Posted on November 12, 2025
Along a stretch of marsh at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana, Cajun boatmen ferried 200 tons of oyster shells to where the wetlands meet the gulf. Members of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana and volunteers stood on hills of oyster shells, loading the shells into buckets before packing them into wirework containers called gabions. They then lowered the gabions into the water to form an artificial reef.
The shells had quite a journey before returning to the salty ocean from which they came: They were recycled from restaurants in Louisiana’s two largest cities, New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Today, that oyster reef sits in the waters off Cocodrie, a 300-person fishing community whose name comes from the Cajun French word for alligator.
CRCL’s reef is just one example of Louisiana’s extensive coastal restoration efforts, which are necessary acts of stewardship in a landscape disappearing faster than almost anywhere in the world. On some parts of the coastline, land is receding so rapidly that the equivalent of a football field is lost every 100 minutes. With the recent cancellation of two extensive restoration projects that were funded mostly with Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement money, small-scale efforts are perhaps more important than ever.
Fiona Lightbody, who coordinates the oyster recycling program at CRCL, stood on a dock overlooking Terrebonne Bay as she explained the twofold benefit of the oyster reef: It will replenish the marsh’s ecosystem while also slowing down land loss.
“The reef is there to grow oysters, but also to prevent the wave energy from hitting the marsh edge and eating away at the soil, which would then disrupt the roots and cause the plants to float away,” she said. “By slowing that wave energy, the reef creates a nice little safe zone for invertebrates and other creatures to thrive, and it slows the erosion.”
In Cocodrie, Louisiana, shells are deposited by the bucketful to form a reef nearly a quarter-mile long.
In addition to planting cypress forests and other native plants to revitalize coastal ecosystems, CRCL has built eight oyster reefs since the shell recycling program was founded in 2014. Most of the group’s reefs, Lightbody said, are about 400 feet long and contain 200 tons of oyster shells.
The organization built this particular reef at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, or LUMCON, a research facility at one of the southernmost points in the state. The site attracts student tour groups and other visitors, making it an ideal place to educate the public about coastal restoration.
To build the oyster reef, CRCL collaborated with the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, a conglomerate of Native American tribes who have dwelled along the Gulf Coast for millennia. The idea behind the oyster reef came from an age-old process: Putting oyster shells back into the environment from which they came is something that Indigenous Americans and oystermen have practiced throughout history.
“If you’re an oysterman, you probably do this automatically. You know if you put your shell back into the water, baby oysters are going to grow on it,” James Karst, the communications director of CRCL, said.
For Devon Parfait, chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, fighting land loss is tied to the survival of his community. That is part of why his tribe worked with CRCL to build the oyster reef.
“Historically, when colonization was happening, these Native communities were pushed as far down south as they could possibly go,” he said. “They used to be able to ride a horse and buggy out to the barrier islands. These days, they’re just sparse little islands that people are arguing about protecting.”
Chief Devon Parfait sees environmental stewardship as a tenet of leading a Native American community in South Louisiana.
Parfait, who is trained as a geological scientist, emphasized the importance of combining Indigenous knowledge of the land with data-based approaches. He used both types of understanding to determine if the build site could support oysters.
“I did my own testing for salinity, which is basically sticking your finger in the water and seeing how salty it is,” he said. “To me, it’s about combining these two different wealths of knowledge—the on-the-ground, lived, generational experience and the institutional expertise—because you need both. If you look at the world with just one, you’re really viewing the world with one eye closed.”
The salinity testing ruled out the original location for the oyster reef—a less salty marsh that lies over an ancient Indigenous burial mound. But the LUMCON site offers advantages of its own. “Too often, you see a lot of these coastal projects that happen totally off somewhere in the distance,” Parfait said. “Our idea was to have a living shoreline that people can come and see and interact with.”
The manmade oyster reef is just one example of nature-based solutions to land loss, which have become more common over the past 20 years.
“In the past, when it came to trying to protect land, everything was about putting in a solid structure or building a wall that keeps things intact, but then you’ve disconnected those wetlands from the estuary next to it, and you don’t have the natural processes taking place,” said Brian Roberts, the chief scientist at LUMCON. “With these projects, we’re trying to figure out, ‘What is nature doing well on its own, and how do we take advantage of that?’”
What’s novel about CRCL’s approach to erosion control is its source. Recycling shells from restaurants is “a way of connecting with the culture of South Louisiana, connecting with our restaurants,” Karst said. “Everybody eats food, everybody loves our food and our seafood, and so we’re bringing people who like to eat oysters into coastal restoration.” The shell recycling program shows no signs of slowing down: Not only did CRCL join forces with the National Football League to build a reef earlier this year, it also plans to build its next oyster reef in April 2026 in collaboration with the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana. This one will include 300 tons of oyster shells.
Small-scale coastal restoration projects, such as the oyster reef, are one piece of a statewide effort that has led to the investment of billions of dollars into safeguarding Louisiana’s coastline. For nearly two decades, coastal rebuilding in Louisiana has been guided by a comprehensive Coastal Master Plan. The plan, now in its fifth iteration, was initially spurred on by the immensely destructive Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005.
“After Katrina and Rita, we said, ‘Here in Louisiana, we have to change the way we do business,’” said Simone Maloz, the campaign director for the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition. “What we want for Louisiana’s future has to be rooted in science, and it has to involve and engage all the communities that we’re trying to restore and protect.”
The Coastal Master Plan made Louisiana a leader not just in coastal restoration but also in disaster relief. What sets it apart, Maloz said, is the fact that the projects detailed in the plan often originate from Louisiana residents, not state or federal administrators. “We ask community members to submit projects, and we have meetings with them all along the way,” she said. “It’s nice to be a leader in that area, and now other states are also trying to use that same kind of method so that they can leverage their own resources.”
In addition to community-level projects, the Coastal Master Plan includes large-scale projects, such as the diversion of sediment from the Mississippi River to restore degrading wetlands, which the river once helped create. Two such projects, the Mid-Barataria and Mid-Breton sediment diversions, started in 2023 after a yearslong process of planning and permitting.
However, a change in state administration shook things up: Louisiana elected Jeff Landry, a Republican, as governor in 2024. He paused the sediment diversions shortly after he assumed office and fully canceled them in the summer of 2025. “To spend over $700 million on two projects in over 10 years, and to stop them in their tracks, is definitely something that we are going to have to deal with the consequences of,” Maloz said.
The cancellations have raised concerns about whether Louisiana can maintain its restoration momentum, and what scale of intervention is possible without the sediment diversions.
“We’re always trying to plug into the Coastal Master Plan,” Franziska Trautmann said. She operates Glass Half Full, a nonprofit that restores the coastline using recycled glass turned to sand. “Our projects are smaller—we’re not diverting a river. We plug in the holes where the bigger master plan can’t really focus. But now that big projects like this are being canceled, who’s gonna fill that gap? Because it can’t be us.”
For now, volunteers are stepping up to try to fill that gap and are involved in every step of the process. The people helping to build the CRCL reef pick restaurant refuse from oyster-shell piles six feet high. They shovel shells into buckets, load the buckets onto boats, and ride the boats to the build site, dumping shells by the bucketful into the gabions.
To Parfait, community is the strongest force left against coastal erosion. “Fear doesn’t bring action in people as much as love and community does,” he said. “When something happens, everybody shows up and helps each other out, no matter who you are, what you identify as. That’s how Native Americans were able to survive down here in Louisiana—we created a sense of community that extended far beyond any of our own personal identities.”
