On an early spring afternoon, our small-engine seaplane banks sharply as it traces the southeastern Louisiana shoreline. My stomach lurches against gravity’s strain as I focus on the coast below us: from our media tour that morning, I can see pools of the Gulf of Mexico’s brackish waters blotting the green and brown marshland, where the colors of the Mississippi River’s eastern bank swirl together like fresh paint drying on an artist’s canvas. Across Louisiana’s shores, the toll of coastal erosion is evident; since the 1930s, some 2,000 square miles of the state’s shoreline have crumbled into the sea. As I take it in, I notice where the river’s levees border the Bohemia Spillway and, adjacent to it, “Mardi Gras Pass.”
Researchers first observed Mardi Gras Pass in 2011. Aided by the Mississippi River’s herculean push, one of the river’s channels began carving through landscape in its path. Then, on Mardi Gras in February 2012, the channel breached, creating a new river distributary—a branch of the river veering from its cross-continental course. Immediately, Mardi Gras Pass revived the transportation of sediment into withered marshlands. Within two years of the breach, a 2017 Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation report found that the distributary had restored marshland;1 in fact, the distributary had succeeded in recreating it. The shifts brought on by Mardi Gras Pass mirrored nature’s method of sediment delivery that had, over thousands of years, gradually formed the “boot” shape seen at the bottom of South Louisiana maps today.2
But more than the landscape was breached that day.
For researchers, observation of Mardi Gras Pass provided breakthroughs in combating Louisiana’s land-loss crisis. In particular, they honed in on the ability of natural processes to rebuild wetlands; projects planned by the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) intended to mimic the natural unfolding of Mardi Gras Pass through human-made diversions. The result of their planning is the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, which nonprofits like the National Wildlife Federation describe as the largest ecosystem restoration project in US history.3 About a mile from Mardi Gras Pass, the $3 billion plan calls for carving a hole in a levee near Plaquemines Parish’s rural and Indigenous communities; there, about thirty-five miles south of New Orleans, artificial diversions will theoretically accelerate the rebuilding of wetlands, which buffer coastal storm surge risks, like those experienced in 2005 during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The CPRA estimates that the diversion will direct 75,000 cubic feet of Mississippi River water and mud per second, which will build roughly twenty-one square miles of new Barataria Basin land by 2075. Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, a fifty-year, $50 billion coastal restoration agenda funded by state lawmakers every five years, will afford the diversion project’s costs.
Meanwhile, for the region’s locals, it was a signal of a potential unmaking of communities and their resources, including local Indigenous people’s foodways and heritage economies, like the locally passed-down tradition of working in commercial fishing. Residents’ concerns mirror environmental researcher Rob Nixon’s characterization of environmental racism as a form of “slow violence”;4 as we witness the complexity of efforts to adapt vulnerable places to withstand the future catastrophic effects of climate change, a colorblind approach seriously risks perpetuating harms already felt by a region’s racially subjugated communities, including Indigenous groups.
The ongoing debate over the diversion project’s long-term repercussions raises questions of environmental inequality that have, historically, gone unanswered: Who and what will climate adaptation projects protect, and who will be left out? These questions require answers in an era in which humankind is, again, attempting to radically modify nature—this time, to undo over a century of environmental mismanagement. Coastal Louisiana presents an early case study.
“This Has Nothing to Do with Fish”
In 2011, researchers Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart and her peers published an article describing the long-term accrual of Indigenous trauma.5 “There is increasing evidence of emotional responses to collective trauma and losses among Indigenous Peoples,” they wrote at the time. In a more recent paper published in the American Journal of Community Psychology,6 researchers Emma Elliot and Megan Bang delve into how the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ land and food systems promotes their livelihoods. It notes the physical, mental, and intellectual risks of colonial trauma posed to Indigenous communities in its examination of how settler encroachment—a parallel to the case unfolding in Louisiana—upon Indigenous land and foodways is related to suicide.
But the Louisiana government’s pursuit centers upon future economies—sidestepping the question, for some coastal areas, of whether they will have a future at all.
State planners unveiled their plan for the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project nearly a decade ago, and construction broke ground in August 2023. Throughout the heralded project’s journey through planning and public discourse, there have been disagreements among coastal researchers—some of whom claim that human-made levees do not restrict sediment’s flow and are not to blame for coastal erosion.
The Louisiana government’s pursuit centers upon future economies—sidestepping the question, for some coastal areas, of whether they will have a future at all.
Meanwhile, locals among the 23,000 residents of Plaquemines Parish—about one-third of whom are Indigenous or people of color7—fear the state’s artificial-diversion construction runs a heightened risk of increasing local flooding. Or, perhaps worse, it may decrease the salinity in the Mississippi Sound’s brackish waters, which feed local Indigenous groups and where commercial fisherfolk harvest from the sea.
“The decision here is not a local one,” explains Mark Davis, the founding director at Tulane University’s Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy, in reference to Louisiana’s white-knuckled push to implement artificial diversions (including a second diversion feature near the same vicinity) against locals’ will. Indeed, in recent years, Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes’ local representatives voted unanimously to halt the project’s construction. A 2022 Plaquemines Parish suit alleged irreversible harm to a Louisiana fishing industry worth $2.4 billion each year. To this day, they remain steadfast in opposing it. Davis adds that projects of such historic scale are designed with urban rather than rural communities in mind. “There’s a whole lot more at stake.”
At public meetings, CPRA and Louisiana lawmakers have acknowledged threats raised by residents of Plaquemines and St. Bernard Parishes. Throughout the diversion project’s planning, the state has performed a balancing act between meeting the needs of locals fearing damage to their livelihoods, as well as the inevitable fact that at the current pace of land loss in the area, tax bases will also begin to disappear; someday, there may be no land left beneath locals’ feet.
“That has nothing to do with fish,” Davis tells me.
“Big Oil”—and Bigger Adaptation
Of the largest oil and gas refineries in the US, nearly all are located along a roughly 300-mile stretch of shoreline between New Orleans and Houston—a distance equivalent to that covered during a five-hour drive. More than half of US crude oil is produced in Texas and Louisiana.8 In these industry-heavy areas, we see a race to protect global energy stability.
In southwestern Louisiana, near the Texas border, that includes the US Army Corps of Engineers and CPRA’s $6.8 billion Southwest Coastal Project.9 The partnership will invest most of its funding (about $5 billion) in rebuilding shorelines and marshland in Cameron, Vermilion, and Calcasieu Parishes—vulnerable neighborhoods that Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan anticipates will erode away by mid-century. The region is also home to an estimated one-fifth of the state’s oil and gas refineries.10 Unlike the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, federal funds will help cover its cost. The remainder will come from the Coastal Master Plan budget, raised through fines and settlements from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which in 2010 dumped 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf over eighty-seven days. Beyond Louisiana’s adaptation measures, federal and neighboring state governments will together look to spend, in the coming decades, up to $100 billion to fortify the roughly 80-mile stretch of Gulf shoreline that already plays host to the world’s largest petrochemical refining corridor.11
In Texas’s Galveston Bay, the Army Corps and state partners will break ground later this year on a historic adaptation effort that, once completed, is expected to cost $55 billion. Locally, it’s known as the “Ike Dike”—a nod to 2008 Hurricane Ike’s toll on southeastern Texas, as well as centuries of Dutch flood control theory that inspired its design. It would be the largest infrastructure project in US history, with towering features such as some forty-three miles of sand dunes standing up to fourteen feet high, an artificial spine barrier encircling Galveston Island, a flood-defense system of thirty-six gates (designed to shut in sequences ahead of major storms’ landfall), along with several even larger, more futuristic gates intended to guard against powerful storm-surge threats at the mouth of the fifty-two-mile Houston Ship Channel, where more than $900 billion in goods pass each year—much of which are oil and gas related. Texas’s adaptation project melds human engineering (so-called gray infrastructure) with nature (green infrastructure): 6,600 acres of marshland will be restored across the state’s southeastern coast, which, like Louisiana’s, will buffer severe storm threats. While modest, Texas’s coastal project recently received its first $500,000 allocation in May 2024.
“Intangible Connection to Place”
The Barataria Basin has seen some of Louisiana’s highest rates of coastal erosion;12 altogether, the square mileage of Louisiana land lost to coastal erosion over the past century is equal to roughly twice that of Rhode Island. Simultaneously, Louisiana must account for additional coastal threats, like some of the nation’s highest future sea-level-rise projections. Without intervention, Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan estimates that some areas near Plaquemines Parish’s most southern borders could see as much as six feet in future sea-level rise by 2100.13 Meanwhile, due to last century’s local oil exploration, parts of Louisiana are sinking. The state once permitted some 50,000 former oil wells near coastal zones. To blame, as well, are approximately 8,000 miles of canals dredged by the oil and gas industry throughout the Mississippi River Delta. Over the past century, these canals have introduced saltwater into coastal Louisiana’s freshwater marshes, killing them. Subsequently, spoil banks—dirt piles leftover from the dredging of canals and their continued maintenance—also impede the distribution of dirt that nature laid down, intervening in the flow of water that was etched studiously across eons.
Eugene Turner, an oceanographer and coastal sciences researcher at Louisiana State University, suggests the state’s placement of blame on levee construction is misguided.14 Instead of pointing the finger at human-made levees, as the state has, the coastal erosion contributors most at fault for Barataria Basin and other areas’ land loss crisis, he argues, are dredged canals and spoil banks. A 2018 study that Turner coauthored with ecologist Giovanna McClenachan supports this conclusion, proposing an alternative, a “proven long-term strategy” in Louisiana’s fight against coastal erosion: backfilling canals with abandoned spoil bank piles’ sediment. Such a solution would cost a fraction of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project’s price tag, which has ballooned from the proposed $275 million since its announcement back in 2012; by comparison, Turner and McClenachan’s canal-backfilling proposal was priced at about $335 million.15
In a 2002 review of scholar-activist Winona LaDuke’s acclaimed 1999 work All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life,16 Native studies scholar Kimberly Tallbear articulates how each Indigenous tribe or community’s relationship to, or with, land is based on local history and necessity⎯a nuance that LaDuke’s analysis, according to Tallbear, fails to capture. Tallbear also argues that for land management conversations to reach their nuanced potential, it is crucial for all parties to partake in talks on environmental issues.
In Louisiana’s case, it represents an expansion of how we should think about how the Plaquemines Parish region’s Indigenous peoples relate to this land, even as it disappears. Louisiana-based researcher Jessica R. Simms and peers’ 2021 article underscores the gravity of such relationships in the context of relocation efforts taking place in Louisiana’s Isle de Jean Charles:
The intangible connection to place—feelings of belonging, lifestyle, family connections, and culture—plays a central role in many families’ decision to stay or go. The choice to relocate is rooted in this complex entanglement of identity, familial ties, land loss, historical and current marginalization, and a way of life passed on by multiple generations. 17
See No Evil
Indigenous peoples’ calls for the state to halt its diversion plan for their part of South Louisiana have gone mostly ignored. Turner suggests that the state lacks research on alternative methods: “There’s background pressure to find another explanation for the loss [of land],” he tells me. But the favored excuse is that “the US government did this by building us flood-protection levees” and not the companies themselves.
Diversion projects might also carry more short-term risks than long-term rewards.
Dennis Lambert, a civil and environmental engineer specializing in coastal, marine, and environmental engineering projects, has long been one of the diversion project’s critics. In 2015, Lambert helped conduct an independent technical review of the Mid-Breton Diversion—a separate diversion project in the same area as Mid-Barataria, with the same purpose, but much further behind in its implementation—for a contracted Danish firm named COWI.
Then as much as now, Lambert’s findings helped shape opinion on the project; he also says he has suffered retaliation for voicing his concerns, which center on the diversion’s impact on sea life that calls Gulf waters home. Lambert tells me, “You don’t need to be a PhD in marine biology to know it’s going to kill dolphins,” which are among the species that depend on the marsh for shelter or to acquire food. If too much freshwater is introduced into those same brackish waters at once, as CPRA’s diversion project may entail, marine life will be in jeopardy.
Noting the potential loss of coastline to sea-level rise, Lambert laments, “We could lose our fisheries anyway. But the answer is not to unleash the river into the heart of it.”
Onward, Forward, without Indigenous Input
Legally, Louisiana wasn’t required to include Indigenous communities’ input during planning phases of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Project. Following the ethnic cleansing known to history as the Trail of Tears, members of Indigenous tribes banded together in an area today described as the southern tip of Plaquemines Parish. Without official tribal recognition from federal and state entities, local Indigenous leaders have no legal prerogative to take part in these types of civil works projects. As a means of tribal cultural resistance, in 2012 Grand Bayou residents joined Indigenous leaders across the nation to form the First People’s Conservation Council. Grand Bayou and FPCC leaders are among those to file suit against the project.
When I reached out to Chief Devon of the Grand Caillou Dulac Band, he declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Tribal leaders like Grand Bayou local Rosina Philippe, the FPCC’s president and a member of the Atakapa-Ishak / Chawasha, did not return requests for comment.
Still, Louisiana set aside $378 million for future aid to commercial fisherfolk and others who will be impacted by the project’s construction. Among those that qualify for funds are Indigenous community members in the village of Grand Bayou; it sits on Plaquemines Parish’s southernmost tip, only feet from the Gulf waters that have for centuries given their people life. Despite their village’s location on land that has almost completely eroded away in recent decades—with much of what’s left today only reachable by boat—the tribal village’s leaders have previously voiced their lack of a role throughout the project’s earliest and perhaps most communally vital planning.
In February 2024, a parish court enforced a stop-work order on the Mid-Barataria project, citing concerns for the commercial fishing industry among other issues. It was part of a flurry of legal moves filed months after the project’s groundbreaking.
Advocacy groups who have long backed the diversion projects remain steadfast in their support. In May 2024, a Louisiana Senate Transportation Committee meeting revealed that the state had already spent $422 million on project planning and construction. The committee noted that cancellation at this stage of the construction process could leave Louisiana responsible for paying out $1 billion in outstanding costs associated with the project.
Such hand-wringing is merely one example of the diversion project’s ongoing stress points. Many of these came to a head in January following the departure of Democratic governor John Bel Edwards due to term limits. The Republican administration of his replacement, Jeff Landry, has since expressed to federal officials what it describes as serious concerns about the project. In November before a State Senate committee, Landry echoed concerns of the diversion project’s opponents, saying its potential harm to commercial fishing and Indigenous foodways could “break [the] culture” of South Louisiana.18
Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungusser, Landry’s second-in-command and the former president of Plaquemines Parish, has publicly opposed the project outright.
Not long after taking office in early 2024, Landry also proposed a potential merger of state agencies—most notably the state’s natural resources department and the CPRA. Experts claim potential losses in funding could hinder the diversion projects’ broader goals.
The CPRA, for its part, remains adamant that the diversion must be constructed.
However, resolution is possible between the state and parish government. In a joint statement by the CPRA, the state, and Plaquemines Parish, the three entities professed their intention to work collaboratively in resolving residents’ “concerns related to the project.” The parish has since modified its stop-work order to allow minimal early work, such as prepping the construction site and building any necessary temporary structures. The statement added, “The goal of both parties is to protect and restore our invaluable coast.”19
It’s unclear what changes might come out of negotiations, or if a new environmental assessment from the Army Corps will be required for changes that might be agreed in the plan. That alone could set the project back years, perhaps longer, according to Davis and other experts.
Both proponents and opponents of diversion agree: Louisiana has no time to spare.
Commenting on the public balancing act required of coastal officials tasked with the project, Mark Davis tells me: “You cannot do this kind of work without making changes, particularly changes that are going to hurt somebody. The real issue is, how do you deal with that?”
Better yet, how can compromise be found before it’s too late to save a region?
Proponents and opponents of diversion agree: Louisiana has no time to spare.
I’ve grappled with this question often. Whose beliefs and analyses of the land are prioritized in the name of climate adaptation?
*
As we concluded our seaplane tour that spring afternoon, with Mardi Gras Pass now behind us, we banked sharply, splitting from the shoreline’s path and back toward the shallow bayou from which we had embarked.
The view ahead of our cockpit shifts from green and brown to the gray of the New Orleans skyline, rising above the coastal barriers that guard against the potential for lashings by the Gulf sea.
Whose beliefs and analyses of the land are prioritized in the name of climate adaptation?
The contrast between the deteriorating Louisiana coast and city skyline is stark. From our vantage point, I can’t decide which looks more delicate. But among those living below, like the Indigenous communities holding on to their way of life as Plaquemines Parish’s southernmost tip gradually disappears, their history seems at risk of breaking altogether.
In the words of Winona LaDuke, “The paradigm that got us into the problems we are facing today is not the paradigm that is going to get us out. And it would be important to have the courage to figure out some of these solutions together, and to recognize that indigenous people’s knowledge is pretty significant knowledge—thousands of years in the same place without messing stuff up.”20
Historically, displacement of Indigenous people lies at the root of our most urgent ecological problems—a reality whose consequences continue to be illustrated clearly in coastal Louisiana today.
1. US Army Corps of Engineers, “Joint Public Notice,” March 5, 2018, mvn.usace.army.mil.
2. Louisiana Geological Survey, “Generalized Geological Map of Louisiana,” December 2007, lsu.edu.
3. Emily Schatzel, “Largest Single Restoration Project in U.S. History Breaks Ground,” National Wildlife Federation, August 10, 2023, nwf.org.
4. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
5. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart et al., “Historical Trauma among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: Concepts, Research, and Clinical Considerations,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 43, no. 4 (December 2011): 282–90.
6. Emma Elliott and Megan Bang, “Reducing Indigenous Suicide: Recognizing Vital Land and Food Systems for Livelihoods,” American Journal of Community Psychology 73, nos. 1–2 (March 2024): 267–79.
7. US Census Results, 2020, US Census Bureau, census.gov.
8. “Profile Overview: U.S Energy Atlas with Total Energy Layers,” US Energy Information Administration,2022, eia.gov.
9. Xander Peters, “How to Stop a State from Sinking,” MIT Technology Review, April 15, 2024, technologyreview.com.
10. “Louisiana: Other Oil and Gas Infrastructure” (map), Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, n.d., dnr.louisiana.gov.
11. Xander Peters, “Galveston’s Texas-Size Plan to Stop the Next Big Storm,” Smithsonian Magazine, July/August 2024, smithsonianmag.com.
12. “A Changing Landscape,” Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, n.d., coastal.la.gov.
13. “Parish Fact Sheet: Cameron Parish,” 2017 Master Plan, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, coastal.la.gov.
14. Robert Eugene Turner and Erick M. Swenson, “The Life and Death and Consequences of Canals and Spoil Banks in Salt Marshes,” Wetlands 40, no. 6 (December 2020): 1957–65.
15. Robert Eugene Turner and Erick M. Swenson, “The Life and Death and Consequences of Canals and Spoil Banks in Salt Marshes,” Wetlands 40, no. 6 (December 2020): 1957–65.
16. Kimberly Tallbear, “Review [Untitled],” Wicazo Sa Review 17, no. 1 (2002): 234–42. 17. Jessica R. Z. Simms et al., “The Long Goodbye on a Disappearing, Ancestral Island: A Just Retreat from Isle de Jean Charles,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences 11 (2021): 316–28.
18. Kevin Mcgill, “Louisiana’s Governor Raises Major Doubts about a Stalled $3 Billion Coastal Restoration Project,” AP News, November 21, 2024, apnews.com
19. Erin Lowrey, “Major Coastal Restoration Project Resumes Some Work after Plaquemines Parish Works Towards Agreement,” WDSU 6, June 13, 2024, wdsu.com.
20. Taylor Jade Powell, “Winona LaDuke: ‘Time to Move On’ from Exploiting, Ignoring Nature,” The Hub, November 9, 2017, hub.jhu.edu.