While most of Louisiana’s coastal nonprofits get involved with beach cleanups, plantings and the like, nearly all of them dedicate at least part of their mission to education.
How they go about that, however, differs from one group to the next.
For example, Restore or Retreat in Thibodaux hosted a tour of the central Terrebonne Basin over the summer for its membership to offer them a better understanding of how various applications can help restore a fragile marsh area.
Using local landowners as guides, the field trip ventured into locales that ROR believes will benefit from additional freshwater and land-building efforts being overseen by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, the state’s guiding coastal board.
It was the third such field trip hosted this year by ROR, and it offered firsthand experience that can’t be achieved in a boardroom. The first trip included a visit to the Davis Pond freshwater diversion project in St. Charles, and the second toured the new Bubba Dove Floodgate in the Houma Navigational Canal.
The Louisiana Wildlife Federation of Baton Rouge, meanwhile, reached out for the masses by underwriting a media buy in downtown New Orleans recently. The group, defining its effort as educational outreach, bankrolled four advertisements on an electronic billboard featuring the message that reconnecting the Mississippi River with its wetlands will build land.
There are several tools identified in Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan, and large-scale sediment diversions play a crucial role. LWF officials say people who live in the New Orleans area have an undeniable interest in this, as do people around the state.
In public forums this year and in 2012 about the state’s Master Plan for the coast, however, any and all discussions dealing with sediment diversion projects have been accompanied by controversy. Fishermen and others worry what such projects will do the natural resources, and the billboards were LWF’s way of telling its side of the story.
