Disparaître – Disappearing
By Skip Clement with a Bill Rodman film
As a redfish fishery and winged game host, Louisiana has no equal in the U. S.
Louisiana’s world-famous marshes and bountiful fishery will be gone in about 50 years. That’s not maybe. It’s already well on the way of performing a spiraling death rattle – losing land at a measured rate of 1,300 acres a year. That’s 58,500 acres since I first hunted and fished there in 1973.
Why is the land disappearing at such an alarming rate?
Louisiana’s coast is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico because we started managing the Mississippi River via levees in the 1800s. That began starving the marshes of naturally deposited sediments – the builder of organic materials that fed the ecosystem and made it a bountiful continuum.
Also, oil and gas exploration and the canals that enterprise has built has added measurably to the decline of the Louisiana marsh Lands.
Watch this Bill Rodman film and weep.
Featured Image credit – fly fishing guide Alec Griffin with a Louisiana redfish. A commons image.