Nancy Sutley, the White House’s point person on the environment, got an airboat-level view of Louisiana’s eroding coastal marshes Tuesday. In a photo from Big Branch Refuge near Lacombe, the boat appears to be in open water, but there is a small strip of green marsh grass in the distance.
Louisianians who have fished and worked the coast for decades can point to broad expanses of water and describe the stands of trees and fields of grass that once grew there.
Byron Encalade, a fisher from East Pointe-a-la-Hache, talked recently about the dramatic loss of land. "I used to travel at night on my boat from St. Bernard all the way across the Mississippi line with only a compass, because we had landmarks we could navigate by," said Mr. Encalade, who fishes for oyster and shrimp. "You can’t do that anymore. All the small islands, all the passes, they’ve all washed away."