Bayou Farewell, Mike Tidwell

Bayou Farewell, Mike Tidwell

At a time when we are caught in the struggle to pass the Restore Act in congress and working to stabilize and recover the coast of Louisiana – this book is essential reading.  The author, a travel writer for the Washington Post, wanted to find the most isolated culture in the country and chose to explore (hitchhike from boat to boat) the Louisiana coastline – the Cajun country and the bayous, marshlands and off shore barrier islands.  http://www.restorethegulf.gov/ 

What he found was a wonderful mix of Cajun, Vietnamese, and Huoma Indians, three distinct cultures living side by side, not blending, but each creating a living in the organic richness of one of the continent’s most important biological banks.  The Huoma and the Cajun have a family tree that dates back so many generations that the landscape is part of who they are while the Vietnamese are displaced to this equivalent to the Mekong Delta and they are seeking a way to climb the economic ladder and have less connection to the place.

Tidwell spends time on the boats and staying in the homes of these swamp people.  He eats with them, listens to their stories, learns some of their personalities and takes the reader on one of the most unique cultural tours you can find in a book. 

While doing this he is shocked almost daily by the disappearing land – the equivalent of 1 ½ Manhattan Islands per year and the land submerges beneath the gulf – the result of erosion from canals dug by the oil industry and the caging of the Mississippi with its load of sediments that should be replenishing the landscape annually.  Instead we have a unique situation where we are losing the rich topsoils of Iowa and other agricultural lands in to the waters because of our system of industrial farming and disregard for winds, rains, and runoff.  That soil, enriched with chemical additives and nitrogen fertilizers flows south in a river that is thick in sediment and it dumps at the end of the Mississippi into the gulf where the freshwater, fertilizers, and other components create a deadzone and at the same time, the Louisiana coast is not getting this rich runoff to stabilize and replenish its rich coastal land and life.  So we will lose land, homes, cemeteries, towns, birds, shrimp, culture, and natural beauty – unless we do the practical and RESTORE the gulf, divert waters and sediment from the Mississippi and cure two problems at once – the shore loss and the deadzone growth.  It makes sense, but it does not mean that our nation will commit to it.

The book was written in 2001 and in the text Tidwell warns that this loss of land will lead to severe damage from future hurricanes.  It was before Katrina and Rita moved in to prove his premonition right.

He also visits the giant oil rigs that dot the coast – Wikipedia describes these structures - An oil platform, also referred to as an offshore platform or, somewhat incorrectly, oil rig, is a large structure with facilities to drill wells, to extract and process oil and natural gas, and to temporarily store product until it can be brought to shore for refining and marketing. In many cases, the platform contains facilities to house the workforce as well.

Depending on the circumstances, the platform may be fixed to the ocean floor, may consist of an artificial island, or may float.  There are 4000 of these in the gulf!

Tidwell in his epilogue writes, “We could just as easily use our love of big tools and grand engineering schemes to repair what is broken along the Louisiana coast and so show the rest of the world how to care for an ailing planet.  We could do that – or we could stay the course, building more and more contraptions like the oil platforms around me now, insisting that everything heel before our ambitions, following the same old story, defiling larger and larger realms of the only planet we have to live on.”  This book was written before the BP oil spill.

The writer is passionate about the landscape and the people and provides the kind of human background that is essential to support the efforts to get support for protecting the landscape.

Read the Mother Jones interview and book summary:  http://motherjones.com/environment/2005/10/bayou-farewell