Posted on October 14, 2024
Jonathan Phillips says he thinks about Louisiana’s disappearing coastline every day.
As a commercial fisherman and member of the Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha tribe, he sees water levels rising in Plaquemines Parish firsthand. He grew up in Marrero but spent a lot of time as a child in Grand Bayou Indian Village, a small community in south Plaquemines Parish that is being threatened by the effects of climate change — rising sea levels, more intense tropical storms and land loss. With the erosion of barrier islands — which protect wetlands from storm surge and saltwater intrusion — life on the bayou is getting more precarious, said Phillips, whose parents moved back to the village after raising him in Marrero.
As “soon as the tide got high you see the marsh floating away,” Phillips told Verite News, referring to Hurricane Francine, which struck southeast Louisiana last month. “Next strong storm will come and take it all away.”
Communities like Grand Bayou, located outside the federal levee system, are increasingly vulnerable to storms as the shoreline recedes.
Over the past 60 years, the land-to-water ratio in Grand Bayou has been steadily decreasing, according to the University of New Orleans study. In 1968, there was more than twice as much land than there was water; now the village is mostly water. The church, Evening Light Tabernacle, and the houses that make up the village are only accessible by boat. It has suffered one of the highest rates of land loss on the state’s coastline, based on a 2011 study published in the Journal of Coastal Research.
Phillips, who still lives in Marrero but continues to visit the village often, said the Grand Bayou is his “paradise.” Still, the village has changed since he was a child — the land used to be higher and the marsh grass didn’t grow so close to houses. As time passed and land loss made storms more devastating, many people moved away from the village, including John’s family.
“It’s hard to live here and lose everything,” Phillips said. “Take a chance of losing everything every year. So, you’re kind of forced to… move away.”
Now, in order to protect the community from the effects of land loss, the tribe is partnering with the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, an environmental nonprofit, to bring life back to the area by building reefs out of recycled oyster shells throughout the village.
Over four days in September, volunteers with the coalition constructed oyster reefs to protect areas that would otherwise be impacted by erosion from high tides and storms.
Rosina Philippe, a council elder and a traditional knowledge holder for the tribe who works on coastal restoration in the area, was at the second day of the reef building project. She said that growing up in the village was idyllic.
“Everything that we needed was here,” she said.
But with the fracturing and disappearance of the marshland, Grand Bayou has lost much of what once made life possible.
For many years, members of the tribe lived independently, surviving off the land and finding sustenance through small-scale farming, fishing and bartering. In the past five to six years, they have grown more dependent on grocery stores because land erosion and saltwater intrusion have made growing crops and raising livestock more difficult. With high levels of salt in the remaining land, dead trees aren’t an uncommon sight in the bayou. Philippe attributes the lack of animal life, especially birds, to the loss of the marshlands.
