Mid-Barataria’s Muddy End - The Margin

Boat captain Richie Blink zipped through the unnamed waters on a warm, September day as the small, waterside community of Myrtle Grove gave way to what little marsh remains on Plaquemines Parish’s west bank. 

Here, the loss of southeastern Louisiana’s once vast marshes feels tangible.

The boat whips between broken segments of tall marsh grass, the stubborn remnants of thick wetlands that have rapidly drowned in recent decades. Areas that seem lush to the human eye appear disjointed and fleeting from a bird’s eye view.

Blink guides the boat of coastal advocates to a short levee that’s quickly becoming this portion of the west bank’s sole protection against hurricanes. The group scrambled onto the squat levee to see the few pickup trucks and cranes lingering on what used to be the site of Louisiana’s largest effort to rebuild land by harnessing the power of the muddy Mississippi River. 

The project, known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, was projected to build and sustain up to 27 square miles of land by 2050. The new land would have strengthened the diminishing buffer between the greater New Orleans region and the Gulf of Mexico, as the land sinks and the sea rises. Coastal scientists and state officials said that the first-of-its-kind roughly $3 billion project, was the only long-term solution capable of withstanding climate change.

Standing between two tall power lines demarcating where the project’s footprint would’ve been, Blink said the acres of clear-cut land act as a somber reminder of the project, now canceled less than two years after breaking ground. 

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his appointee to helm the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), Gordy Dove, abandoned the diversion in summer 2025. CPRA cited increasing costs, ongoing litigation and permitting concerns, despite decades of research and a dedicated source of funding. The governor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Southern Louisiana is on the frontlines of a question facing most of the world’s coastal communities of how to deal with sea level rise. Because of human factors, including climate change, Louisiana has experienced some of the fastest rates of sea level rise on Earth. The rates are so fast, some scientists liken studying coastal Louisiana to traveling through time, previewing what other coastal wetlands will face in the coming decades. 

After Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago, the state developed a nationally-renowned model for tackling the coastal land loss crisis holistically. It was guided by decision-making grounded in science, led and implemented by the CPRA, the state agency tasked with rebuilding and hardening the coast. Sediment diversions, including the Mid-Barataria, were considered a cornerstone in the plan, working alongside other strategies such as marsh created by dredging-and-pumping mud and sand.

Under the Landry administration, however, coastal advocates fear politics have overtaken the state’s past determination to follow the science while the federal government simultaneously dismantles the scientific community. Dove said in an interview with The Margin that his agency’s decisions are backed by “facts and figures.”

The Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion’s termination came after the Landry administration allowed the project to stall for about a year and a half. In that time, the state’s coastal agency offered little explanation, stating staff had signed non-disclosure agreements about the project and ongoing litigation.

Now, the CPRA plans to consider a smaller version of the project that was authorized in 2007, promising it will deliver “similar benefits.” The smaller diversion was originally projected to create more marsh using a dredged sediment pipeline. The diversion would focus more on channeling freshwater than sediment, Dove said. Though, scientists who consulted with the state say the modeling underlying earlier estimates were less sophisticated.

Coastal advocates question whether any new project to reconnect the basin to the river could come fast enough, let alone be large enough, to make a difference. Dove estimated it would take about five years to start construction on the Myrtle Grove project, though the state still needs to reevaluate the project through the permitting process and shore up federal funding. 

Staring at the former site of the Mid-Barataria, Lauren Bourg said she could still picture the new land that would have been created. Bourg directs the National Audubon Society’s Mississippi River Delta program, which has advocated for science-based coastal restoration for more than a decade.

“ It feels crazy that we're standing here… that sediment would've come right in here and would start collecting almost immediately,” Bourg said. “The governor and Chairman Dove have canceled these projects in the name of the people, but what are they giving the people in return? The problems persist. The problems are here. They're not going away.”

Bourg said any project similar to Mid-Barataria could take at least eight to 10 years to greenlight. Construction was expected to take another five years. Bourg and other advocates worry that whatever solution moves forward may arrive too late to combat sea level rise.

“Louisiana's coast doesn't have eight to 10 years,” she said. “It is weird standing here in an area that we thought would be the largest ecosystem restoration project in the country, and there's nothing here.”

In an interview, Dove emphasized that his agency continues to use modeling to design projects, and is only building projects already approved in the master plan. He said he’s dedicated to the use of science, despite what critics say. 

“We do everything by scientific. We do everything by sound engineering. We model every project we have. We follow all state statutes,” Dove said. “It's getting aggravating that certain groups say that they own the word scientific. I've never built nothing without permits and science and models…I wanted that for the record. They do not own scientific. We do scientific.”

Reconnecting the river

With the changing approach to coastal policy and a potential smaller diversion several years away, the question of southeast Louisiana’s future has grown murkier. 

Between 2020 and 2050, Louisiana is projected to see 14 to 22 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle, a barrier island that sits on the southern end of the Barataria basin, according to the National Sea Level Rise Viewer, a tool created by multiple federal agencies using projections updated in 2022. The coast has already experienced about 11 inches of sea level rise at Grand Isle from 1993 to 2023. That amount of sea level rise would swallow much of the remaining wetlands outside of levee systems and lead to frequent coastal flooding. By 2100, the sea could be almost 3 to 8 feet higher at Grand Isle, depending on how quickly carbon emissions are curbed. 

The idea to restore the Mississippi River’s connection to the surrounding marshes dates back many decades. When Congress directed the Mississippi River Commission to coordinate flood control policy in the late 1800s, some engineers wanted to design a more comprehensive program including levees, outlets and reservoirs. Instead, the leadership adopted a “levees only” policy, sealing most of the Mississippi River’s outlets with higher and higher levees. The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, which displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Illinois to Louisiana, ended that approach. The swollen river demonstrated the need for a system of levees, outlets, and spillways. Still, much of the river in southern Louisiana was leveed, a decision top civil engineers knew would lead to the degradation of the delta. Elmer Lawrence Corthell, a leading engineer, noted in 1897 that decision-makers had to weigh protection of current generations against the effects that sinking, sediment-starved land would have on future Louisiana residents.

Modeling the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The model below uses a comparison slider to illustrate how the landscape changes with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios showing modeled conditions from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

Historically, the Mississippi River built all of the land in southern Louisiana. The river would naturally overtop its banks during flood seasons, and the mud would fall out, building up the land over millennia. Levees protect property by preventing the river from spilling over, but they also prevent southern Louisiana’s spongy land from being replenished. 

While he conceded “the present generation should not be selfish,” Corthell believed the development in the Mississippi River delta would be worth the high price of later needing a vast levee to protect the region from the encroaching Gulf of Mexico. 

Corthell’s prediction was spot on. From 1932 to 2000, Louisiana lost about 1,900 square miles of land, nearly the same footprint as Delaware. Disconnecting the river from the delta with levees was the primary cause, worsened by extraction and canals carved through marsh by the oil and gas industry. 

Coastal scientist Denise Reed moved to Louisiana in the 80s after graduating from the University of Cambridge. She’s a renowned expert on sustaining marshes. In 1993, a state task force introduced its first comprehensive coastal wetlands restoration plan. Reed played a role in the 1993 plan, with the input of other scientists. She said that it was one of the first to clearly call for diversions, like the Mid-Barataria project, as a “lynchpin strategy.”

The 1993 plan said, “The Mississippi River built most of the coastal wetlands in Louisiana and in it lies the best hope for restoring wetlands that have been lost in recent decades.”The restoration plan helped lay the foundation for the state’s extensive coastal master plan as it exists today. It was also among the first to propose what would become known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion.

Around this time, Sidney Coffee, who lobbied on behalf of Louisiana on coastal issues in Washington D.C. and eventually became the first chair of CPRA, said both planning and funding for wetlands restoration were inadequate. 

“There was no money,” said Coffee. “It was just a daunting, daunting task.”

Until Hurricane Katrina… 

In the aftermath of the 2005 storm, and Hurricane Rita weeks later, restoring Louisiana’s coast became a top priority. 

“After Katrina, we knew that we had to change everything. We had to have everybody on the same page,” Coffee said. She headed coastal policy under then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. 

State lawmakers recognized the need for restoration as protection. The natural landscape provides multiple layers of defense to ease the pressure on levee systems. Katrina and Rita provided the political will to start saving the coast, but it took another disaster for the money to match the need. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (commonly referred to as the BP oil spill) devastated an already suffering Louisiana coastline. The settlement allocated over $4.6 billion to spend largely on coastal restoration in the state — funding at a level that was previously unheard of. It was enough to seriously move forward the Mid-Barataria diversion. 

“We'll never see the money again,” said Coffee.

Designing a diversion

As the Mississippi River winds through south Louisiana, the water slows as it approaches each bend. Computer modeling by the state and other scientists showed a hefty amount of mud and sand could be redirected across Plaquemines Parish’s west bank and out into the Barataria Basin. 

Picture a deep two-mile-long, concrete channel a little more than a quarter-mile wide. One end features a complex system of gates to control the amount of water flowing from the river out the other side. During peak flood season, in the spring, the channel would siphon a fraction of the river. The largest sand particles would start to drop out and build on top of each other quickly, while smaller particles would likely travel down the basin before settling. 

When Reed, the marsh scientist, first moved to Louisiana, she searched for ways to keep coastal wetlands from drowning in sea level rise. 

“The idea certainly, in the saltier end of the system, [was] that sediment was really important for [wetlands’ survival],” Reed said. “And where was that sediment gonna come from? Well, the obvious source was the river.”

So, the idea of man-made diversions quickly rose to the top. Reed said maps showing land loss trends revealed how areas connected to rivers deteriorated more slowly, adding further evidence of the river’s power.

Cuts along the lower Mississippi River serve as proxies for how controlled diversions can build land. Most recently, major flooding in 2019 opened up a new outlet in lower Plaquemines Parish along the east bank of the river, called Neptune Pass sitting about 30 miles south of the Mid-Barataria site. The boat of coastal advocates rocked as it motored across a choppy Mississippi River to the 850-foot-wide mouth of the young distributary. 

Neptune Pass rose to prominence in 2022 after the channel grew nearly sixfold from 2016 to 2021. The channel transformed from a meager bayou to a massive crevasse diverting about one-sixth of the Mississippi River and dumping it in bays to the east. As more of the river flowed out, the power of the mainstem started to slow, allowing for more mud, silt and sand to drop out, leading to sandbars in the new navigation channel thus placing Neptune Pass at the center of a new coastal controversy. 

So the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s coastal authority met in a standoff. Close the channel to maintain the depth required for giant ships or allow the spontaneous diversion to start building land in the surrounding wetlands. 

Now, six years after its emergence, rocks transported downriver cover the base of the channel and its banks to limit further erosion. The Corps’ position won out. The federal agency is in the process of placing more rocks in the channel to constrict the flow of water, easing any impact on marine traffic. The amount of sediment passing through will be reduced with the restraints on water flow. Yet, the area remains a prime example of how little time it takes for the river to begin building land when given a chance. 

As Blink’s boat cruises down Neptune Pass, he points out how a line of tall black willows along the bank didn't exist six years ago. This pocket of vibrant wetlands sharply contrasts the bay near the Mid-Barataria site.

“It's not often one could stand in the middle of a huge geologic change. Being in the middle of a baby delta, or a new delta being formed, is really kind of cool,” he said. “Everything's nice and green. There's a lot of diversity… If we give nature the room to do what it needs to do, it's going to solve a lot of our problems.”

The concept has been proven repeatedly over decades. Uncontrolled, Neptune Pass built at least 1,000 acres of new delta at its mouth leading into Quarantine Bay by 2023. Farther west, near the mouth of the Atchafalaya River, a manmade channel opened in the early 1940s unintentionally built and maintained almost 10 square miles of land south of Morgan City by 2010, according to one LSU study. The Wax Lake Outlet created one of the few deltas that continues to grow, thriving as the rest of the coastline recedes.

Mid-Barataria, meanwhile, was engineered to build up to 27 square miles of land by 2050.

The below timelapse between 1984 and 2020 shows the creation of the delta from the Wax Lake Outlet. 

Race to the bottom

Across the region, the Mid-Barataria diversion had broad support. But locally, in Plaquemines Parish, a project of this scale has been controversial since it was proposed. The concerns of seafood fishers, marine animal advocates and communities vulnerable to increased flooding made the project divisive. So much so that, when the project’s tradeoffs were undeniable, the local parish council unanimously voted to oppose the diversion after the draft environmental impact study was released in 2021.  

With its prime location at the foot of the Mississippi River, Plaquemines Parish historically served as a trade hotspot. The coastal parish maintained a thriving seafood industry, even attracting immigrant fishers from Central Europe in the early 1800s and later from southeast Asia. While crawfish and shrimp remain supreme in Louisiana, oysters are a prime cash crop. Oysters and other bivalves are also among the most sensitive to environmental changes. 

Byron Encalade learned the oyster business from his grandfather and uncle in the small Black fishing community of East Pointe à la Hache. He still remembers helping his grandfather fix boats as a little kid, crawling beneath the boat during repairs. “Cooning,” or gathering oysters, was one of his first jobs. Growing up, when he needed money, Encalade and his cousin turned to the brackish waters of Plaquemines Parish, chiseling oysters out of shallow oyster beds until they caught a handful of sacks. It was their version of an allowance.  

“We’d get $2 or $3 a sack. I know that don’t sound like much money today. But you're talking about back in the 60s, that was a lot of money,” Encalade said. 

His oyster pocket money helped him pay for everything from school clothes to his first pair of All Stars so he could play basketball.

“I bought them myself, fishing oysters,” he recalled fondly.

Now, at 72 years old, he said the lifestyle of his childhood is rarer or has disappeared altogether. The last oystermen struggle to remain in the industry, especially those who are Black like Encalade. When disasters, like influxes of freshwater due to flooding or smaller river diversions, struck, Encalade said it was harder for Black oystermen to have the resources to recover, in part due to discriminatory state policies that make it more difficult for Black oystermen to obtain new leases.

In Plaquemines, new oystermen are uncommon. Everyone Encalade knows who still harvests oysters are in their 60s. 

“Most of the people I know in it wish they would have got out of it years ago,” Encalade said.

He said the parish’s oyster industry has been destroyed over the last two decades by back-to-back disasters, rising prices and diminishing oyster reefs. In 2001, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries observed more than nine million barrels of oysters in the public grounds around Plaquemines Parish alone. Last year, the state’s assessment found less than half a million barrels around Plaquemines. Statewide, there were 1.2 million barrels of oysters in the public grounds. While those numbers don’t include oysters in areas leased from the state, they reflect a decline seen across the business. 

Shrimpers have faced a similar plight as the same disasters have weakened their industry. Additionally, cheap farmed shrimp imported from other countries has also flooded the market, reducing the price people are willing to pay for Gulf shrimp. 

After watching freshwater wipe out popular oyster grounds east of the Mississippi River, Encalade opposed the idea of the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The pulse of freshwater would transform areas that had grown much saltier with the encroachment of the Gulf of Mexico, which enabled oysters and brown shrimp to migrate higher in the basin. With the diversion, salinities would drop closer to levels seen in the early 1900s, before the deterioration of Louisiana’s coast. 

The fear of too much freshwater meant oystermen and fishers were among the loudest voices attempting to stop the project. Seafood fishers like Encalade felt they were in the fight of their lives, struggling to keep their culture, heritage and income alive. Any additional stressors, like the diversion, felt like a threat to sweep fishers’ last leg out from under them. 

The question about fishermen like Encalade became a political flashpoint for the 2023 gubernatorial election. As the Mid-Barataria verged on approval in 2022, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards was nearing the end of his term-limited tenure. When he was in office, the state’s coastal authority held course, steadily working toward a permit from the Army Corps and funding approval from the trustees created by the BP oil settlement.

“[This is] the largest ever ecosystem restoration project in our state's history,” Edwards said at the groundbreaking in August 2023, which no local Plaquemines Parish officials attended. “It's also a project that will once again show the rest of the nation, of the world, that Louisiana has what it takes to address the growing threat of land loss and sea level rise.”

Couched in the celebration was a warning. At the groundbreaking, Edwards said the next person in line must “allow science to guide that decision-making.” 

That year, one of the Louisiana fishers’ most powerful allies grew louder. Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, who served as president of Plaquemines Parish for almost a decade, campaigned heavily against the diversion, calling for its cancellation to preserve local fisheries and communities. He was widely considered a would-be frontrunner for the governor’s race.So was then-attorney general Jeff Landry, who used litigation to champion the oil and gas industry. Some of Landry’s positions were unsupported by research, including when he previously labeled climate change a “hoax” in 2018. Nungesser met with Landry in November 2023 before he ultimately declined to run for governor. The sediment diversion was one of the topics they discussed at the meeting.

Near the end of his first year in office, Landry grew vocal against the sediment diversion and railed against the Mid-Barataria’s pricetag. The project had grown more expensive over the years due to the lengthy approval process, and Landry said he worried the state would have to make up the difference if the project cost continued to balloon.

But the state had already secured enough money to pay for construction: $2.26 billion in BP settlement money and $660 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The state was also building the diversion under a program called “construction manager at risk” that required firms to deliver the project under a guaranteed maximum price, reducing the likelihood of a drastic cost increase.

At a November 2024 state Senate transportation committee meeting, Landry also pointed to the plight of the fishers, prioritizing the concerns of the seafood industry.

“This project is going to break our culture,” Landry said. 

Without the project, however, shrimpers, oystermen and other fishers will also miss out on additional aid for their businesses. Dove told The Margin the state doesn’t plan to look into other support for the fishers or communities outside the levee system. He said other coastal projects, like a billion-dollar, 23-mile-long strip of land created through dredging called the Barataria Landbridge, will prevent flooding from future sea level rise. But coastal advocates contest the land bridge's ability to offer protection beyond the next 20 years — the typical lifespan for marsh created through dredging. 

“We don't have to help the fisheries because there's nothing to help. And they're gonna be fine. We're not gonna interrupt what they're doing right now with the fisheries, with the oysters,” Dove said. “We're not gonna hurt fisheries.”

After campaigning to cancel the project, even Encalade had little hope for the future of his fellow oystermen.

Encalade still leads the Louisiana Oysterman Association, but he’s sold all of his oyster boats. For a while, the only thing that kept his oyster business alive was simultaneously owning and operating his own truck operation. He’s sold his 18-wheelers, too. Encalade said he’s thankful his kids chose to go to college and get advanced degrees instead of pursuing the oyster business. He said a lot of his friends who took payouts from the BP oil spill and reinvested it into their oyster business have yet to recover their investment, and it’s hard to find an alternative.

The ripple effects

The lack of progress on the already permitted and funded diversion raised questions from the federal partners charged with disbursing the BP settlement.

After November, Landry and Dove, the chairman of the coastal authority’s governing board, continued to say publicly that the diversion no longer seemed feasible in the long term, due to the cost of operating and maintaining the project once it was opened. Dove estimated maintenance costs included more than a billion dollars of dredging waterways near the project. 

The agency also didn’t make progress toward settling a lawsuit with Plaquemines Parish. The Parish brought litigation challenging the project shortly after the groundbreaking, when the parish issued a work stop order, followed by another within the following four months that left the project in limbo for over a year with little pushback from the Landry administration.

About five months after the November 2024 committee meeting, the Army Corps suspended the diversion’s permit.

“This suspension is based on the State’s actions (including failures to act or to obtain compromise), its public statements and positions, the new information and potentially changed circumstances since permit issuance,” wrote Col. Cullen Jones, the commander and district engineer of the Army Corps’ New Orleans District, in a letter dated April 25, 2025. He noted that the suspension did not reflect the process leading up to the Corps’ 2022 decision to greenlight the diversion. According to the letter, quoting from the Corps’ original permit decision, the benefits of the diversion as originally designed had “slightly outweighed” the project’s cost and consequences. 

A spokesman for the Corps said he couldn’t provide further comment on the Mid-Barataria diversion due to pending litigation.

Quantifying the Effects of the Mid-Barataria Project

The chart below outlines the expected total land area as a result of the Mid-Barataria project with restoration versus without restoration. It includes forecasted scenarios from Year 2 after project completion through Year 50.

The state didn’t contest the permit’s suspension; instead, it requested more time while studying the potential of a sediment diversion that would be five times smaller. 

The state’s last extension request was in July, a little over two weeks before the state’s coastal agency decided to officially terminate the Mid-Barataria project. The termination came after the state had already spent more than half a billion dollars on the diversion. The federal trustees—NOAA, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture—agreed to still reimburse the state for the money spent on the now-canceled project, returning the remaining $1.6 billion of BP oil spill money to the trustees to fund future Louisiana projects. 

Any new project will have to go through the years-long restoration planning process again to receive approval, as well as receive new approval from the Corps. 

In his statement, Dove pledged the coastal agency’s commitment to rebuilding the coast hadn’t wavered, despite canceling a project that had been a key piece of its master plan for 18 years.

The administration recently doubled down on its approach to sediment diversions by quietly withdrawing its permit application for another large-scale sediment diversion. The Mid-Breton Sediment Diversion, while large-scale, would have been smaller than the Mid-Barataria, about two-thirds the size, on the east bank of the river. The coastal agency halted the project with little consultation from its governing board, citing a lack of funding.

Given the cost of Mid-Barataria, the Edwards administration knew there wouldn’t be enough BP settlement dollars to also pay for Mid-Breton,so the future of the project wasn’t secure. However, with Mid-Barataria’s cancellation, state Rep. Jerome Zeringue wondered if that money could have gone to Mid-Breton instead and how the latest cancellation would affect the master plan.

At the October CPRA board meeting, Dove didn’t address the question directly, though he said there will be an impact on the 2029 master plan. But he said the Corps would move forward with a previously authorized slate of restoration projects in the Breton Sound Basin. In a later interview with The Margin, Dove said those projects haven’t been funded yet, but if they are, the move will be cheaper for the state.  

Despite a request from a board member, CPRA agency officials didn’t commit to sharing what the future computer modeling of the Louisiana coastal projects shows after the cancellation of the plan’s sediment diversions. 

New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward sits about 20 miles north of where the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion was projected to build land. The area around New Orleans, including parts of Jefferson Parish, was expected to benefit the most from the wetlands created by the diversion, restoring some of its storm buffer to the south. 

The Lower Ninth Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement & Development is a Black-led organization founded not long after Hurricane Katrina that tries to address environmental issues that lead to disasters as well as advocating for resources in the community. For Arlo Townsley, their Coastal Restoration Coordinator, the project’s cancellation felt like it signaled the loss of a major tool, the river, to help shape the broader future of the region. He said he was excited to see the river managed differently, in a way that built land instead of lost it. 

“It would have meant a lot in terms of projects to come and other avenues of how to build a sustainable future for our coast and the land that we're on,” Townsley said. “Any land that we lose, it brings the Gulf closer to us…So it definitely impacts us [on] that larger scale.”

He said the cancellation also brings up a lot of questions about how to move forward when large-scale projects to reconnect the river are taken off the table. 

His organization has focused on restoring the coast closer to home. The central wetlands of Bayou Bienvenue are nestled in a triangle bordered by New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and St. Bernard Parish. The same canal that funneled storm surge from Hurricane Katrina into the city’s levee system killed off the cypress and tupelo swamps that once buffered the area from storms, leaving behind a ghost swamp. With the closure of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the central wetlands have started to recover. Salinity is low enough for trees to survive again. 

In late October, a group of environmental and coastal advocates clad in Halloween costumes gathered volunteers on party boats to help replant the swamp with 1,000 young baldcypress trees. The planting is part of a larger effort to reforest the swamp with more than 30,000 trees, as well as thousands of plugs of new marsh grass. For Townsley, these plantings felt like a bright spot amid the loss of two sediment diversions. 

“Now that [those] projects don’t exist, that makes the projects that we're doing in the central wetlands a lot more important,” he said, noting that the plantings have been effective so far. 

Amid the dire projections and the uncertainty of coastal restoration, Townsley said it’s hard to imagine whether a city like New Orleans could even exist after another 100 years. 

“It would be an entirely different city, and one that was very much redesigned to live with water, instead of against it,” he said. “The paradigm that has brought us here is like, how do we control, wall off, channelize, and separate ourselves from water.”

Charles Sutcliffe, a senior advisor for resilience at the National Wildlife Federation, said the chances of either sediment diversion being revived, even by a future administration, are slim to none. 

As the boat whipped on the outskirts of Myrtle Grove on that September tour, he noted how the loss of the project leaves the same communities that feared the project stranded. No diversion means no money to help them adapt to a basin that will continue to change with or without the project. Tides that will continue to rise. 

Sutcliffe was named the state’s first Chief Resilience Officer during the Edwards administration. “They're flooding today. They are going to flood more and more and more as time goes on. And there's not even been a discussion about how do we provide that kind of flood relief to them now, outside of the project. To me, that's as offensive as killing a project that's been planned for so long.”

Yet, as the climate projections grow, the scale of the solutions in Louisiana is shrinking. Sutcliffe and Bourg said the priorities have also shifted, focusing more on hard infrastructure than marsh creation.

Bourg added that these changes and choices go against the decades of science that guided the state’s coastal program. 

“If we are saying we are unwilling to have these large-scale restoration projects implemented, we are essentially turning our backs on this part of Louisiana,” she said. 

As the boat floated in Quarantine Bay, where the mighty Mississippi continues to build land through Neptune Pass, Foster Creppel, a Plaquemines Parish resident, shared, 

“As long as we have the Mississippi River, there's hope.” 

***

Disclosure: The author worked at the National Audubon Society from February 2020 to October 2020 as a communications associate.

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