Episode 5: Boyce Upholt on the Plan to Rebuild Louisiana’s Coastal Marshes

For decades, Louisiana has been losing coastal marshes in areas around the mouth of the Mississippi River. The biggest causes for the loss of land are the levees built along the Mississippi and the hundreds of canals cut through the marshes for oil and gas exploration. Hurricane Katrina helped renew the determination to not only stop this loss but find ways to restore the Mississippi River’s ability to build land again. Journalist Boyce Upholt wrote about one of the plans to rebuild land in a recent article. In this episode of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast, I talk with Boyce about those plans, why not everyone is on board, and who will pay for the project. We end with a short discussion about ways to value this land that goes beyond dollars and cents..

The Controversial Plan to Unleash the Mississippi by Boyce Upholt

Follow Boyce Upholt:

• http://www.boyceupholt.com/
• https://southlands.substack.com/
• Re: Wild podcast

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Boyce Upholt (00:00):

So it’s kinda just a labyrinth of waterways when you get out into those marshes. So it’s just really, it’s hard to get out there. If you don’t have a boat, there’s really no way to do it. There aren’t a whole lot of roads out there, but for those that get a chance to get out there, it’s an incredibly beautiful place.

Dean Klinkenberg (00:30):

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river, and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.

Dean Klinkenberg (01:00):

Welcome to episode five of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. In this episode, I talked with Boyce Upholt, a topnotch journalist and excellent writer who goes deep into the subjects he writes about and is meticulous about getting the stories details, right. He recently wrote about a plan to reverse the tide of land loss in an area where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, which is the topic we focus on in this episode. Louisiana has lost over 3,000 square miles of coastal lands in the last few decades. We talk about how that happened, what we’ve lost, a plan to restore some of that lost coastal land, and why the plan isn’t being embraced by everyone in the area. At the end, we talked a little bit about ways we might start valuing the land that goes beyond just the dollars and cents it yields for some of us. I’d like to give a quick shout out to new Patreon supporter, Al Wilson. Thanks Al! Now on the interview.

Dean Klinkenberg (02:05):

Boyce Upholt is a writer and nature critic based in New Orleans. His journalism has appeared in among other publications, National geographic, the Atlantic, Smithsonian, and Oxford American. His story, The New Republic, about how a troubling new farm chemical sparked conflicts in Arkansas and what that means for the future of agriculture won a 2019 James Beard Award. He’s currently working on a book about the Mississippi River for WW Norton. In a recent article, he took a deep dive into the ambitious and challenging plan to reverse to the loss of coastal land around the Mississippi Delta. The article ran in Hakai Magazine. I hope I’m saying that name right. Welcome to the podcast, Boyce.

Boyce Upholt (02:46):

Thank you. It’s great to be here. It is actually pronounced Hack-eye, which is, I had been pronouncing it wrong for a long time. And then I saw in, in the Twitter, their Twitter feed that it was Hack-eye. And I’ve tried to remember that now.

Dean Klinkenberg (02:57):

Excellent. See, that’s the problem. When you see words, when you only see the words and you don’t hear them, you’re never quite sure how to pronounce them. Well today, you know, I really wanted to have a chance to chat with you a little bit about your article about coastal land loss. That was an excellent piece, a nice in depth article, and it also reran in Wired magazine. So there are a couple different places people can read it. I’ll post a link to that in the show notes. Why don’t we just start with a little bit of background. Tell us a little bit about what the problem is, what coastal land loss really is. How did we get here?

Boyce Upholt (03:32):

Yeah. And it’s actually, there is some contention even within that, I mean, what coastal land loss is, is pretty straightforward. There’s all this marshland down in Louisiana that was all made by the Mississippi River and it’s been disappearing for, for decades, really, although it was only, I mean, 50, 60 years now, we’ve kind of had that confirmed, but it, it goes back even decades before that. The rates have gone up and down,. There’s various causes, right? As sea levels rise with climate change, it’s gonna get even worse. There’s issues about, if you cut a canal through the marshes that might bring salt water into ecosystems that can’t really tolerate salt water, and so the plants die off. And then that means the soil is no longer held in place. But the big thing, and the reason why this is a story about the Mississippi River is what a lot of people blame is the construction of the levees along the Mississippi, which I’m sure your listeners have some experience with.

Boyce Upholt (04:36):

And in particular, the problem down here in Louisiana, where I live, is once you get kind of south of Old River in, down on the Louisiana/Mississippi border, you are into what’s called the Delta and there, the Mississippi used to have all these distributaries where sort of essentially the river will start forking apart and following various paths to the sea and each of those paths would carry some water would carry some mud that would replenish the marshes down here. And throughout the 19th and 20th century, a lot of those distributaries were closed for reasons of flood control. Then the levees also keep water from flowing over the banks and depositing more mud, and so we have this situation now where the Mississippi and its mud just kind of goes straight down all the way through, never splits off and actually the current, sub Delta, the Plaquemine sub Delta, reaches almost nearly to the edge of the continental shelf. And so it’s like once the mud is coming out of the mouth of the Mississippi, now it kind of just tumbles off into this deep abyss and it’s not able to, to collect it all. And so that is potentially a major cause we can talk more, I mean, there’s some scientists that say that’s not actually the big deal here, but that is the cause that has gotten the most attention and that most scientists do put a lot of blame on.

Dean Klinkenberg (05:55):

So part of that too, as I understand it is, and I’ve seen kind of conflicting studies on this, but the Mississippi, the lower Mississippi does not carry as much sediment as it used to because of the giant dams we built on the Missouri River. But it seems like even in the, some of the studies seem to suggest that the lower Mississippi probably still carries enough sediment, that it could build land if it was allowed to. Did you come across those kinds of studies? What do you think of that?

Boyce Upholt (06:24):

I did. Yeah. I, and I, this was a piece, it, it wound up being very well read, which I was happy with. And I got lots of reader emails for this one. And one of the emails I got was someone was like, why didn’t you talk about the dams? And obviously you, like, if you look, I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but the amount of sediment load in the Missouri River is just fractions of what it was, less than 10%, I think, of it’s historical amount. So that’s a huge difference. I’m pretty confident that, I mean, like in a crazy world where we could do anything, I I’d be interested to see what happened if we pulled out all the dams on the Missouri. It would, it could do a lot of interesting things. But I think where we’re at now, I feel pretty confident that there’s still enough mud in that river to, to build land in part because of the Atchafalaya River.

Boyce Upholt (07:07):

So that’s the one, I talked about these distributaries, the only distributary essentially that’s not closed now is the Atchafalaya River, which comes out at Old River, which I mentioned before, is sort of the beginning, the northern most point in the Delta. And actually just last week, I think that the Corp of Engineers released a study they’ve been working on for years. Nobody has known quite how much mud goes down the Atchafalaya. So like by law, roughly on average, 30% of the water goes down the Atchafalaya, but nobody was sure if it brought 30% of the mud or, or what was going on there. And I think they’ve just now said the, their best estimate is about 13% of the Mississippi River’s mud is making it through this system of engineering, into the Atchafalaya River. And yet at the mouth of the Atchafalaya, you’re seeing land building there.

Boyce Upholt (07:52):

So even, it’s like with all this diminishment, even without this, the Missouri’s heavy load that it used to have, and then even with just 13% coming down that river [the Atchafalaya] that is still enough mud to, to build land. So that really shows how muddy this river system is. And yeah, there are other places down in the Delta where there have been sort of like small cuts because, oystermen have cut little canals and things like that. We’ve seen that there is enough mud in there too, to build land, at least in some occasions or some circumstances.

Dean Klinkenberg (08:22):

Yeah. Great. So the, the mouth of the Atchafalaya is not the only area, but it’s the only significant area where there’s new land being built by the river’s mouth. Correct?

Boyce Upholt (08:36):

Yeah. I mean, some scientists would contest that. I mean, there’s a new, there was a new cut down in Plaquemines Parish, so in the last couple dozen miles of the Mississippi, that we’re only starting to look at, see now what it’s doing, but, but there does appear to be some land building there. But for a long time, the Atchafalaya has been sort of the example held up of where there has been land building and the way that rivers can, this river system in particular can still do.

Dean Klinkenberg (09:02):

So tell us a little bit about what this land is like. You mentioned marshy. Can you describe a little bit what the, what that meeting of the Gulf and the Mississippi, what that area is like?

Boyce Upholt (09:15):

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to, and I’ve come to think of it, the Delta, as essentially consisting of, I break it into kind of two typologies here. Right? So you’ve got, what I talk about sometimes pretty often is like fingers. So like the river itself, as it’s coming down and building out its path, it’s dropping the various heaviest mud right along its banks. And then you, so you get these like long, natural levees. They’re very similar levees, but they’re laid down by the river itself, two long strips of land, right along where the river’s flowing. And that is New Orleans, where I’m sitting right now is built on one of these natural levees. It’s, it’s the highest ground in the Delta. And so that’s the, the basic.

Boyce Upholt (09:55):

At the beginning of the Delta are these fingers, different paths reaching out into the Gulf of Mexico, but that percentage wise is a pretty small amount of land, whatever you want to consider land down here. Most of the sort of like ecosystem, the landscape is not these ridges, but between these ridges there’s marsh, sometimes swamps, some places where there is, you know, the level of land is a little bit lower than the top of these river-built ridges. It’s mud that is sort of, kind of flowing over those natural levees and getting laid down. In some places the mud got stacked high enough by those processes to actually break above the, the level of the ocean. And a lot of other places, it hasn’t, but it was nearly close enough that maybe certain species could come in and take root. And then those species would, you know, live and die over generations and they would sort of form new soils themselves.

Boyce Upholt (10:46):

And so it’s high, high, organic soil contents in some places. There’s what, what is called flotant, which I believe is a French word from the sound of it, which is, there’s sort of whole portions of marsh grass that are essentially floating on the water because they’re just like growing out of compacted marsh from before that. So it’s, you know, my travels on the Mississippi River have mostly spanned St. Louis down to the Gulf of Mexico, but I find like, when you really get down into these marsh grasses, it’s, it’s one of my favorite portions of the river. It’s, I mean, it’s not a super diverse ecosystem. It’s, a lot of these marshes are just one species of marsh grass going for acres and acres, but it’s just this like vibrant electric green, you get all these birds flying in and out of them and you get these winding bayous through the marsh grasses. So it’s kind of this Labyrinth of waterways when you get out into those marshes. So it’s just really, it’s hard to get out there if you don’t have a boat, there’s really no way to do it. There aren’t a whole lot of roads out there, but for the people, for those that get a chance to get out there, it’s an incredibly beautiful place.

Dean Klinkenberg (11:49):

Yeah. It helps have a boat. I remember a few years back, I was on a, a canoe trip with John Ruskey and the Quapaw Canoe Company, and we took a little side trip where we got out of the canoe and walked around one of those grassy areas. And I had no idea what to expect, you know? I kind of thought this was kind of floating grass and I’m, am I gonna step through and end up, you know, knee deep or hip deep in water? But it was fairly firm to walk on in the area where we were. Right? So I, I know there are different kinds of marsh grasses. Some of the areas we passed I think was Roseau cane, but it’s, it is like, it is kind of this massive grass in a lot of places with that thick organic mud kind of cementing everything together.

Boyce Upholt (12:31):

Right.

Dean Klinkenberg (12:31):

Kind of like a, a prairie in a way, it feels a little bit like a prairie landscape to me at times.

Boyce Upholt (12:38):

Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s another form of grassland, right? Prairies, right. It’s different, different species, very different soils. The soils down here are gonna be much wetter and saltier in the case of a salt marsh, but it essentially is, the conditions, the prairie, produce these grasslands. And to me, grasslands, part of the beauty in them is like photographs don’t do it. You kinda have to be there because part of the beauty is the scale. We’re just like, oh my gosh, just for as far as I can see and in every direction, it’s just this endless ocean of non ocean, in a weird way.

Dean Klinkenberg (13:09):

So, right. Plus I think it kind of creates a, a feeling of vulnerability. You’re kind of, you’re out there completely exposed with nothing to hide behind. And yep. I think that’s a feeling we should probably all have more often to remind ourselves of our absolutely vulnerable natures. But, so then that’s also an area then where there’s a mix of salt water and fresh water, kind of brackish, I guess. Can you tell me a little bit about what lives in the waters around there? What kind of wildlife would be living in that, in those marsh areas?

Boyce Upholt (13:37):

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, so you, you’re absolutely right, that there’s this mix of brackish fresh and salt water and in particular, I mean, so the Delta, in some ways you can think about it, it’s almost triangular shape as the name implies and the further north you are, further away from the Gulf of Mexico, you’re going to have fresh water. You’ll have like fresh water cypress swaps. The Atchafalaya basin is the largest freshwater swamp, river swamp left in the United States. That’s part of the Delta. But then as you get closer and closer to the ocean itself, you’re gonna get more, the salt from the ocean is gonna be more and more capable of kind of like filtering its way up into these bayous and these different labyrinthine waterways. And so there’s this gradient as you go south, or as you get closer to the ocean, it’s gonna get saltier and saltier.

Boyce Upholt (14:21):

And that has everything to do with what lives there. There are a lot of species that their lifecycle requires them at certain stages to be in like low salt, brackish water, and at other stages to get down out into much saltier water. And so in particular, blue crab and shrimp both need to cycle through that. sort of whole flow, and that has shaped the human history of the Delta hugely because those have been, become species that Indigenous people would catch and eat. And then after settlers came in, the industry of the, the first industry in the marsh at least, was often catching shrimp and fish and it’s precarious today, but it still continues.

Dean Klinkenberg (15:02):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So how has the loss of those marsh lands affected the wildlife that lives in those areas?

Boyce Upholt (15:13):

That’s a good question. I mean, it’s like hard. That was a something I was trying, for a while I’ve been trying to sort of pin down and it is, it’s not an easy question to answer, right? I mean, some species can pick up and move. And so, like our, if you look at a certain 10 square acres of marshland that used to be, it’s something that used to be marsh and is not marsh now, it’s going to be very different right there. Maybe used to be shrimp in there. And if it’s just open water, the shrimp aren’t gonna come in in the same way. The big question to me is are those shrimp gone or are they just somewhere else? I think what has been most compelling–I don’t have hard numbers on this–but there’s some ornithologists that have been looking at bird migrations, right. And that’s a very complicated process.

Boyce Upholt (15:57):

There are, right, these birds go so many different places. There are so many things that could threaten them, but over the decades out, as we’ve seen the sharp decline in the marshes, we’ve also seen huge shifts in the number of birds that are coming up through the Mississippi flyway. Right? There, one of the comparisons I found powerful was someone looking at sort of Audubon, back in Audubon’s day, I think someone went out and could shoot, I think, hundreds of birds within an hour. And now that, that same bird I think, was a plover, you’ll be lucky if you see maybe a dozen plovers in a whole day of sitting out there observing. And so it’s, again, it’s hard to say, is it the loss of, of the marshland that does that? But these species that are flying for hours and hours across, across the Gulf of Mexico, kind of finding this space that is filled with these foods like shrimp and crabs, that there is a little bit of stability for them to land in that, is a really vital habitat for migrating birds. So that is one of the places where it seems like the loss of these lands is gonna have much wider ecosystem effects.

Dean Klinkenberg (16:54):

Mm-hmm <affirmative> so it sounds like maybe part of what people suspect is that there, that the loss of that land might be contributing to a decline in the number of those birds, or we just do we think those birds are migrating along different routes?

Boyce Upholt (17:10):

Yeah, that, that would be the other variable. I mean, I would, I think certainly some people would hypothesize the loss of, of this marsh in particular is hurting birds. I mean, certainly the loss of wetlands broadly, right? This is, Louisiana is this weird place where it’s, it’s so famous for wetland loss, and yet it’s has much more wetlands left than many other places. And so I think that’s impacting birds broadly, but, you know, the Delta in Louisiana remains this huge expanse of, really important expanse of this kind of habitat that’s disappearing everywhere. And that’s partly why people are so concerned, like it just, clearly birds that need this landscape are threatened because it’s disappearing everywhere for various reasons. And the fact that we’re now losing Louisiana as well is, is a big problem.

Dean Klinkenberg (17:54):

Mm-hmm <affirmative> Well, so take us through what the plan is to try to reverse this. It’s a, yeah, it’s not a modest plan.

Boyce Upholt (18:02):

<laugh> Not a modest plan. No. I mean the big, it it’s back in the early 1970s, the first kind of report that made big waves in the scientific community, kind of confirming that this was a problem. It, in that very first report, there was this idea of like, well, we know this Delta was built by the Mississippi River. If we want the Delta to come back, like more Delta to be built, maybe we have to let the Mississippi River do what it used to do. And so for 50 years there’s been talk of how can we, right? We’ve built these levees, closing the river in, we closed off these distributaries. What can it look like to, to kind of cut this back open and let the river flow back out into the Gulf of Mexico in more places. And so the state of Louisiana, since after Katrina really damaged New Orleans, that this proposal started to, to kind of be looked at more seriously and money started coming behind it. In a sort of ironic twist, the BP oil spill brought more money to these projects.

Boyce Upholt (19:03):

And so the CPRA, the Coastal Protection and Restoration Agency–I hope I have that right; I always get it mixed up–is the state agency that is in charge of sort of both protecting places like New Orleans from flooding, but also restoring these disappearing ecosystems. And they’ve talked about making as many as 10 of what they call sediment diversions. So these kind of cuts through the levees that would be carefully engineered to carry water and mud back out into the Gulf of Mexico. The one that will be built, I mean, there are some very small ones that have been built already, but the largest that is, has been proposed will also be the first one that is likely be built. And so that will be built in a parish in Louisiana called Plaquemines Parish. It will carry water into what’s called Barataria Bay, which is just east of the river in Plaquemines Parish.

Boyce Upholt (19:50):

Sorry. No. Just west of the river in Plaquemines Parish. And so it will carry this huge volume of water and mud back into this bay where there has been a ton, a ton of land loss. And it is an active project, right? The Army Corps of Engineers right now is sort of looking over the proposal. They’ve already released an environmental impact study and it’s sort of any day now should be–I think it’s this fall–they’re gonna be making a decision about yes or no, but signs lean towards that they will approve this and then construction can begin, sort of unleashing the Mississippi River once more, at least in this one place in Plaquemines Parish.

Dean Klinkenberg (20:25):

Well, now not everybody is an enthusiastic supporter of this, idea. Can, can you talk a little bit about some of the folks who are against it and what the reasons are that they don’t like this idea?

Boyce Upholt (20:36):

Yeah, it’s been very controversial. I will, let me say first, I mean, like there has been a huge amount of enthusiasm. A lot of scientists are very enthusiastic. A lot of people concerned about restoration of habitat have been very enthusiastic on the flip side, people in Plaquemines Parish, the place where it is going to be built have been very opposed to it. That is driven, the biggest driver of that is the seafood industry, which is again the big historical industry in the Delta. What’s happening is shrimpers–it’s just a super tough industry in a lot of ways. It’s changed over the past 50 years. Essentially the cost that a shrimper will get for shrimp has not gone up as fuel rises, the cost of fuel rises, so people are getting pinched more and more.

Boyce Upholt (21:20):

And so in some ways, land loss has been good in various ways. I, I don’t think anyone would articulate it. No shrimper would say like, oh, we’re glad land loss has happened. But, sort of the fracturing of the marsh means there’s more edge and more edge can sometimes lead to more populations of things like shrimps. And as the marsh is retreating inland, shrimpers often don’t have to go as far to get shrimp. And so the concern that a lot of shrimpers have is like, well, if you’re gonna put all this fresh water right back into this bay where we’ve been catching shrimp, it’s just gonna push the shrimp even farther out. We’re gonna have to, you know, they’re already kind of pushed the limit financially trying to get the shrimp now. Like we can’t, they can’t afford the gas to go even further out.

Boyce Upholt (22:02):

And so they’re kind of saying, this will be the end of this multi decades, deeply traditional industry in this place. And so they’re deeply opposed to it. On top of that, there’s sort of a lot of other concerns that get layered on top. So, dolphins will definitely be impacted in Barataria Bay. It looks like, the modeling that that’s been done is like, they will almost certainly not be able to survive this fresh water. So some individual dolphins would likely be sort of like hit by so much fresh water that they could become sick or even be killed by it. Potentially maybe some of these dolphins would just be able to kind of shift and move habitat. As I said, that’s one of the open questions in these sorts of things, but there’s enough concern about dolphins that that’s, that’s raised another bit of controversy. And then beyond that, because the Delta itself is, there’s a lot of, it’s a just very multiethnic community, you have, black fishing communities, you have Cajun fishing communities, you have a couple of Indigenous communities that are still left. And so that just complicates the entire project. It, a lot of the negative impacts of this project may come back to sort of these historically disadvantaged communities. And that has brought a lot of attention to this as well.

Dean Klinkenberg (23:11):

Mm-hmm <affirmative> Well, plus it’s also layered on the, like the historic urban, rural divide, let’s say trust breaches that go back to major floods and the 1927 flood is the classic case. You mentioned that in the article where yeah, they blew a hole in the levee in Plaquemines Parish to save New Orleans essentially. And there’s a lot of debate about whether or not they even really needed to do that at that time, whether it was necessary. And there were lots of promises made for a financial support to help the community recover that were never, they never followed through on. They didn’t respect their promises. And even though this was 90 years ago, right? People have a, a long memory.

Boyce Upholt (23:55):

People have, yeah. People like to, stories get passed down and traditions get passed on in this place. Yeah. That, that’s a big piece of it. And I think that even people that aren’t, you know, people who live in Plaquemines who aren’t fishermen, I think that sort of history drives it further. And then it, it’s not just that history… If you drive down, so that, in 1927, they actually blew the levee in St. Bernard Parish, just above Plaquemines Parish. After Katrina, when they built a flood wall to protect New Orleans, it wound up being built, I believe, right on the Plaquemines Parish/St. Bernard Parish line. And so there’s literally this wall that you drive through as you drive south on the east bank of the river, where you’re like, okay, now I’m out of, sort of out of the system of protection so that if a hurricane comes in, if something bad happens, you feel like you’re, you’re very much on the edge of the earth. And so people are very aware of this sense of like this landscape broadly, the marsh in particular has not always been valued by the US government, by settler people. And then Plaquemines Parish in particular has been mistreated in multiple ways is, is the way it’s often seen.

Dean Klinkenberg (25:01):

Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So you mentioned the, part of the concern is maybe this, the disproportionate impacts on Indigenous communities or African Americans in the area. Are, can you, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like, what are the ways that… is it because they’re shrimpers and they might lose access to shrimping, or are there other angles to this or aspects to this?

Boyce Upholt (25:28):

Uh, I mean, it’s, it’s largely that particularly… I’m trying to Google this now. I believe it’s, the name of the town is Phoenix. So there’s one, at least one, I think multiple towns in Plaquemines Parish that are largely African American and that have a long tradition of fishing. So part of it is, so the, the history of the marshland, as I said, settlers came in, wanted to build farms, cities like New Orleans. Those went on these higher ridges, these fingers reaching through that kind of left the marshes, not empty, but more, like it became a space that was because the wealthiest people were less interested in it, became a space where people that otherwise didn’t have opportunities could sort of find ways to make a living. And so that turned the Delta into this very ethnic place.

Boyce Upholt (26:18):

You’ve got Filipino fishermen. You’ve got Vietnamese fishermen. You’ve got Black fishermen. You’ve got Cajun French fishermen. And so some of that is, yeah, just this history of how this place came to be. And, and those people staying rooted in these communities that mean a lot to them now. In terms of Indigenous populations in particular, I don’t necessarily get the sense that the Indigenous people I’ve spoken to are opposed to the diversion per se, but more that they feel kind of left out of the conversation. So in particular, in Plaquemines Parish, there’s Grand Bayou Village, which–let me make sure I’m getting–the tribe name, correct. They are Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha. And so there’s, it’s this community in Plaquemines Parish that, it’s just a, basically a row of houses on a bayou, but it’s completely disconnected from the mainland now, kind of surrounded by the marsh that has sort of sustained ties to this place for hundreds, potentially thousands of years.

Boyce Upholt (27:18):

And this is a group of people that is not seeking federal recognition from the government, which has been really hard to come by in Louisiana because of the particular history here. So it’s, it’s just this place that for many years, just kind of forgotten and overlooked by the authorities. And these are people that had developed deep kinships with this ecosystem and this landscape and they just, nobody really bothered to ask them as these plans started rolling out like–what would you like to see done? And so it’s not always opposition to the diversions, but it’s also just like, there are a lot of other things that we can and should be doing here. There’s a lot of talk about one of the, one of the controversial things is the oil and gas pipelines that have been kind of like stitched throughout these marshes for companies to come in and extract oil.

Boyce Upholt (28:05):

The way those have contributed quite a bit to land loss, according to some scientists–maybe the primary cause of land loss–but there hasn’t been much. So one, one action you could take is fill those canals back in. It might not kind of restore land, but it certainly will help land from continuing to disappear. And that’s an action that the state has mostly avoided doing. And some of the Indigenous people I’ve spoken to have said, let’s do that. And then in the absence of government action have been seeking other avenues to make sure that that can happen, that sacred sites that mean a lot to people, that have meant deeply important things to people for thousands of years, that those places can be protected by filling back in the, these canals that threaten them.

Dean Klinkenberg (28:47):

Mm-hmm <affirmative> That makes a lot of sense. I’ve certainly seen probably a lot of the same studies you have that suggest those canals for oil and gas exploration that were cut through the marshlands, may be the single greatest contributor to the loss of marshland. So what do you, what’s the, budget for this project? How much money are we spending or is gonna get spent on this diversion plan? Who’s paying for it? And well, let’s do that first. Overall, what are the cost estimates for this and where is that money coming from?

Boyce Upholt (29:23):

The price I mentioned in the piece is 2 billion dollars and that made, I don’t remember quite where, where I saw that, but that made it by the fact checker, so I can feel confident that that is pretty close to accurate. So yeah, $2 billion is, I mean, depends on how you figure it, from certain points of view, it’s like this small drop in the federal budget. From another point of view, it’s a lot of things you could do with 2 billion dollars. But it, yeah, so it’s a big, big pricey thing. And it’s been described as the largest ecosystem restoration project in the US. I don’t know if that’s by budget or just by scale of acreage looking to be restored.

Dean Klinkenberg (30:00):

And that 2 billion, is that just for that one diversion into Barataria Bay?

Boyce Upholt (30:05):

That is just for that one diversion. Yes. So the whole, the CPRA coastal master plan, again, I don’t have the most up to date numbers. I believe it’s 50 billion just for sort of the stuff they’ve laid out so far, which is the first of kind of multiple desired iterations. So the overall effort to save the coast, which is there’s a lot of other projects that we’re not talking about here, there’s sort of mud is being shipped out or piped out to, to be restored in places. There are coastal islands that are being restored. There’s a lot of different things that are part of that project, but the full project is 50 billion dollars or more.

Dean Klinkenberg (30:44):

And is that all expected to be federal dollars then, or… I don’t suppose the oil and gas companies are contributing any money to this pool?

Boyce Upholt (30:53):

They are actually, not necessarily willingly, but they there’s sort of been laws set up that… and they make a lot of sense. There’s, there’s a certain justice to that. If oil and gas has contributed this problem, some of the revenues from oil and gas, I think from federal oil and gas income–I’m not sure, I should fact check that–but I believe that it’s federal revenues then get rediverted toward these, these projects. I mean, most of the money so far, that $2 billion for this diversion, the mid-Barataria sediment diversion, I believe is coming from the BP oil payout. There was just a study this past week, though, that was kind of looking at, BP money has been the primary driver of coastal restoration for a decade and a half, or I guess a decade since that oil spill. That money is going to run out before too long, I think within the next 10 to 12 years. And it is not clear yet kind of how we will go about paying for the scale of the projects we’ll need to save this coastline.

Dean Klinkenberg (31:56):

You sort of hinted at this before, but I just wanna make sure I’m, I’m getting this right. I think in, was it 1990, Congress passed a, passed a plan for some coastal restoration efforts, right? So what the reason we’re doing, we’re going much bigger now is essentially because of Katrina and because suddenly some folks think there is value for that extra marshland in protecting New Orleans in particular from big storms?

Boyce Upholt (32:31):

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that the, that act was a big win at the time, right? So I, again, I don’t have precise figures, but it was really the first time that the federal government took seriously this problem and started funding some of these projects. But it, there was just never, I think it was in the, maybe the tens of millions of dollars a year, that when you’re talking about a project, that’s $2 billion, tens of millions of dollars, isn’t gonna get you there, right? And so I do… like in this piece in particular, the way I’ve come to think about the diversions is Katrina was this major impetus that built urgency around these projects. And to me, that’s, I mean, neither good, nor bad. In many ways, I think these projects are urgent, but to me, one of the interesting facts about it is the reason why I see that as building urgency is, is that it was a rare moment when what an ecosystem needed was the same thing that some fairly wealthy land owning people needed and that they saw: oh, crap, these marshes have been disappearing.

Boyce Upholt (33:35):

And part of the science here is the marshes. You know, we’ve got storm surge, we’ve got hurricanes, the marshes can absorb both of those things. It can kind of like stop a storm surge that’s driven by a hurricane from rolling inland. It can also kind of just like suck up some of the kinetic energy of the storm as the storm is passing over the marshes. It’s just getting, like slowed down and slowed down so that once the storm gets to a place like New Orleans, the presence of the marshes can help really weaken that. And so the devastation that happened after Katrina, there’s a lot of things that caused it right? As a failure of the, the hurricane protection system in the city as well. But as people were like, well, we don’t wanna see this happen again, we have a lot of money invested in this town, all of a sudden, the marshlands that for so long had been seen as at best sort of a place where we should just dredge some canals and drive some pump jacks so we can get oil out of it. All of a sudden it became something that had value to people. And so, yeah, that was a big impetus. That, that’s where the CPRA emerged, as the state said, we need to do something about this. And then ironically, again, it was the, the BP oil spill that actually put this injection of money into things, which is not something I raise in the piece, but that has its own irony of, without that industry, it’s not clear where the money comes from.

Dean Klinkenberg (34:48):

Right. So we we’ve lost, I forget the number off the top of my head, but, you know, two or 3000 square miles of coastal marshes, essentially something in that range.

Boyce Upholt (35:00):

I believe that’s right. Yeah. In the, Hakai is a Canadian magazine, so I had to put everything in, in metric, but it’s 5,000 square kilometers is the number I had.

Dean Klinkenberg (35:08):

Right. So that’s about roughly 3200. Yeah. And, and I forgot where I was going with that question. h, I know where it was. So this particular project, is really one, one way of trying to reverse the loss of coastal land, but there are all… it’s a much bigger problem beyond this one spot in the Delta, right? Can you, I don’t know how much you got into this, but can, can you talk a little bit about what some of the alternative ideas are that are out there for trying to deal with the loss of coastal lands?

Boyce Upholt (35:46):

Yeah. I, I didn’t go into any of them in depth, in the same depth. So I will not be able to speak about them in the same depth now, but, I mean, I know the thing that a lot of people in Plaquemines Parish talk a lot about is this sort of shipping of mud out of like, let’s essentially mechanically recreate marsh by, we’re always dredging the Mississippi River, right, so that the towboats can go through. And the concept there is like, well, rather than just kind of like dropping that in the channel and having it be carried out down into this abyss off the continental shelf, let’s take that mud that we’ve dredged and carry it out so that we can like put it back into the marshes. What a lot of people will say is like, that’s just an incredibly expensive process, and it’s not a process that… The beauty of the diversion is that you sort of don’t need fuel or anything, it’s like letting the river do all of that work itself.

Boyce Upholt (36:38):

That really to me, is the, the biggest proposal I’ve seen. I mean, I know you and I have talked about some other studies of like, do people, should people be down here? The reality is there’s, there’s a lot of retreat underway because of climate change. It’s not, at this point, it’s not a thing that any politician would ever openly propose of like, oh, we just think people should leave Plaquemines Parish, because that would bring a lot of fire and fury. But, there are places, a place in the marsh, Isle de Jean Charles is another indigenous community that is on the other side of Barataria Bay, and it basically, there was an effort there that this community decided they did want to retreat and move somewhere else, and it just became a very messy process. That’s something else I’ve written about, the process of, of sort of like a, an unrecognized Indigenous community that, that doesn’t have official federal status, trying to work with the state, became mired in a lot of complexities of, of who should get to decide what, and a lot of people came away from that being very unhappy.

Boyce Upholt (37:46):

So, yeah, there’s not, I don’t know. There’s not a whole lot of other things that I see. Um, I mean the status quo right now is we’re gonna keep losing land. We’re gonna keep making whatever projects we can. Communities after they get blasted by hurricanes, some people will come back and some people won’t, and we’re just gonna kind of slowly see a trickle of population out of this place is, is the unfortunate reality. If, if we don’t find something that works.

Dean Klinkenberg (38:11):

Right. Basically sort of like a slow attrition, right? Yeah. And I don’t know if this came up at all in any of the, with any of the people you talked with, I’ve always been curious whether this particular proposal ever was discussed down in the, in the New Orleans area or along the coast there. I think it was six years ago now. I’ll send you the link later if you haven’t seen this study before, but a group of researchers from Washington University here in St. Louis essentially proposed giving up on half of the, the Delta below, around like Pointe a la Hache. That just kinda giving up on trying to build anything below that point and letting that land disappear, not putting any effort into continuing to rebuild there and using that new area around that spot to build a new bird’s foot Delta and to put efforts into diversions around there. Anybody you talked to familiar with that idea, or discussing it at all?

Boyce Upholt (39:12):

I Googled it as you’re talking and this, it confirmed my suspicion. About six years ago, there was sort of a competition that was held. And I don’t remember exactly who hosted that competition, but there was sort of this, a number of teams were invited to kind of build proposals of like, what could it look like to have a future for the Delta that allows us to keep a navigation system here, and that reckons with this, these changes. And so, I became a little bit more familiar with a rival proposal that would be in part, because it was proposed by scientists down here that I know a little bit better. It’s not, this isn’t, it’s not something I got as deeply into in this piece in part, because it feels a little academic to me, which I, it, I guess is, I don’t mean it to be dismissive, but I, I find a lot of legislative and academic proposals that are out in the world. As a journalist I try and stay aware of them, but, but so often they’re so far from coming to reality. And so like, it, it, this felt like an important intellectual exercise, but the things that came out of this competition, none of them felt particularly close to implementation. But that said, I mean, some of the things that, that I have seen proposed in that competition may for other reasons, come to pass. That this I, I mentioned before a second place where land is being built, that is in Plaquemines Parish, a number of people now within the past year kind of saying like there’s an avulsion happening, right? So, your listeners may be familiar with the, the worries that, that the Mississippi could head down the Atchafalaya, that would be what’s called avulsion of, this shifting of, of the river’s path. Right now some people are saying actually an evulsion is happening right now, as we speak, not as, you know, 300 miles upstream in, in the Atchafalaya, but just like a couple dozen miles up from the current mouth, there is this new opening that, that is getting bigger and bigger and building more and more land. And that kind of tr matches some of the proposals that we were in this competition. So, it may come about less because of the academics who are like, let’s think about this and more just cuz nature does it that way.

Dean Klinkenberg (41:21):

So is that new avulsion, is that at Mardi Gras Pass or is that a different area?

Boyce Upholt (41:26):

It’s, it’s near there. I like, I haven’t dug as deeply into it. It’s called Neptune Pass is, is one way that I think the Corps has been referencing that. There’s a guide down here named Richie Blink, who, who I’ve been out with, who wants to call it Avulsion Pass because it’s an avulsion. It is in that same strip. I mean, Mardi Gras Pass is in, or your listeners that don’t know about it’s called Marty Gras Pass, because back in, I think it’s 2013, over Mardi Gras weekend, sort of a flood tore a hole through the banks. There’s a strip in the river, in Plaquemines Parish where even before the 1927 flood, they had decided to take down the levees to see if that would kind of relieve flood pressures on New Orleans. And so that means in this place, there’s a more natural riverbank. It’s overtopped frequently, whenever the floods come through and that’s where Mardi Gras Pass happened. It’s in that same stretch downstream of there where this new avulsion seems to be, seems to where the river’s shifting more and more of its path. And I believe now it’s sort of like 30% of the water in that stretch is now heading out this alternate route.

Dean Klinkenberg (42:27):

Wow.

Boyce Upholt (42:31):

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say one of the interesting things about it is it’s already becoming a question of what to do with that. So the Army Corps is worried that all of that water going that way will cause shoaling that will be a problem for some of the, the big freighters that are coming through. And so they want to build sort of an underwater rock dike to keep it from growing any bigger. And then a lot of these scientists that are looking for ways to build land are saying like, well, we don’t want to stop, right? Like this is a place that it is building land. And so how can we, what can we do in this new pass so that it doesn’t mess up our current navigation regime, but allows us to, to allow the river to build the land as we’ve been wanting it to do. So it’s, it’s another one of these sort of trade off scenarios.

Dean Klinkenberg (43:15):

Right. And isn’t it, one of the sort of unfortunate realities with this, that if there’s a conflict between maintaining the navigation channel and building land, isn’t the navigation channel gonna get higher priority?

Boyce Upholt (43:30):

Yeah, I think most like, like that is a federal priority. There are a lot of, there’s just a very robust set of legal protections in place for that. I think the hope here is that, they can build sort of this underwater dike and they don’t need to seal this pass necessarily, but maybe with some like very refined engineering, they can control the flow a little bit so that it won’t cause shoals elsewhere, but mud can continue to exit down that pass. But, we’ll see if that kind of complex level of engineering works out.

Dean Klinkenberg (44:01):

Right. There’s so many things to balance with all this. Uh, and uh, there are different people pushing different agendas and uh, it’s a complicated mess.

Boyce Upholt (44:12):

It is. Yeah. Well that’s, that’s what the Mississippi River is, right? A complicated mess. We’ve done a lot to it. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s a lot of hard decisions we face now.

Dean Klinkenberg (44:20):

Right. That could have been, you know, a book title, “A complicated mess.” So we’re kinda winding down on time here, but I, I want to ask one last question. A lot of the, it seems like a lot of the drive for this particular effort now and scaling up the coastal restoration efforts came down to concerns about the economic impacts of the loss of those coastal lands. But those areas mean more than just, you know, things that we can measure in terms of, you know, dollars and cents. So do you have a few thoughts on other ways that we might think about valuing that land beyond just what they provide in terms of direct economic benefits?

Boyce Upholt (45:00):

Yeah, I mean the thing, right… So I’ve been researching this, this book about sort of what the engineering up and down the Mississippi River for a few years now. And the thing that I did not expect when I launched that process was that I would get kind of so obsessed with Indigenous history and pre-history, and particularly Indigenous earthworks, which are places like Cahokia, but, there are a number of mounds like that down here in, in Louisiana. And that sounds like, maybe sounds like a strange answer to the question you asked. But to me, there is this spiritual tradition that has existed along the Mississippi River for thousands and thousands of years, which I’ve come to see as something that has developed in reaction to understanding a river that is a complicated mess, of people that, that have lived here and decided they wanted to stay here, but to stay here, you had to find a way to reckon with these issues of floods and landscapes changing and things like that, that, you know, the way we Americans have chosen doesn’t seem to be working.

Boyce Upholt (46:00):

And, and it, the fact that people survived here for thousands of years, to me shows that they, they found a different way of engaging with the river. And in particular, there’s sort of this, this kinship relationship with, with non-human beings of… So I quote an Indigenous woman in the piece, a leader of this Grand Bayou Village who talks about kind of everything being connected and, and you can’t isolate any one thing and, and measure its value alone because just to do so you just can’t take things out of this circle of life in that way. And yeah, I was just criticizing people for doing academic studies into sort of how might we change the Delta. And, and I think it, I could also be criticized, like it will take quite a bit for some of these values to, to be spread widely enough for those to be embedded in our, the way we approach river engineering.

Boyce Upholt (46:47):

But, I don’t know. As someone, I, I think of myself as, as a settler, I’m descended from people who arrived from elsewhere and, and kind of came into this land. And, I have lately made it a project a little bit, of trying to learn the, the wisdom of people that have been here much longer. And so to me, I’m, I’m very interested in and sort of yeah, how we thread together the world that we built with this Indigenous world that has been here so much longer and persists and that we still need to learn from.

Dean Klinkenberg (47:17):

Excellent. Yeah. I think we, we’re on the same page with a lot of that, so, yeah. Thanks for articulating that for me. So where can people reach you or keep up with your work? What are the best places to follow you?

Boyce Upholt (47:33):

That is a good question. I mean, my website is my name, BoyceUpholt.com. That will at least be a good hub for people. I mean, like I’m fairly active on Twitter and have a number of other projects that are a little bit less Mississippi related, but recently started my own podcast that is kind of conversations about kind of what I was just saying about rethinking our relationship with nature, implicitly, if not always explicitly. It’s bringing in some of these Indigenous ideas, so that’s called the Re: Wild podcast. You can find that on my website and then I’ve just launched a newsletter called Southlands, which is kind of a guide to nature down here in the south where I live, which I think a lot of people, people think of the west as being the place where America is wild, but there’s a lot to discover down here. And so I’m trying to, to highlight some of those places. So, if you head to my website that you’ll, you’ll be able to, to get to any of those other things.

Dean Klinkenberg (48:24):

Well, thank you so much for the conversation today. This was fantastic. I hope you enjoyed it as well.

Boyce Upholt (48:29):

Thanks so much, Dean. It’s an honor to be here. It’s a pleasure.

Dean Klinkenberg (48:34):

If you’re enjoying the show, share that love with other people. Leave a review on iTunes or your preferred podcast app. Each review makes a difference and helps other fans of the Mississippi River and the Midwest find this show.

Dean Klinkenberg (48:57):

And now it’s time for the Mississippi Minute. Today we’re going to go in a slightly different direction. I have an announcement to make. I’m very excited to let you know that I have a new book coming out. The official release date is September 1, but it is currently available for preorder through all the usual outlets. The book is called Mississippi River Mayhem: Disasters, Tragedy, and Murder on Ol’ Man River, and it is published by Globe Pequot Press. It’s a little bit of a different kind of book for me. It certainly has a heavy dose of history since, it focuses on historical events, but for this book, I also really made an effort to try to tell the stories of these events, these tragedies, through the words of people who experience them as much as possible. So in this book, you’re gonna find chapters on disasters and tragedies like the New Madrid earthquakes back in 1811 and 1812, tornadoes that devastated river towns, floods beginning with the flood of 1844, which we don’t really hear very much about, steamboat wrecks.

Dean Klinkenberg (50:08):

And I divided these into three broad categories. So you’ll, there are separate chapters on snags, fires, and boiler explosions. And then there’s gonna be some chapters on specific steamboat disasters, like the wreck of the Sultana, the Monmouth, and the Sea Wing. And if that’s not enough for you, there’ll be, there’s a chapter on brothels and prostitution in river towns, on prohibition and bootlegging, disease outbreaks like cholera and malaria, the Milford Mine disaster in northern Minnesota, the I-35 bridge collapse up in Minneapolis and the drownings of college students, of college-aged men in La Crosse, Wisconsin. As I said, this book is currently available for pre-order, so you can go and check it out now. And I’m going to cover some of these tragedies in more detail down the road in future podcast episodes. Thanks for listening.

Dean Klinkenberg (51:06):

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app, so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you help keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast is written and produced by me. Dean Klinkenberg. Original music by Noah Fence. See you next time.