"We Can't Not Try"

“We Can’t Not Try”

A Closer Look at Marsh Creation

Story by Catherine Schoeffler Comeaux • Photos by Sean Gasser

Sean Gasser

For millennia, the Mississippi River Delta region has been a place shaped by floods. Receding waters leave behind land-forming sediment in some areas while natural erosion carries it away in others—resulting in a cyclic, shape-shifting coast that, for a time, maintained its fertile acreage. Then came human ingenuity, which altered the Mississippi River to provide navigation, irrigation, commerce, energy, and a variety of solutions to diverse needs. One of the unintended consequences of these alterations, though, is the region’s deprivation of sediment which, compounded by erosion and subsidence, has resulted in the drastic loss of South Louisiana’s wetlands.

“We have a complex issue,” said Windell Curole, general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District as he spoke to a small group of us on a recent tour of the various restoration projects Ducks Unlimited Inc. (DU) has overseen in Golden Meadow in recent years. “We have one of the great deltas of the world and every great delta has two things: great opportunity and great risk. The challenge is to use the opportunity to minimize the risk.”

Curole has harnessed the opportunities of the coast, spending his childhood catching fish in the canals to help feed his family and shrimping in the Gulf to pay for college at Nicholls State University, where he earned a degree in biology.

He also is all too aware of the risk of living in a place so shaped by the waters around it. Destructive hurricanes, flooding, and disappearing land successively pushed Curole’s ancestors northward over the past century, from the coast at Cheniere Caminada to where he now lives in Lafourche Parish about thirty-five miles from the open waters of the Gulf. “We’ve retreated, the Gulf has followed us,” he said.

Today, Curole brings his years of experience as an extension services fisheries agent for the Louisiana State University AgCenter to his work at the levee district where, for over forty years, he has had a hand in maintaining the levee system that protects the communities it encircles from the threat of flooding. He was considered a hero when the levees withstood a direct hit from Hurricane Ida in August 2021.

The Golden Meadow Marsh Creation and Nourishment Project has built upon Curole’s work, strengthening the levee system’s line of defense against the increasing threat of hurricanes and rising sea levels. Ducks Unlimited launched the project in 2019, in partnership with ConocoPhillips/Louisiana Land and Exploration Company, the Lafourche Parish Government, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Shell, and TransRe. A hydraulic dredge was used to pump sediment from nearby Catfish Lake through a temporary pipeline system into a series of shallow ponds that were at one time marshland. When active work was completed in 2020, this project—an elaborate nudging of nature’s inclination to use sediment to build land—had already restored and nourished 140 acres of marshland adjacent to the South Lafourche Levee System.

Windell Curole overlooking the newly restored areas of marshland that had been steadily disappearing in his lifetime.

Sean Gasser

The project is one of several restoration projects DU has overseen on the Gulf Coast as part of its mission to conserve waterfowl habitat in North America; so far, the organization has played a role in conserving over 497,000 acres of habitat in Louisiana alone. Mike Carloss, DU Director of Conservation Programs for the Southwest, joined us on the tour, noting, “The Golden Meadow marsh restoration project is a strategic use of limited funds with critical partners and landowners doing their best work to benefit the ecosystem, fisheries, water quality, and other ecosystem services, as well as the communities—not only the livelihoods of the people but by helping to protect them from storm impacts such as flooding.”

Our small group, including Curole and other project partners, drove the levee southward to see the effects of DU’s work in the region. In the areas outside the scope of the project, we saw broken marsh interspersed with open water all the way to the horizon, where a blue sky met the muted yellows and bright greens of the marsh grasses.

Leslie Suazo, DU’s Coastal Restoration Coordinator, pointed out the duck wing-shaped terraces created by DU and other partners: twenty-five acres of the V-shaped and linear terraces created with carefully placed dredged material. I was surprised at how well they were integrated into the existing landscape. Measuring approximately one thousand feet long, forty feet wide at the base, and about ten feet wide at the top—each terrace was planted with native oyster grass. Nature quickly filled in with other marsh vegetation like wire grass and leafy three-square—all which help to hold the terraces in place as they buffer existing marshland and the toe of the levee against the wave action that continuously erodes both.

Carloss pointed out the groundsel bush growing along several of the terraces. He noted that this small bush provides cover and habitat for various birds while adding to the structure of the newly restored land. Groundsel, referred to as manglier in some areas of South Louisiana, is used in Native American, Creole, and Cajun culture to make a bitter tea known to cure fevers, chills and congestion. (Note: The word manglier comes from the French word for the black mangrove—a totally different plant which grows sparsely in the southernmost areas of the Louisiana coast. To further complicate this matter of plant nomenclature, in Carloss’s hometown of Abbeville, the word manglier refers to the wax myrtle. If you are confused, be sure to get your manglier tea from a reputable source and don’t try to make it at home.)

The vegetated terraces calm the water so that subaquatic plants can take hold and thrive—providing habitat and nourishment for aquatic and avian species alike. Several of the terraces in the Golden Meadow project were designed to include 3D-printed blocks comprised of biologically-enhanced concrete, which is made with a locally-developed mixture specifically engineered to attract oysters. The strategically-placed, irregularly-shaped blocks, created by Tyler Ortego of Ora Estuaries, form a structure that invites oysters to take hold, adding to the diversity of life that keeps the marshland in place.

Broken marsh interspersed with newly-created marsh as a result of restoration projects taking place in Golden Meadow.

Sean Gasser

“Can we walk on it?” Sean Gasser, the photographer, asked as we came to the point on the levee overlooking the 140 acres of continuous marshland.

Curole responded with confidence, “Yes, you can. It’s amazing how quick the change. That marsh was out there, and I could see it in my lifetime eroding away, and in a couple of years—boom, it’s back! It’s amazing how well it comes back. You put some dirt above the waterline, and it germinates.”

I hadn’t worn my knee boots, so I stepped out on faith, following Gasser into the chest-high grasses. Feeling the dense, spongy give underfoot I recalled trudging through the marshes with my father as a child, looking for a whitetailed deer, the land seeming to move beneath my feet. The mud released the smell of new grasses comingled with rotting humus—a somewhat sweet, subtle stink promising new life— “boue pourri,” Curole called it: the South Louisiana French term for “rotten mud”.

Crouching in the grasses on the edge of the newly-restored marshland, we heard red-winged blackbirds and watched a small gulp of cormorants perched in a low tree. At our feet, we noticed mussel shells embedded deep in the root structure of the leafy threesquare—they were everywhere, some dried and cracked open to reveal their violet-tinged insides. The gulf ribbed mussels are an important part of the marsh ecosystem, as they filter water and help to hold the land in place by providing structure with their shells and byssal threads. Seeing them throughout the newly-restored marsh bolstered my confidence in nature’s ability to take back its rightful hold on the land.

Continuing our tour, Curole noticed the remnants of a chenier, a beach ridge populated with oaks, rising out of the high ground in the marsh. Knowing the importance of treed ridges in the community’s line of defense against hurricanes, Curole mused, “I’d like to see a chenier out there again.”

This comment caught the attention of John Harrington, ConocoPhillips Wetlands Director, who started a conversation about the potential for establishing new cheniers. Harrington participates in ongoing communications with the South Lafourche Levee District and DU regarding the projects supported by ConocoPhillips. He said, “By engaging in organic conversations with project collaborators, we can avoid random acts of restoration, ensuring there’s purpose and resiliency in what we do.”

Gulf ribbed mussel thriving in roots of marsh vegetation.

Sean Gasser

Throughout the morning’s discussions, I heard the oft-repeated statistics of coastal land loss (like the football field disappearing into the Gulf every hour) and perused maps showing the boot of our state in need of a re-soling. Looking out over the broken marsh itself, I asked the question, “Is rebuilding the coast even possible?”

“We have a complex issue, without a simple solution,” Curole reminded me, “For the future of our coastal communities, you’re either going to do something to protect yourself from flooding or you will disappear—that’s it. You have to actively want to have your community to continue to exist, if not, they won’t be here. And we’ve lost communities before, this is not new. We can’t not try.”

Buster Avera, a retired oil field worker who spends at least one hundred days of his year fishing the waters of South Louisiana, depends on people like Curole and the folks of DU to try, he said, “I think it’s a little late coming, but we need more of these types of projects to protect what we have left.”

Witnessing the collaboration between the people who see coastal restoration not only as a possibility but who are actively making it possible, I am grateful that human ingenuity has the power to correct mistakes of the past, the will to try, and the humility to keep learning— relying on feedback from nature gained by continual vigilance and scientific research.

In an article for the Lafourche Chamber’s publication Insights, Curole wrote, “As we work to maintain our communities, it is always important to question everyone and everything. Precise understanding of our problems and their evolution, along with the solution to these problems, is critical. After questioning everyone else, it is more important to question ourselves and our work. What was right today, may not be right tomorrow. We must employ the best information available to give ourselves a chance for success in a changing environment.”

We end our tour with lunch at Griffin’s Seafood, a local eatery in Golden Meadow. Curole passes around a video he has on his phone. “Did you see the shrimp they’re catching on the beach at Grand Isle? Some were getting thirty pounds in one throw of the cast net!” he exclaimed “That’s why we live here—it’s the most productive area there is. This place throws food at you!”

Yes, it does, and the fried shrimp po-boy was great.

Learn more about Ducks Unlimited Inc.’s conservation efforts in Louisiana and nationwide at ducks.org/ wetland-conservation.

Learn more about various restoration projects along the South Lafourche Levee District at slld.org/projects.html.