Torn on the Bayou

Ecological Jewel or Carbon-Capture Dump?

Photo: Rob Verchick

A fan of place-based education, every year I haul my students to Louisiana’s Maurepas Wildlife Management Area to paddle the swamps and learn about coastal law. I wrote about one of those trips in my last book, The Octopus in the Parking Garage. I described the setting this way:

A forty-odd-minute drive from New Orleans, Maurepas Swamp consists of about ninety- six square miles of flooded forest consisting mainly of water tupelo and bald cypress trees, the rootlike “knees” of the latter poking out of the water like dragon’s teeth. Dripping with Spanish moss, their branches shade an under-story of wax myrtle, pumpkin ash, and an abundance of things that slide and crawl. Located within the “Mississippi flyway,” the swamp provides rest stops for hundreds of species of transient songbirds, including warblers, cuckoos, vireos, and woodpeckers.

This semester, I had ten students with me, each paddling a kayak on the swamp’s shimmering water. Bits of salvinia, a free-floating aquatic fern, eased downstream at an almost imperceptible rate.

Stories on the bayou are always changing. This year the narrative wrestled with a choice the state is making about what the Maurepas Swamp will become—an ecological jewel or a carbon-capture dump.

The community is torn.

Photo: Adele Colson

On one hand, Maurepas is a story about re-discovery and recovery. For generations, this wetland had been harvested for the fur and timber markets. Cut off from the Mississippi River decades ago by levees and flood control, the swamp’s cypress and tupelo trees have suffered saltwater intrusion, subsidence, and a lack of nutrients. In the photos above, the landscape looks lush. After all, Maurepas is, for my money, one of the best paddling sites in the New Orleans area.

But look closely, and you’ll see thinning canopies, dying trunks, and water spreading where forests once stood.

Photo: Adele Colson

There is reason for hope.

Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority has started work on a $300 million river-diversion project that would send fresh water and some sediment from the Mississippi River into Maurepas Swamp. The initiative, which is mostly funded from fines associated with the BP oil spill, would stabilize and restore about 70 square miles of forested wetlands. This diversion is part of a multi-billion dollar effort to restore Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, whose imperiled state can be traced to levee development and the destructive activities of the oil and gas industry.

In our lifetime, I tell my students, Maurepas Swamp could become an ecological jewel.

Photo: Rob Verchick

But there’s a hitch.

Fossil Fuel companies want to use subsurface formations beneath and around the wetlands to store captured carbon dioxide. Recently state agencies approved a plan proposed by Air Products Blue Energy to construct a carbon dioxide pipeline through the Maurepas Swamp Wildlife Management Area. The pipeline would carry captured carbon dioxide through the wetlands and into a proposed carbon storage facility below Lake Maurepas. (Air Products manufactures ammonia and hydrogen through a process that creates lots of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. When manufacturers use carbon capture technology to dispose of that pollution, they call their product “blue ammonia” or “blue hydrogen.” Marketing is everything.)

Air Products’ pipeline footprint and access roads marked in red. Source: Earthjustice

As I’ve written elsewhere, carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS) is a bad idea. The technology is unproven for this purpose; the process is prone to ruptures, leaks, and contamination; and the industry requires permanent government subsidy. According to the International Energy Agency, the technology’s future role in carbon reduction will likely be minimal.

Foisted on this struggling patch of public land, such industrialization seems a disaster waiting to happen.

For this reason, the regional advocacy group Healthy Gulf is challenging the project in court. The group claims that when the state accepted the donations of tracts of land from private donors, it entered agreements that include binding language making conservation the priority. I see other legal problems too. It’s possible the agencies’ approval may have violated the state’s public trust doctrine or requirements in the state’s coastal-use permitting program (known as the State and Local Coastal Resources Management Act.) We’ll see.

What Nature is forever teaching us here in the Pelican State is that you simply cannot have your swamp and eat it too. Wetlands like Maurepas Swamp are a blessing and a life support system.

If you’re hungry, I know a better way. I take my class to Middendorf’s.

Photo: Adele Colson

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