Art on the Water: CHAISE ÎLE in Bayou Bienvenue

CHAISE ÎLE is a site specific installation sculpture made for the damaged Bayou Bienvenue at the top of the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Artist Roy Staab's sculpture is made of tall bamboo with cantenary lines made of bundled blood-weed [harvested from the land near the site]. This video shows how nature works with the art from wind when the lines move to the quiet still reflection of the early morning sunrise light that John Taylor caught and the evening sunset that Katie Holten found. Made with the help of A Studio in the Woods staff and recent resident Benjamin Morris and a few others.

News from LSU's Coastal Sustainability Studio: New Course on Wetland Revitalization Kicks Off

This week a major component of the CSS’s drive towards revitalization of our coastal wetlands begins with the first day of a new trans-disciplinary course at LSU. “Disturbed Systems” is a multi-level class in which geologists, environmental managers, and landscape architects will come together to design a coastal restoration project for Cheniere Caminada, a regressive beach ridge plain in Southeast Louisiana which has undergone significant changes in recent history due to human interaction.

The design projects chosen by student teams will start by first defining and then critically evaluating the variety of ecological and man-made systems at work in varying scales on the site. The students will then address this layered issue by offering design guidelines and a vision for intervention that seeks to revitalize this unique piece of coastal Wetlands.

This is the first course of it’s kind being offered at the school, using the trans-disciplinary working methods of the CSS  as model for collaboration

via css.lsu.edu

NOLA.com: Louisiana coastal restoration 50-year blueprint released

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune

Declaring Louisiana’s loss of coastal wetlands “nothing short of a national emergency,” state officials today released a $50 billion, 50-year strategy for rebuilding land and increasing protection from storm surge for coastal communities that they say can be paid for with money the state is reasonably sure it will receive.

The strategy is outlined in the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority’s draft five-year master plan update, which for the first time contains maps showing the location and scope of proposed projects and maps showing what the state’s coastline will look like in 2061 if they’re built. Lists of the projects also show their cost.

The master plan was made available on the Web Thursday  at noon at www.coastalmasterplan.la.gov.

Also included is a map showing the wetlands loss that will occur by 2061 if the master plan isn’t implemented and the extent of flooding from storm surges that will accompany a 100-year hurricane in 2061 if the projects aren’t built.

The document makes clear that some smaller coastal communities, and some segments of rapidly eroding coastal wetlands, will be losers in the expensive race to restoration. READ MORE >>

via www.nola.com

Read through the entire draft plan below:

Open publication - Free publishing - More coast

PBS: Public Lab Produces Wetlands Maps From Balloon and Kite Flights

By Stewart Long

The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) is an organization and membership community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. Public Laboratory's mapping tools, openly available and easy to use, are putting the ability to do processes such as georectifying in the hands of people who may have never created a map.  

Using aerial mapping techniques, residents and volunteers of the Gulf Coast region began field mapping trips in 2010 to document the impact of the BP oil spill. Between May 2010 and April 2011, tens of thousands of images were collected and 50 regional maps created. Between May and October 2011, Public Laboratory partnered with Dr. Alex Kolker, from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium to begin a bi-monthly monitoring of select oil impacted and non-impacted sites in the Barataria Bay region. The intent of this phase of wetlands mapping was to monitor change over time with high-resolution aerial and ground imagery.

Wilkinson Bay in Louisiana.

READ MORE HERE >>

via www.pbs.org

Ebb & Flow: Art by Roy Staab at Bayou Bienvenue

On December 17th, artist Roy Staab, the third fellow in a series by A Studio In The Woods called Ebb & Flow, installed a temporary art piece in Bayou Bienvenue entitled Chaise Ile.

"Ebb & Flow is a 6-week residency based on the premise that Southern Louisiana can be seen as a microcosm of the global environment, manifesting both the challenges and possibilities inherent in human interaction with urban and natural ecosystems. We ask artists to describe in detail how the region will affect their work, to propose a public component to their residency and to suggest ways in which they will engage with the local community."

The CSED would like to thank Mr. Staab and also A Studio In The Woods for choosing the Lower 9th Ward as the site for this installation. Standing on the platform is already a moving experience, but Mr. Staab's piece causes one to pause and reflect longer on the implications of what one is seeing: a degraded ecosystem, impermanent, yet still clinging to life.

Sewage latest weapon in Louisiana's coastal fight (VIDEO)

Great piece on Bayou Bienvenue restoration recently on New Orleans' WVUE!

John Taylor, a lifelong ninth ward resident, recalls trapping for nutria in the 1960's in the area of swamp known as the "central wetlands."

The cypress swamp of Taylor's childhood looked like something out of a different world, a 30,000 acre area of lush forests and coastal marsh.

Taylor, now 64, watched in dismay over the years as salt water intruding from the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet killed the trees.

Katrina wiped out what was left.

"You couldn't see to the other side," Taylor said, as he looked out over an open bay where forest once stood.

Thursday, Taylor was among those wielding a shovel as politicians broke ground on a project designed to bring the first little patch of that swamp back to life.

The $10 million wetlands assimilation project will let loose treated sewage to act as fertilizer.

"It really sends a message to the rest of America that it's critically important that we rebuild all of New Orleans, all of St. Bernard," Mayor Mitch Landrieu told a crowd of onlookers.

To demonstrate the concept, New Orleans will build a man-made swamp over 20 acres, including cypress trees planted up to 1,200 feet from the sewage plant."You couldn't see to the other side," Taylor said, as he looked out over an open bay where forest once stood.

Thursday, Taylor was among those wielding a shovel as politicians broke ground on a project designed to bring the first little patch of that swamp back to life.

The $10 million wetlands assimilation project will let loose treated sewage to act as fertilizer.

"It really sends a message to the rest of America that it's critically important that we rebuild all of New Orleans, all of St. Bernard," Mayor Mitch Landrieu told a crowd of onlookers.

To demonstrate the concept, New Orleans will build a man-made swamp over 20 acres, including cypress trees planted up to 1,200 feet from the sewage plant. READ MORE >>

via www.fox8live.com

Cypress swamp near Lower 9th Ward will be restored as hurricane defense | NOLA.com

PHOTO: Darryl Malek-Wiley

Local leaders announced Thursday the beginning of a project to restore a key area of cypress swampland near the Lower 9th Ward, an effort they called essential to protecting the metro area in the event of another major hurricane.

Swinging shovels full of dirt, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro said the eventual restoration of the 30,000-acre triangle of the once-vibrant Central Wetlands will be part of the several lines of defense that will keep the area safe from storm surge.

The project, first proposed by the Sewerage & Water Board's environmental affairs division, is being built by the water board and St. Bernard Parish.  The first phase, which will restore 2,300 acres, will cost $10 million and will be paid for by the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program, which is financed by offshore oil revenue. Another $30 million will be made available to expand the effort in the next few years.

“This is one of those bright spots where governments join together, crossing parish lines in Louisiana, and do something good for the public, good for the future of all of our communities,” Taffaro said.

“It really sends a message to the rest of America that its critically important that we rebuild all of Louisiana, all of New Orleans, all of St. Bernard because we all have common threats,” Landrieu said. READ FULL ARTICLE >>

via www.nola.com

Restoring the Hurricane Highway

The latest in a documentary series from the Gulf Restoration Network – this time, a discussion of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) and its impact on greater New Orleans as a “hurricane highway” allowing storm surge into St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward after Katrina.

This episode of Gulf Tides focuses on restoration of the MRGO wetlands and the actions from congress necessary to fund such efforts.
Featured are interviews with Lower 9th Ward residents John Taylor (Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development), Rev. Willie Calhoun (Lower 9th Ward School Coalition), & Sarah DeBacher (Holy Cross Neighborhood Association), as well as John Lopez, Ph.D. (Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation) and Greg Miller (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers).

Restoring New Orleans' Battered Wetlands

By Laura Tangley

Standing on a levee overlooking New Orleans’ Bayou Bienvenue, you can see skeletons of dead trees scattered across the open water, a hint at what was once there: a thriving cypress-tupelo swamp that helped protect the city’s Lower Ninth Ward from damaging hurricanes.

But all that changed starting in the late 1950s, when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO), a 76-mile-long channel intended to provide a navigation shortcut from central New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico. Completed in 1968, the project destroyed 27,000 acres of local wetlands, including Bayou Bienvenue’s cypress swamp. Adding in erosion and salinity changes caused by the channel in subsequent years, the MRGO (known locally as “Mister Go”) negatively impacted a total of 600,000 acres of wetlands in the Greater New Orleans area.

Now an ambitious plan crafted by the MRGO Must Go Coalition seeks to bring back these critical wetlands. Launched in 2006 in the wake of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the 17-member coalition—coordinated by NWF—brought together scientists, environmentalists and local communities to raise awareness of the role the MRGO played in worsening Katrina’s damage. Although parts of the Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish are at higher elevations than much of the city, they experienced the most catastrophic flooding due to increased storm surge and levee breaches directly attributable to the channel. Today, six years after Katrina, these communities still are home to just a fraction of the number of residents they once had. READ MORE >>

via www.helpholycross.org