Saving the Coast: Interview with Kerry St. Pé

*Two years ago I sat down with Kerry St. Pé, the Executive Director (at the time) of the Barataria-Terrbonne National Estuary Program. This program is one of 28 national programs dedicated to the preservation and restoration of our wetland system. For 40 years Kerry and his staff have fought for our coastline and culture. Last July, Kerry retired as Executive Director, making this possibly the last interview published from a time where he was at the helm of that organization.*

TB: It seems to me like there are two erosions. Not just the coast, you’ve got an erosion of heritage. With these graves it’s very symbolic. More than just the coast, what we’re losing…

St.: Yeah, we’re losing the coast, but more importantly we’re losing the thing that sustains our culture. So, we want to save or restore the coast because we want to save our culture. It’s all about the people. The marshes and wetlands, and all those coastal wetlands aren’t just places for people to travel through and look around and look at the beauty. It’s the thing that protects us from hurricanes, it’s the thing that entertains us (with) fishing, crabbing. It’s the thing that supports our way of life. You know, crabbing, shrimping, oystering, fishing. The wetlands down here are everything to us. It is who we are. So, the reason we want to restore it is to save ourselves.

TB: When did we first notice how dramatic the erosion really is?

St:  Mid-to-late 70s. I was working by that time.  Now, we always knew there was land loss. The 1927 flood. Even dating back to Harnett Cane, he was talking about land loss, wetland loss, back then... the mid-forties, nineteen-forties... but, the land loss really started accelerating after we started digging oilfield canals, you know, exploring for oil and gas. We started sucking fluids out of the earth, and it caved in the earth’s crust...so, we’ve always been sinking. It’s just that the Mississippi has offset that sinking by flooding and depositing silt and sand down there. We’ve been sinking for 10,000 years. People that don’t understand that from around the country, they’ll say we shouldn’t live here because this place is sinking. Well, we’ve been sinking for 10,000 years. That’s not the problem. The problem is, not only have we built levees, but we’ve built locks and dams in the upper watershed. So, even if we didn’t have those levees, there’s not enough sediment coming down the Mississippi river...we have to harvest sediment from where it is.We’re going to need freshwater diversions, freshwater input, but we don’t necessarily need the massive quantities of water people are talking about, that would destroy the very culture we’re trying to save.

TB: Right. So if that’s what we need –to pump the sediment- how would we do that? Open the levees? Or just dredge?

St.: No, just opening the levees would bring in massive amounts of water. It wouldn’t do anything because the sediments are on the bottom, not the surface. So, we need to harvest that sediment with dredges to restore our system.

TB: So what’s the most recent thing being done in terms of restoration, what’s the most recent thing, in terms of projects?

St.: Well, we’re strong advocates of dredging and piping sediment to pipelines to restore the habitat, to restore landscape features, coastal landscape features. This has been done a few times, throughout our history, it’s been done. The place I grew up in was built in 1920 with a pipe and a dredge... So, this has been done repeatedly, but not necessarily to restore wetlands. In the distant past it was more done to fill wetlands. But more recently, we’re using that technique to restore wetlands. The problem is, it’s very expensive. You lay a pipe and you find a sediment source in the river, and you pump it. And, when they finish with that project, historically, they've been picking up the pipe.  So, what we need to do, is do projects like that, like a long distance sediment pipeline. 

TN: Do you think we’ll do it? Do you think we’ll restore the coast?

St: I think we can do it. It remains to be seen if we will. We need the political will. This isn’t just a political game. We need to restore the coast for the good of Louisiana and the nation. But, yeah, I think it can be done. I think we’re running out of time. 

TB: Why aren't people out there demonstrating? I mean, people are upset and very angry. But coordinated action, obviously we have you, and the National Estuary, but coordinated, grassroots action, from what you might see in other parts of the French-speaking world, from say, Quebec. If this was Quebec, the Quebecois would go out into the street, for demonstrations, but we just don’t seem to be a demonstration kind of people.

St: That’s right, we aren't. That’s not our way. The people here are more likely to –they know full well what would happen if we’d lose our wetlands. They know now, they see it. You have oldtimers and they say, they see after Katrina, Rita, they knee deep in water. They say ‘no wetlands.’ I don’t have to tell them that. Out in Port Sulphur, where my house was washed away in a tidal wave. The whole Parish was washed away. Those people know why. No wetlands. So, it’s generally known down here by the people who are intimately affected. But you go not too far, to Baton Rouge, or New Orleans, even, where people live in the city and are not connected to the natural landscape around them. And they realize it much less. That’s mainly what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with the development of a state master plan, for instance. And we have the influence of people who are not from the state. We have scientists from out of state and they aren’t connected to the culture. They don’ know Mr. St. Pierre from Larose who have a camp down the bayou. They don’t know anything about that. They know, ‘hey, I remember in high school and college reading about Southeast Louisiana being formed by the Mississippi River.’ So we should just return to the river, right? No, people are living according to the way the system is now. '

TB: Well, I’m about to go down to Leeville, take some pictures of the graveyards. I was hoping you could tell me about the graveyards. Exactly how many are underwater?

St.: I don’t know exactly how many, but a lot. I mean, people don’t build graves underwater, they burry it on high ground. They build ‘em in elevated places, on high land. This is where they bury the people in Leeville. Leeville was once called Orange City, back in you, know, at the turn of the 19^th Century. It was all high land, they had the Orange orchards everywhere. They had cotton fields, they grew Easter Lilies. But, it’s not just Leeville. We have places like that all over South Louisiana. Katrina just destroyed graveyards all over St. Patrick’s Church, where I grew up. People were having to find their loved ones whose caskets had floated out of the graves. But that’s the shape we’re in today.  

St.: We have hope. There’s still hope here. We can restore this place, but it’s going to require us to pump sediments from the Atchafalaya, and the Mississippi, and other places. But if this place is worth being restored, and I think we’ve all decided that it is. It would be more expensive to just abandon it: the oil, the gas, the roads. It would be very expensive to abandon it. So, to restore it, what do we need? We need dirt, we need sediment. Not water. We need a more concentrated supply of sediment, the kind you get when you pump form the bottom of the river. That’s what we need. That’s the only hope we have.

  

Eroding a Songline

Montegut, an unkept grave sinks in the silt

Indigenous Australians, Aborigines, have a tradition known as Songline by which the singer can identify landmarks throughout their country. Each rock and hill, tree and valley, is transcribed into an epic that includes elements of their clan's history. If a land is disappearing, though, what becomes of its Songline?

Twenty or so yards of land near Bayou Allemends lay in dispute between the Dubroc's and Lamartinaire's. By mischief or miscalculation, this sliver of land found itself on the Dubroc side of the barbed wire fence, a precautionary against cows and coyotes.

Each hurricane Oak and Pecan trees dropped their branches on either half of the demarcation, unaware of the seriousness of their transgressions. The fence itself unraveled at nature’s cruel indifference to our notions of property. Even with the fence gone, the boundary remained. Years later, even as the patriarchs of both families rested in their mausoleums, an unspoken tension haunted their lands that stood atop a hill of river silt and clay. A spot that Avoyelles Parish calls ‘The Island’; a testament to its role in the 1927 flood.

                                                   

Graves incorporate with a Chitimacha mound outside of Dulac

Outside of Lake Charles is a woman who can tell you if your relatives are in Hell, Heaven, or Purgatory. My uncle, a Dubroc and devout as the rest of us, sought her counsel. It was revealed to him that the original erector of that fence, the interred patriarch of the Dubroc family, was in Purgatory. In filial piety he hoped to assuage his grandfather’s suffering. He and his brothers arrived at the home of the oldest living Lamartinaire –who was also the oldest living Dubroc- a woman whose father had fought in the civil war and whose late husband’s land was take by Vieux Sampson Dubroc’s crafty placement of barbed wire.

                                           

The Virgin Mary on top of the mound

This old woman, Tant Sybil Marguerite Dubroc, was my great-grandfather’s sister. She married a Lamartinaire with whom she had two children. As a member of both families, she inhabited the border of the dispute. Wise enough to see the pettiness of the feud, but a good enough Catholic to not push the issue.

South Louisiana has made an art out of the visit. We call it vieller and all it amounts to is drinking coffee, talking a lot, and saying little. 

By my junior year of college my grandparents had passed away. So, I would visit with Tant Syb. When our time together would end and I would leave her home, I could notice the tears in her eyes. At the time, I just attributed it to Latin emotionalism, but in retrospect I recognize I might have been one of the few Dubrocs to frequent her house.

 When I went to South Korea, my father would drop in on Tant Syb for me. Eventually he brought along his two brothers. And, as Tant Syb was now in their cognitive radar, it was only natural that the way to slake Vieux Sampson’s sufferings in Purgatory would be to make peace with the oldest living Dubroc.

Tant Syb passed away not long after in the satisfaction of a rift mended, a final task complete.

                                                             

Unkept grave in Montegut

To the standard southerner, the Southern Baptist or Methodist, the Protestant of whatever stripe, mending rifts because of concerns over purgatory may be hard to believe, but that is because of a misreading.

Rifts between families do not mend because of Purgatory or seers. Peace was possible because, in so many words and for so many reasons, the Dubrocs and Lamartinaires were there. They have a place and a history and they know where which relative is buried where, what that relative accomplished, what that relative means to them. The Dubrocs and Lamartinaires can mend boundaries because they have boundaries. Being defined by place, a structure exists for the preservation of their history and their interaction with the present.

                                              

A cheniere, or oak ridge, dead from saltwater intrusion

At the mouth of Bayou Lafourche sinks the once-called Orange City. Today it is known as Leeville: whatever oranges once grew there are gone with the land that supported them.10,000 miles of canals –dug by oil companies for the past eighty years- scratch themselves through south Louisiana’s marshlands like whip lashes across the back of the condemned.

                                            

Leeville, at the mouth of Bayou Lafourche, pre-Katrina

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Louisiana’s economy depends upon petroleum. The state boomed in the 1970s; pumped out over three times as much oil as Saudi Arabi, before crashing in the 1980s when the swamps could no longer yield as much as expected.

                                            

Center Right: arial vie of a sunken graveyard

                                                

And so, these canals lie unused, increasing in width with the action of waves, bringing in saltwater that kills the plant life holding on to the land whose foundation has been sucked away. Supporting soil and minerals were removed because of oil exploration. This caused the natural process of subsidence (that is, the gradual sinking of the land) to speed up to an unsustainable rate. 

Today Leeville is an island in all but name, but unlike the island that the Lamartinaires and Dubrocs had during ‘27 flood, it is an island that offers no protection. It is connected to the land only by a highway flanked on both sides by water: the exposed spinal cord of a rotting corpse.

Unlike their more northern cultural kin in Avoyelles or Lafayette, the people of the Bayou, of the Southeast Coast, are faced with the loss of their Songline.