and to raise awareness of the plight of the wetlands in the five Gulf Coast states, focusing particularly on Louisiana. At a certain point the two goals merge, because music and art, as Tab Benoit points out, speak truth to the heart, and the truth of this festival is that the wetlands must be restored, or we will all pay dearly for their loss as millions of people are slowly displaced and precious resources, landmarks and cultures disappear. We have already experienced the first shocks with Katrina and Rita in 2005, and most recently with Gustav and Ike, and there are many more hurricanes to come. Meanwhile, Nature's own defense against hurricanes, the wetlands, are disappearing at a frightening rate. This trend must be reversed, and rapidly.

Houma itself lies in Terrebonne Parish, which, along with Lafourche Parish, suffered considerable flooding and other storm damage from Hurricane Gustav and Ike back in September, so much so that Tab Benoit, president of Voice of the Wetlands, said that they weren't sure they could even put the festival on until the last minute. Two local levees had actually given way, sending Gulf waters roaring into coastal towns, so it was questionable whether Terrebonne would recover in time to make the festival even feasible.



















Two local levees were breached in southern Louisiana during Hurricane Ike. (A photo sent to me from lower Lafourche Parish during Hurricane Ike, shot by Tab Benoit's manager.)

Flying to New Orleans early on Friday the 10th with my wife, and after returning for several hours to the Lower Ninth Ward as well as other areas of the Big Easy for an update on conditions (which I will write about later), we drove through the backwater side of New Orleans, moving southwest, on down toward Houma. As we reached Terrebonne Parish I began to see large piles of debris that had been gathered up and stacked near houses and businesses situated just off the highways I was driving along, a sober reminder of what had just happened a few weeks earlier. Finally, after a few wrong turns and retracing a few roads, we reached my hotel right after dusk.

After tossing our stuff in our room and then my checking my email on the hotel lobby computer, we headed out for the festival before it got too late. After following the hotel clerk's directions a little too literally and then barging into a family restaurant full of customers and a Cajun band to ask for new ones, I was soon able to find the venerable Southdown Plantation, venue for the Voice of the Wetlands Festival.

















Southdown Plantation

Fortunately, it was still early enough to be able to catch the last few hours of the opening afternoon/evening activities. A band was just ending its set when we walked onto the grounds, so we wandered over to the large, semi-enclosed public section of the plantation estate, where they had set up, among a multitude of other things, a small stage, several rows of chairs, a big white screen and a sound system. Tab Benoit was in the middle of a short speech on the wetlands, and as we settled in, he finished up and introduced the next speaker, who turned out to be, to my surprise and delight, none other than Walter Williams, creator of that famous pop culture icon, Saturday Night Live's Mr. Bill. Walt actually lives in New Orleans, where he has shared all the terrors and blessings of the last several years, and he does far more than create tragic-masochistic Play-Doh icons, for he is a heavy-duty wetlands activist, stand-up comedian, voluminous film producer, screenplay writer and much, much more. Walt, I might add, is also an occasional contributor to OpEdNews.com.

















Tab Benoit and Walter Williams - a slow shutter speed distorted this shot.

Tonight he was lecturing and showing videos about the loss of the wetlands, and what we can do to stop it. And while he was talking, Tab was moving merrily through the audience, handing out one of Walt's latest DVDs, called "Restoring Our Coast – Who Pays". Nice documentary, by the way, with 1) a section on individuals struggling to come to grips with the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans, called "Hard Road Home"; 2) a crack-up humor section where none other than Mr. Bill himself and his faithful dog Spot give us a bevy of public service announcements on and excursions into the wetlands; 3) a lively, very informative section called "New Orleans – the Natural History"; plus 4) a five-minute quick version on saving the wetlands. You, the reader, can actually see all this simply by going to http://www.mrbill.com/. Go ahead and educate yourself, and have some laughs doing so, at the expense of Mr. Bill.









Oh Noo! Mr. Bill

Click here to visit the wetlands with Mr. Bill.

After Walt was through, I wandered over to the food line and bought some fine Cajun cooking, and then crossed the lawn to the well-lit in multi-colors music stage where my wife had already joined the audience. The last set of the night was just starting and the Mike Zito Band was up at bat to start things off. Zito, who has a classic, raspy Blues voice, put on one fine performance. He travelled all the way from Texas, by the way, to do this gig. Meanwhile, the band kept transforming as more and more guitarists kept walking onto the stage, greats like C.C. Adcock, John Lisi, Ronnie Fruge, Joe Stark and Tab Benoit. What the evening was now evolving into was the 5th Annual Guitar Showdown, and what a showdown it was, sending the audience, which was now crowding around the stage, into more and more rapture and abandon as each guitarist tried to one-up the previous one with his own solo, keeping everyone clapping, shouting or dancing right on up until the last note of the evening. Then we went back to the hotel and crashed.

















Guitar Showdown: eight guitar players on stage

The next day, Saturday, we got back to Southdown right after the festival reopened at Noon, and spent a good while shuffling between the music stage and the wetlands education area that encompassed, besides last night's stage, various information tables and displays. (I would digress, occasionally, to the awesome Cajun food lines or the beer stand.) Info tables included a nuts and bolts ecological exhibit run by environmental sciences students from Nicholls State University, a campaign table for Senator Mary Landrieu (politicians from both parties were invited), who has been a strong advocate for wetlands restoration, and of particular interest to me, an info table run by the Gulf Restoration Network (http://healthygulf.org/). I hadn't heard of them before, and was quite impressed with what they're all about. I started talking to one of the representatives, Collin Thomas, about the wetlands, and he sounded authoritative enough that I asked him to do an interview for OpEdNews. Here is what he had to say:

















Collin Thomas, spokesman for the Gulf Restoration Network

Interview with Collin Thomas, Gulf Restoration Network Spokesman

Mac: I'm down here at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival. There are a lot of environmental groups down here, and I ran into one fellow. What's the name of your organization?

Collin: We're the Gulf Restoration Network.

M: And your name, sir?

C: My name is Collin Thomas.

M: Tell me about your network

C: We're a non-profit organization based out of New Orleans. We've been around for about fifteen years now. We work in all five Gulf States and we're made up of diverse groups, community groups, environmental organizations, as well as individual members.

M: What specifically are you doing here today at the Festival?

C: Well today, we're down here - this is our second year here - working with the Voice of the Wetlands and we're focusing on our Natural Defenses Campaign, which is partly public education to raise awareness about losing a football field worth of wetlands every 45 minutes due to coastal erosion and what we can do to mitigate this impact, which also involves putting pressure on congressional and state legislatures to make coastal restoration a priority issue.

M: How much is the loss of the wetlands a man-made problem?

C: Well, a lot of it is attributed to men. Some of the actions of the Army Corps of Engineers, with the diversion of the Mississippi from its original floodplain, the (indiscernible) river diversions, and they have a couple of (indiscernible) projects going on right now, so we need it (wetlands awareness) on a large scale, especially down here in the Terrebonne Parish area.

M: By the way, how badly was Terrebonne (Parish) hit by Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Gustav?

C: Well, from what I've heard from the Voice of the Wetlands website, Gustav pretty much came right up their alley and did a lot of flooding, and even Ike, even though it just passed by down there, did a tremendous amount of flooding from just the rains and there's a lot of wind damage. And wetlands are tremendously important in mitigating these attacks, because for every three to four miles they have, it scoops up to an entire foot of storm surge.

M: I heard Tab Benoit say last night that there was a ten foot surge, and that's happened in the past, but never with the consequences with Ike.

C: Perhaps, I'm not actually sure about what he said - my first day here - but I'm sure, he lives in the area and he's familiar with the issues.

M: OK, I also heard that several levees gave way, not Federal levees, but local levees.

C: That very well could be the case. I haven't heard anything about that specifically, but I know there was damage caused by the storm.

M: What part do the oil companies play in this problem?

C: Well, right now there's a lot of canals they're not using, that they use for exploration and for piping resources that they've already taken and that they leave open, and that allows the saltwater to intrude into those wetlands and kill a lot of the marsh flora that exist there.

M: Once the saltwater gets into the marshes and bayous, it's an all-downhill sort of thing?

C: Pretty much. There's a short period of time where you can mitigate the impact, but it's very, very limited and also, when they dredge these canals, they have what they call "spill banks" which are the leftover sediment that they try to make sort of temporary levees. What happens is when these storm surges come in, they're funneled and channeled into these canals. They spill over, and then they get into the wetlands that are behind these spill banks and that causes further erosion. Our estimates for the oil and gas companies (responsibility) would be about 40 to 60% of the wetlands losses suffered since the 1960s or so.

M: Wow. Are you working with universities?

C: Absolutely! I'm actually the campus organizer for the Gulf Restoration Network, and what we do, on campuses is that we go and present the different information to classes, be it from sociology to biology to chemistry, pretty much anyone who would be interested in the scientific or the advocacy area of our work, and then we have internships available where they assist on donor campaigns, campaign organizing, community outreach, research and a number of other things on a wide range of issues.

M: How does global warming relate to the local problems?

C: Well locally you know, first of all, you have the rise in sea level which, with a lot of Southern Louisiana at sea level or below sea level, naturally plays a part in saltwater intrusion as well as magnifying the intensity of hurricanes, the frequency of large hurricanes, as well as how far a storm surge can go because it's kind of that vicious cycle where the salt water is intruding, it's killing wetlands more rapidly, also the sea level rise which is allowing more water to be readily available to be pushed inland from storm surge.

M: You had said something earlier about asking the governors in the area to get involved in confronting global warming.

C: Yes, that's one of our campaign issues right now. Our global climate change staffer, Casey DeMoss Roberts, is putting together a (proposal), focusing now on getting Governor Jindal to bring up, in the Gulf of Mexico Alliance, which is made up of all the Gulf state governors, to make global climate change a priority issue for the region, because right now it's not and we think that's a mistake, because we are already starting to see the impacts of climate change, and we have to prepare for those ones that we're fairly certain are going to occur, as well as to begin mitigating our impact, our contributions to global climate change.

M: Are you in contact with any of the countries in the Caribbean? Are any of the countries in the Caribbean trying to do anything like you're trying to advise?

C: Not that I'm aware of right now. We're focused mainly on the United States, but there are Caribbean countries as well as Latin American countries that share the Gulf of Mexico.

M: Well, that's a lot of good information right now, so thank you for that.

C: Well thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to get this information out there.

If you want to learn more about the Gulf Restoration Network, or even get involved with them as a volunteer or intern, or become a member or donate a few bucks, go to http://healthygulf.org/.

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While we're on the subject, I want to go into a little more detail about how saltwater intrusion affects the wetlands, because I don't think that is understood very well by the average citizen, so I am inserting this paragraph from a website called Mission 2010 New Orleans, for your information: click here for the actual website.

Salt water intrusion

Written by Sara Barnowski and Leigh Casadaban

Salt water intrusion is a major cause of wetland loss and is increased by canal systems. Currently, there are 10 major navigation canals and countless smaller ones winding intricately through the wetlands of southeast Louisiana. These canals are used for transportation for oil companies that drill in the wetlands, and for the agricultural areas in the region. However, they connect the inland, freshwater wetlands with the Gulf of Mexico. This increases the salinity of the freshwater areas causing vegetation deterioration and land loss. Also, because of the flow of traffic through the canals and the instability of the surrounding soil, the wetlands are very easily eroded. Consequently, the brackish water penetrates even further into the wetlands. This increase in salinity is toxic to many of the plant species that grow there. Much of the time the community cannot handle the sudden increase in salinity, and the plants die. The fewer plants there are in the wetlands the more unstable the soil is because the plants' root systems hold much of the substrate together. The loose soil is then more easily eroded, which connects the vicious circle of erosion and plant loss.

To return now to my narrative, after I interviewed Collin, I put my pen and small recorder in my pocket, grabbed a beer and headed back to the music across the grass. Southern Cross was up and their lead singer, Nicki Rhodes, was really cooking and the audience was lovin' it. More about today's bands in Part 2.

















Southern Cross on stage

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