Louisiana’s coastal erosion, the state’s biggest ecological concern, now has a human narrative through a project by one University student. Madelyn Smith is the creator of “Louisiana Gone,” a project that documents the lives of Louisiana residents living near some of the state’s most vulnerable wetlands.
Smith, a renewable natural resource sophomore concentrating in wildlife habitat conservation, worked with photographer and mechanical engineering junior Trent Andrus to develop a project that would humanize one of the state’s largest political and environmental challenges.
According to the United States Geological Survey, the state of Louisiana loses approximately 17 square miles of wetlands every year, or a football field’s worth of land every hour. Since 1932, an area of the coast roughly the size of Delaware has been completely submerged.
Smith said she first became interested in coastal conservation while taking a class in the Louisiana Service and Leadership program through the Roger Hadfield Ogden Honors College.
“We are uniquely tied to our environment, both culturally and economically,” she said. “There’s not much discussion about coastal erosion [around the state], but the locals know what’s happening.”
The honors college’s Leader Scholarship, which gives students a $5,000 stipend to develop their own project significant to Louisiana, provided Smith with the opportunity to work on something that would look at the state’s wetland loss through a new lens.
Smith found out about the scholarship through Dr. Granger Babcock, one of her honors college professors. Babcock also helped her initially structure her project and wrote her a letter of recommendation for the program.
“As a LASAL Scholar, Madelyn is committed to improving Louisiana, especially in the area of coastal sustainability,” Babcock said in an email. “We are very proud that she has received an Ogden Leaders Award so that she can document the effects of land loss in Louisiana, which is a significant problem that continues to challenge the leadership of the state.”
For the project, Smith began travelling to South Louisiana to speak with locals about experiencing coastal erosion first-hand. She noticed that while these residents have serious worries about the land loss, their concerns are rarely received by state officials.
Smith thinks this happens for two reasons. One has to do with the state’s economic dependence on the oil and gas industry.
“Oil and gas donate a lot of money to political campaigns and they have a huge influence,” she said. “A big reason why we’re not seeing action is because a comprehensive plan to fighting coastal erosion includes cracking down on oil and gas.”
Secondly, Smith said residents of these communities already have an unfavorable opinion of the government, and the state’s ties with big oil and gas businesses strain that relationship even more.
Smith and Andrus have already met with residents in Houma and Morgan City, and plan on visiting towns even further south like Cutoff and Leeville. Smith said hearing the stories first-hand has had a lasting impact on her.
“One of the people we talked to…took us out on his boat and all we could see for miles was a dead cypress tree forest in the bayou,” she said. “It looked like a bunch of black toothpicks sticking out of the water, but you know there’s supposed to be huge trees there.”
For more information on Smith and Andrus’s project, follow the Louisiana Gone project on its website and Facebook page.