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Transcript
Courtney Naquin: Hey y’all. Wow! Happy Gregorian New Year! It is 2023 now, and we still have more episodes of fantastic interviews with some pretty great people to share with you. For the seventh episode, we’re going to discuss a really critical topic that comes up in many conversations about climate change: land loss and environmental degradation. These topics, especially land loss, are almost impossible to ignore if you’re from or live in Louisiana. But land loss is an issue for all coastal communities from the Gulf and beyond and has an enormous impact on the broader global ecological balance.
It is a complicated topic that involves not just environmental science, but also colonization, politics, and the economy, and as you could probably guess, polluting and extractive industries are major driving forces in land loss and environmental degradation. And if you remember from our previous episodes, polluting industry is also directly involved in colonization, politics, and the economy. So, to help paint a coherent and detailed picture, we interviewed Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at the environmental justice organization, Healthy Gulf, and who also happens to be one of the smartest people that I know.
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Naomi Yoder: My name is Naomi Yoder, I use they/them pronouns. I am a staff scientist at regional nonprofit Healthy Gulf, so we work in the Gulf of Mexico, the five Gulf states, and we tend to focus on coastal issues but everything is sort of connected, so we go wherever the work goes. So, um, Healthy Gulf is an organization which, our purpose is to collaborate with and serve communities who love the Gulf of Mexico. And to do that, we provide research, communications, and coalition building tools, all of which are needed to reverse the long pattern of over-exploitation of the Gulf’s natural resources. So we are community and environment based and my work tends to center around doing environmental research and, sometimes, field work to support our campaigns and, um, any of our work. So, I’m based in Houston, Texas. Most of our organization is based in Louisiana, but we have staff in Mississippi and Florida.
Courtney Naquin: Awesome, thank you. So today we’re gonna talk about a very complex issue of environmental degradation, both in terms of land loss but also in terms of just like how fracking and the fracked gas industry impact the physical environment and what that might mean for wildlife and for the people and communities that live in these areas that are highly industrialized. And much of this land is wetlands such as marshes and chenieres - and people are actively being displaced from their homes because of land loss, especially Indigenous and Historically Black communities. And it’s also really impacting things like the fishing and shrimping and oyster industry. So, I’m hoping, can you unpack that land loss statistic and also just talk pretty broadly about the scale of loss happening in the Gulf?
Naomi Yoder: Yeah so, a lot of this comes back to the Mississippi River. So, the mighty Mississippi is kind of driving some of these things just because people want to live on the river. We’ve come to use the river for transportation for goods and products and people. So, the river is kind of like central to this story. And across Louisiana, across the Gulf coast, you know, the fresh water sources that are pouring into the gulf are integral to the story of land loss all along the Gulf. So, part of why I’m saying that is because if we think about how land is built in the first place, how do we have land? Building comes from sediment that’s delivered by rivers. So, there are a couple of exceptions, but that is the major way that land is built, right, at least on the coast. So if our sediment budget, let's talk about a budget, if we have less sediment coming in you know going into land than we do leaving, then we’re gonna be losing land. And essentially that’s what’s happened. So how has that happened? We have, I think of four major contributors.
One is gonna be river constraints so we have channelized, dredged, and levied the river so that it now no longer floods over its banks, which is the primary method of land building. In order for, like, a healthy river to function building land, it needs to over top its banks and flood into the floodplain with this kind of sheet flow. And so we, we have made it so we constrain the river. Geologically that doesn't really work for the river because, now the river can't build land, it wont move. it’s not doing its normal river things, right? So river constraint and channelization is one.
Another is subsidence, and oil and gas extraction contributes to subsidence in a huge way. So, I’m gonna talk about oil and gas contributes to land loss in several ways in Louisiana, and one of them is through subsidence. So actually subsidence means land sinking. And so subsidence occurs naturally but what’s happened is, we sped that system up so that it’s occurring, more quickly than it would in a natural unaided system. So subsidence occurs for several reasons but one of them is, if we extract oil and gas from the substrate, from the ground, that land will be more likely to sink. So um, I think of it like a sponge. New Orleans is sitting on a big sponge and, you know, (laughs) if we start taking out water or oil and gas, if we start pumping that stuff out, the land is just gonna sink.
Climate change and sea level rise are another one which also ties back to oil and gas. We kind of can’t separate oil and gas from land loss anywhere, but in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast particularly, primarily because of climate change. I mean, we also have land loss from these extractive procedures as I was saying.
And then the last reason that we have land loss is from canals, and canals built often for oil and gas, maintenance canals, access canals, and also for pipelines. You know, sometimes canals are for transportation, but the vast majority of them in southern Louisiana are for oil and gas extraction or access. And, you know, we have these pipelines across the Atchafalaya river basin that, it’s been called the “Great Wall” for water and therefore for any animals that live in the water and use the water. So we have this kind of bathtub effect caused by pipelines. What happens when we create a pipeline, or what used to happen at least all the time was digging a trench and then piling that stuff that was in the trench on the sides of the canal, this channel, so you’re effectively creating like, a levied canal, you know, in that process. So all of those things make it so that the water flow is changing and then the sediment delivery is also changing. Or in other cases, the water from the ocean is coming in and taking over. So, that’s a long story (laughs) to tell you about how there’s a lot going on and all of these, this is the reason that Louisiana has such a high rate of land loss.
Courtney Naquin: Thank you so much for um, that really in depth answer because I think it's important to understand, what occurs naturally and how to distinguish between what occurs naturally and what doesn’t and, of course, this is an unnaturally fast process of land loss. I want to ask more about how oil and gas has played into land loss and elaborate a bit more. Because, for example, you know, you mentioned oil and gas operations impact our land and habitats in many ways, from construction and dredging and pollution events creating these canals, and also through greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. And, in a recent episode, General Honoré helped make the connection between hurricanes and oil and gas operations. But, can you go more into detail about how you see industry operations impacting wetlands, deserts in the Permian, um, and different ecosystems and habitats along the frack cycle?
Naomi Yoder: Yeah that’s, I feel like it's a really big story, it's a long story. (laughs) A lot of southern Louisiana is wetlands. And so, when we talk about land loss, we’re not only talking about wetlands, but pretty much in south Louisiana, we are (laughs). So that's another thing to keep in mind, is we have not only loss, you know, subsidence happens in the Permian Basin too, it's that we have wetlands loss. And that is one of the key pieces here that we’re really concerned about, because you know, we’re concerned about land loss anywhere right but in this case, wetlands are this kind of, you know, heart for the whole system of the ecosystem. It’s like this beating pulsing thing that keeps the place alive so, you know, we need them. (laughs) And so oil and gas and industry impacts wetlands in several ways.
One of them is just a directly the footprint of the physical place. So you know, people wanted to live along the river,and so what happened is, both sides of the Mississippi were just crowded with plantations, you know. And that’s where people were enslaved. And so now, you look at that footprint of those plantation lines, right, and now you see industry. So it's kind of been replaced. If you can imagine that transposition, there’s a buffer along the river, you know, enslaved people and the plantations that they were forced to work on, then you put, you know, now you put in industry. It’s like you’re just clearing that same land. And so, you know, a plantation might have had sugar cane or something, or indigo, something that was, that did actually have kind of wetlands, you know, involved, or at least there was something growing there. So what’s happened is, like, you know, it’s socially also connected because there’s one system of oppression to another. But, the actual campuses of these chemical complexes and all the industry has come in and taken over and cleared those wetlands. So that’s, that’s still an enormous impact. So, another thing I was saying before about canals, that’s another really big impact to wetlands across, you know, anywhere there’s oil wells being drilled. In order for the oil well to function, you know, you have to have either a pipeline or, some system of transportation to get that material to where it’s going. So, you have to be able to access it, right?
So that’s what’s also happened is that we have like, you know, these wetlands carved up and, you know, dredged out. So there’s, there’s dredge and fill, and both of them destroy wetlands, right? Both of them are involved in building any kind of oil and gas infrastructure, building most of our infrastructure, you know? I mean, this isn’t just limited to oil and gas, it’s about other types of infrastructure as well and urban development, stuff like that. But when we’re talking about oil and gas, it's this huge impact. Both the campuses and the facilities that are big terminals, but then also this kind of sprawling network of wells, canals, and pipelines.
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Courtney Naquin: So I want to ask another question a bit more about industry development, just in mapping all of these wells and industry infrastructure that people may or may not be aware about. There’s still like you know active industry facilities and some that are still currently being built, even in some of the most vulnerable areas that, personally, I find surprising that they would be allowed to be built there. I was wondering if we could talk a bit about that, cause there is a big push, you know, to export fracked gas around the world and we’re seeing a huge buildout of LNG export terminals along the coast, especially in southwest Louisiana. A few are already built and exporting. Can you talk a bit about some of the proposed Gulf projects that you’re particularly worried about in terms of impacts on wetlands, habitats, and land loss?
Naomi Yoder: Yeah, um. I’m worried about any project that impacts wetlands and contributes to land loss (laughs) in the Gulf coast. So let’s just say that up front. I can't, there’s so many (laughs) and it's not only oil and gas, right? It’s commercial development and unchecked suburban development. There's a lot of other places that are just chipping away at wetlands and you know, you get a big effect when you add them all together. It’s another piece of the problem that's really difficult to get at. We can’t point to one thing and say, like, this facility is the worst, you know? It’s that there's, you know, so basically what I think I'm getting at is the problem is that what do we hold valuable as society right? We don’t value our wetlands. We don’t hold wetlands as one of our values. I mean, I do. But, you know, I can’t influence the oil and gas industry. I can't influence the oil and gas lobby. So, I can lobby against them maybe, but that’s not the same as we have a social contract that says we’re going to preserve and protect wetlands or coastal lands. So that said, (laughs) there are facilities that I’m particularly concerned with because of the number and the scale of them.
So two of those sectors that I'm particularly worried about are liquified fossil gas or LNG export terminals because the vast majority of LNG work in the U.S. is export at this point. So we have very few import facilities. So, we’re thinking about exports. And then the other is deep water offshore oil courts that are also for export. So both of those things, about LNG and oil, deep water oil and carbon capture actually, is that they’re all presented as, well we’re doing something good. The industry is saying, look, gas is so much cleaner than coal, isn’t that fantastic? Shouldn’t we just use gas everywhere for energy? They’re sort of skipping the fact that gas is a fossil fuel. You know, that one burns cleaner than the other, yeah that’s better, but it doesn’t mean that it’s not a fossil fuel and we’re not still trying to get a different solution to using fossil fuels, which is the key, we’re trying to stop using fossil fuels. Isn’t that what we are all trying, anyway. It’s, so there’s a disconnect with like what is our goal here, right?
And so then like for deep water offshore oil ports, the reason those are being proposed is you know ostensibly, because right now if you want to fill a huge tanker, they’re called very large crude carriers and they’re bigger than, like, panamax, kind of vessels they’re enormous. They’re I think that it’s right that VLCCs can’t fit through the Panama Canal, they’re too big. These are huge, huge vessels. If you have a huge vessel, that means that you’re able to more efficiently transport the material. They’re saying, we should use huge vessels because then we have fewer trips across the ocean to carry this stuff. Okay. So there’s one argument of why is this better, and then the other thing is that right now, if you want to fill one of those very large crude carriers, you have to power a vessel, another smaller vessel, back and forth from the shoreline refinery storage facility to that VLCC. So, that creates a lot more, there’s emissions involved in all of this. Whenever a vessel is being loaded, there’s VOCs and other air pollutants that are emitted. So there’s pollution plus there’s fuel that’s used.
So the industry is like, hey, so we can save all of this fuel if we just build a port that’s deep enough so that these VLCCs can come in and load from there. So it needs a pipeline and it needs a platform and it needs a whole loading facility. But again, like, why is that the solution? Is that what we really want to be doing? You know, and so there are so many “solutions” coming from the industry, and from really smart people that have really good intentions, to be fair. But they’re not good ideas, so that’s part of what we’re trying to do is point out that those are not good ideas. Those are not actual solutions for the problem, which is to move away from fossil fuels, stop using fossil fuels. So, if you’re operating a deep offshore oil port, that’s not your goal, right? Your goal is to be able to use more fossil fuels, which is kind of what it seems like. This is just to say that most of the facilities, the very large facilities that um, are popping up and being proposed around the Gulf coast are facilities like this, that kind of pose some kind of a solution and make themselves seem like they’re the good guys, right? When in fact, it’s just more of the same, it’s like, kind of not business as usual because it’s a different thing (laughs), but it’s not the change that we need. Why aren’t we talking about stopping using fossil fuels, you know?
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Courtney Naquin: Can you talk a bit about wildlife impacts and how it might impact different animals and ecosystems just along the frack cycle, from the Permian into the Gulf coast?
Naomi Yoder: Yeah, um, that’s a poignant and sad story about ecosystems Everywhere you look, you know, as soon as you pull a thread, you unravel this whole thing. But there’s a valuable ecosystem there. We think about the fragility of an ecosystem, oh it’s so fragile. Instead I would kind of reframe that and say, let’s think about value. These ecosystems are valuable. We need them. So, if we think about it that way, then we start to sort of have this idea of ecosystem services. So you know, it’s essentially assigning monetary value to, you know, an ecosystem, right? So when we turn that and say okay ecosystems are valuable. Well, why? Because oyster systems filter the water or aquifers are replenished from surface water filtering through the soil and becoming groundwater and that purifies it in the process. So there’s these things that we have never, we haven’t quantified enough. So, you know, in our past [laughs] we’ve never really put a value on those things, aside from an aesthetic or spiritual value, right. So now, if we say, well actually we do need, you know, the rain to be functioning properly and not acidic, then we can put a value on drinking water. I’m not trying to say that we should just assign monetary value to everything. It’s more that it helps us to understand that ecosystems are valuable to us in so many ways. As soon as you, you know, throw a stone, you know, you hit a valuable piece of an ecosystem.
And so, that’s like the golden cheeked warbler for example. There’s a golden cheeked warbler example for everything. There’s something somewhere that we are impacting whether it be our own lives or you know wildlife or other organisms that are important. It’s not about this species, it’s about our spiritual question of like, what do we want to have here? And if we want to have a functioning, thriving river, then we need everything else that’s involved in that. It’s a spiritual question but it’s also a social and values question. What do we want to preserve and then if we decide on that, then what level do we need? What level of preservation do we need and how do we get there? So, it ends up being really, like, a story about greed and capitalism and environmental injustice. We can’t agree on what level of preservation we want because, we are entirely as a society, not like you and me, but just, the larger we are focused on profit. Profit is the thing that we need. Profit is what shareholders need. Profit is what the corporation needs. So, we can’t agree on, you know, we need to have a certain level of preservation, right?
Back in the early aughts, there was a study about the outlay of money that would be required to have enough protected areas to protect biodiversity across the world. And they’re talking about funding existing protected areas, buying new ones, and then staffing all of those things. So this is the budget. And back in the early aughts, that budget was 45 billion dollars per year. And so, to put this in a context. That’s about 10% of the U.S. military budget per year, just the U.S. military budget. It sounds like a lot, but it’s not a large amount. And so, you know, we can do that. We have the knowledge and the ability that we could do that. We just don’t. It’s because we haven’t made that a priority, you know? And we haven’t said, okay, you know, we need to value our ecosystems and our ecosystem services in a way that protects us, because we need those things. We haven’t made that connection yet.
Courtney Naquin: Heard. The value of ecosystems is, well it’s invaluable. I wish that the U.S. could have its own pachamama. For those who don’t know what that is, I think it’s Ecuador that established pachamama, it’s rites of nature that was largely influenced by the Indigenous people there. But it’s saying that nature has a right to, you know, exist and be undisturbed. Underlying all of that, nature is, like we are not separable by nature. We are impacted by everything that happens to it, so thank you for raising that. It’s like, it’s a values issue as well.
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Courtney Naquin: I have just a couple thoughts and questions to end on. I would like to end with this note of you know, value, and why the ecosystem is so important. But also, what solutions there are and what has been working and where people can be plugged in to. So, uh, in terms of that, I would like to get your thoughts on mitigation efforts and coastal restoration projects, or even a restoration project even not on the coast. There are restoration projects happening anywhere along the frack cycle or beyond. Coastal restoration sounds good but what is the reality? What can state and federal agencies do to better support these efforts? And could restoration work? How would they play out if you were to replace the extractive economy and employ people with a new kind of restorative work?
Naomi Yoder: Yeah. Great questions. So, mitigation restoration, um. So, one of the pieces of good news in Louisiana is um, that you know, you can’t be an elected official without talking about land loss as an issue. It is a central issue across the aisle, which is amazing. I haven’t seen that in many other places, where there’s an environmental issue that is bipartisan, and is of deep concern, despite any other values. So, that in my opinion is kind of a win, that we have unity on this priority. Where it starts to break down is in the details, of course, right? And it’s back to, you know, in order to deal with land loss, and you know, ecosystem values, we have to have a whole toolbox, you know? And right now, we have a pretty limited toolbox. And so the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority is kind of the agency in Louisiana that’s overseeing a lot of this. And CPRA, you know, they have incredible scientists and have an incredible amount of people doing, you know, really good work. It’s that a lot of that doesn’t get translated into action. So what happens is, there’s um, CPRA releases for every parish, for every coastal parish, what will, what is the current projected land loss under climate change scenarios. What is the flooding situation like?
So they have like, they’ve done a lot of this work and then, then we can start to think about what we need to do. And so, they have restoration projects and they have beach replenishment, beach nourishment. They have barrier islands that they’ve built. They have mid-Barataria sediment diversion for example. They have all of these, what I call, engineered solutions, you know, restoration projects that involve building something in order to encourage or build restoration lands. Some of their other plans are what’s called nonstructural. So, what that means is like, elevating homes and businesses, elevating buildings so there can be flooding. Bringing the water into neighborhoods. Like, allowing water to be in residential areas in the city or wherever, instead of trying to keep the water out all the time. Like having ways that the water can come in and that we won’t be destroyed. So, elevating is one of the ways to do that. We could have a prohibition on slabs on buildings. That would be a huge step forward. We haven’t done that. There are all of these things that are available to us that we need to be implementing. And that would be significantly less costly in a lot of cases than a sediment diversion, for example. But you know, for all of these different reasons, we haven't done that.
I guess I want to say that I do feel encouraged in a lot of ways. When we get into the details of it, there’s a lot that needs to still be done. And there’s a lot of, like, expanding our tools and actually implementing some of those things that CPRA has laid out, instead of prioritizing restoration from dredging. There’s another piece of restoration that we need to talk about as a society which is the beneficial use of dredged material programs, and that’s a wonky term for what happens with material that's extracted from wetlands. So, we dredge the wetlands, we clear the wetlands to make room for a new site and then that dredged material is sediment, right? So, they put it somewhere that it will build land. But so, there needs to be a lot better situation there for us to actually use dredged material beneficially. I also think we need to talk about dredging as its own huge issue. Are we really gonna be able to continue to do what we’ve been doing with dredging for all of the industry and all of the transportation needs that we have? I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like it, right? We need to talk about that, and what to do instead of being like, well let’s just create more dredge piles over there. It’s a huge issue and we haven’t gotten away from it.
The other thing that I wanna say is that there are other really good ideas that I’ve heard about that are what I would call more nature based solutions for restoration and so I’ve looked at this in several places, but Texas in particular. In Texas right now, in Galveston Bay, there’s a proposal to make a huge coastal barrier, including gates that would wall off the Galveston Bay from the Gulf of Mexico during a storm. Plus then, like a sand levy for all along the peninsula. It’s an enormous project. And it’s complete folly. So one of the things that I heard about is a response to that, like what could we do. And this is true for so many places that there’s coastal erosion happening that might not even be connected to an industry, it’s just sea level rise is making this happen, right?
One of the things we could do is like build what’s called a sand motor and you essentially capture the sand that’s migrating down the coast through the currents, instead of dredging and trying to find all this sediment somewhere and put it in this place where it's not really going to stay, we can build structures that are minimal that will trap the existing sand and try to help us build land with something that’s not actually going to destroy a huge amount of space in the construction of it. There are really hopeful things that I could see with mitigation and restoration, but you know there's a lot that we need to do as well. We still also have a pretty big gap in what’s happening with wetlands mitigation. So once wetlands are destroyed, the Clean Water Act dictates that we have to have a mitigation response. And so that is enacted in many many cases, but those mitigation banks and the ways that there’s mitigation going on, there needs to be a lot more money there and effort at looking at what’s really happening. Are we really mitigating?
One other thing you said was how can we, will this be like jobs for people and, absolutely. There’s a project right now that’s being proposed . It is to backfill some of those canals that we were just talking about. And you know, this is not like the universal solution you know, there’s fishermen, people that depend on those canals now too. It’s looking at targeted ecosystems and saying why don’t we employ people to actually knock those artificial levees down that are making those walls to hydrology. So there’s a lot of opportunities for doing this restoration work that is really important that we could be putting our money and effort towards.
Courtney Naquin: Thank you so much for going into more depth about coastal restoration and restoration projects in general. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to speak with us and we were really into the weeds about these really complex issues, but I think it was really informative and I'm really excited to see how this episode comes out.
Naomi Yoder: Yeah, thanks, you too. I'm happy to talk to people more about some of the details if things are confusing. There’s no such thing as a stupid question so I always want, if there’s something that doesn't make sense that you'd like to talk to me about, I'd love to offer that to people. To you and to any listeners. You can email me, naomi@healthygulf.org, or you know we can connect somehow and you know I just hope that we all continue to learn and grow together, and that we’re gonna actually like to find the solutions that we need.
Courtney Naquin: If this episode moved you in any way, please share with your friends, family, and colleagues. And subscribe so you don’t miss out on any future episodes. If you’re curious about how to get involved in the movement against fracked gas and polluting industries in the Gulf Coast, checkout our website at breakingthecycle.org for more information. And if you really want to go the distance, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Those reviews go a long way in spreading our reach, so please hit us up.
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Courtney Naquin: I’ve been Courtney Naquin, your host. Thanks to Roddy Hughes, our producer, Thomas Walsh, our editor, Pearly Gates, for her tunes, and our project manager, Natalie McLendon, and to all of you for listening. We hope you’ll be back for our next episode. See you then!