Restoration

By CASEY COLLIER
For eight years, there has been a concerted effort on behalf of several federal, state and local agencies, using the technique of vegetative planting, to combat the St. Mary Parish Conservation District’s coastline erosion, and this year was no exception.
Tuesday morning, 32 volunteers, students and specialists met at Burns Point Recreation Area to plant 2,853 California Bulrush seedlings in the bay.
According to Andrea Dumesnil of the office of St. Mary Parish Soil and Water Conservation, eight agencies were in attendance. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, St. Mary Parish Soil and Water Conservation, St. Mary Sheriff‘s Department, Franklin Fire Department, Enlink Midstream, Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, Gulf Coast Association of Soil and Conservation and St. Mary Parish 4-H all participated in apportioning the bulrush plants to their new homes at the bay of Burns Point.
GCASC District Vegetative Technician Andrea Gorum said of the choice of plant species, “I needed a plant that would tolerate varying water depths and salinity. Since this is a bay, the wave energy is a big factor. The plant must establish relatively quickly or the waves will out-compete it. This plant was chosen because it grows in predominately fresh water but will tolerate short increases in saline water. It will also grow in deeper water than most other plants, up to 36 inches.”
In total, five boats of people were at work planting in the bay on Tuesday, and 4,265 linear feet of shoreline were covered with swaths of bulrush, which will be monitored by the GCASC once in 30 days, and again next year, for success rates.
Yet, simply stating it as “erosion of the Gulf Coast,” is not a fair assessment of the totality of the problem of Gulf Coastline recession. It is the turning back of hundreds of years of manipulation caused by commercialization—that is the endeavor at hand.
At least, that is the view of coastal restoration project volunteer Donovan Garcia, a view which, according to the Natural Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicines, is of fair merit.
In a study published in 1990 called, Managing Coastal Erosion, the NASEM cited as “human-induced changes” to coastlines to include “construction or modification of inlets for navigational purposes, construction of breakwaters built in nearshore regions, construction of dams on rivers with steep gradients, sand mining from riverbeds in the near coastal area and extraction of ground fluids resulting in subsidence (the sinking of land relative to the coastal water level).”
“This land is washing away and we don’t have the sediment coming in to rebuild this land anymore,” Garcia said. “We’ve impacted the land so much. When we moved all our coastal reefs, dug them up and moved them to build roads, we didn’t know what it was going to do. Oil and gas has impacted us. Digging canals has impacted us. Cutting the cypress trees down and cutting right-of-ways through the woods, all of this was impactful, and we didn’t know it at the time. We’ve been doing it for a couple of hundred years, and we’re trying to turn it around in a short period of time.”
The fact is that worldwide, coastal erosion is a natural phenomenon. Coasts are affected by tidal fluctuations, weather, and tectonic composition everywhere there is a coastline. Though it is unclear to what extent, the effects of man on those coastlines, necessarily compounds erosion rates of beaches, shores and coasts.
In a 2008 symposium presented by Rice Research Station, LSU AgCenter and the NRCS, it was reported that Louisiana coastal marsh loss “occurs at the estimated rates of 65-91 km2 annually, representing 80 percent of the entire coastal wetland loss in the United States,” and those rates of loss are likely to have increased, since then.
Regarding man’s effect on the Louisiana coast, Steven Carmichael’s Coastal Restoration and Conservation in Louisiana (Past, Present, and Future) does not offer quantifiable evidence, (as little to none exists) but it does say, “Man’s intervention, including efforts to maintain navigable channels, infrastructure protection from flood and storms, and gas exploration have undoubtedly impacted the dynamic natural processes that exist related to the building, natural subsidence, and erosion of the deltaic lands.”
The effects of civilization and commerce on the Louisiana coastline have for decades been recognized as detrimental. Federal, state and local governments have been hard at work during that time to combat the long-term impact of coastal erosion. In 1990, Congress passed the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act (CWPPRA), which Carmichael says, “is expected over the next 50 plus years to infuse needed financial resources into restoration projects.”
Signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, the CWPPRA “is designed to identify, prepare, and fund construction of coastal wetlands restoration projects,” according to the CWPPRA website: lacoast.gov/new/About/.Default.aspx.
According to CWPPRA’s website, the reasons for protecting the coastal wetlands of Louisiana range from their acting as a buffer from storms and hurricanes, to their holding excess rains during periods of high rainfall, as well as that of their vegetation acting as a filter to purify water. All of which, provides a habitat, migratory and breeding grounds, and nurseries for thousands of species of wildlife, including the bald eagle, our national symbol.
Without the Louisiana’s coastal lands, the state would forfeit an estimated 55,000 jobs, as well as billions of dollars in state revenues, not to mention the value of coastal lands as resources for recreation and ecotourism.
As for the bulrush planted Tuesday, and its utility as a hurricane buffer, Gorum said, “One mile of marsh grass decreases one foot of storm surge during a hurricane.”
So, as far as short term benefits, that ratio is quantitative enough to singularly bear-out the importance of the restoration efforts in the bay. However, of long term solutions to coastal erosion, it can be said that there is much more work to be done in understanding and mitigating the negative impacts Louisianans have made on our own coastline.
Donovan Garcia’s take on the process is, “Everybody knows we have a lot to lose, and the landscape is changing quite rapidly. Anything we can do to help, may seem like a drop in a bucket, but to me, it’s worth a try.”