The Louisiana Stormwater Coalition

Saving the Soul of Sportsman’s Paradise

The Louisiana Stormwater Coalition Uncomplicates Litter Solutions

Kathryn Kearney

If Louisiana leads the continental United States in anything, it’s rainfall. Our semi-aquatic environment is central to our culture—affecting everything from our cuisine to our jobs to our recreation. But, with such impressive levels of rain come problems, too.

“Because we’re number one in rainfall, we’re number one in polluting the watershed,” explained Marie Constantin, founder of Louisiana Stormwater Coalition, an all-volunteer organization formed last year to increase awareness on the benefits of stormwater management. “Every couple of weeks, a big rain comes, and everything that’s on the streets gets carried to a storm drain. The storm drains are freeway onramp systems to a lake, river, bayou, or stream. So, that’s how the litter gets there, but it’s easy to intercept it.”

Constantin, a photographer by trade, has always had a soft spot for nature. “I’ve always loved the outdoors. When I was a student, I was a worker for two research projects,” she explained. “I went to the California desert and studied the Blunt-Nosed Leopard Lizard. Then, when I was at LSU, I assisted in studying the four regenerative methods of Loblolly Pine and their impact on the forest environment. I almost went into wildlife management, but then I picked journalism.”

After years of witnessing the toll litter was taking on the wildlife in Capitol Lake in Baton Rouge, last year Constantin founded the coalition to aid the quickly deteriorating area. In the short fifteen months since its founding, the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition has removed an astounding 1,192 bags of litter from the lake.

Courtesy of the Louisiana Stormwater Coalition

“Litter is actually very complicated. To make it simple, think of the streets as the lipstick and the pearls, and then the watershed as the soul. The lipstick and the pearls can be ugly—the litter isn’t going to kill us. We’re not eating it, but we are going to lose business because of it,” said Constantin. “And then you have the soul. The fish that we’re eating have pollutants in them, and we have very little ecotourism in our sportsman’s paradise because it’s horrible looking. Animals are dying a death by litter. But, other states have stormwater treatment programs that Constantin has spent the last several years researching multiple communities in Florida with longstanding stormwater treatment plans in place, which she hopes to use as models for Baton Rouge and other Louisiana communities. Their tactic: consider stormwater a utility, and charge a few bucks a month— generating millions a year—to treat stormwater with equipment ranging from simple booms to sophisticated hydrodynamic separators.

“There are solutions—these are not complicated,” explained Constantin. “We are not reinventing the wheel. The sportsman's paradise is positioning itself to heal. It’ll take seven years for the land to heal itself, but there’s a model. Everything we’ve done has not worked. And so, if we keep doing the same thing, that’s insanity. This is a pivot. We know this can work. These stormwater treatment programs will reduce flooding, allow our sportsman's paradise to heal, and bring us ecotourism.”

louisianastormwater.com.