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.