blue moon fund

On April 20, 2010 an industrial accident led to an uncontrollable fire that killed 11 people, sank BP/Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, and unleashed the largest offshore oil spill ever seen.  More than 50,000 barrels of oil spewed every day from the blown wellhead and the nation’s attention turned to the impact on the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile environment – deepwater fisheries, barrier islands, and Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.  On July 15^th, after releasing almost five million barrels of oil into the environment, BP finally capped the well but scientists will not know the true impact of the released oil for several years.

The newspaper stories and television cameras reporting from those coastal wetlands showed soiled and vulnerable birds, oil washing up into fragile marshlands, stressed local fishermen pressed into service as industrial cleanup workers,  and local residents from long-standing and diverse traditional communities angry at the immediate and long-term loss of jobs in fishing, energy production, and tourism.   What was not immediately reflected was the fact that the wetlands, the fish and birds that rely on them, and the human communities that inhabit them, were in a state of rapid decline before the Deepwater Horizon drillship even set sail to begin drilling the ill-fated Macondo well.

Louisiana’s coastal wetlands are in fact the delta of North America’s largest river, the Mississippi.  As with major river deltas around the world, the Mississippi delta wetlands are an incredibly productive place.  More than 90 percent of the Gulf of Mexico’s vast fishery relies on the wetlands for some portion of their life cycle.  More than 110 species of migratory neotropical songbirds, and most of the nation’s waterfowl use the wetlands as a critical migratory rest and refueling stop.  And just as places like the Nile and Indus deltas were the cradles of ancient civilizations, the Mississippi delta first supercharged the American economy as the major gateway for Midwestern produce – after all President Thomas Jefferson sent his emissaries to Napoleon not to buy the middle of the continent but just strategically-critical New Orleans – and now as host to a massive and intricate infrastructure that produces and refines more than a third of the nation’s oil and gas.

The wetlands and the communities that rely upon them were already weakened and vulnerable when the oil spill hit because all of this nationally productive economic infrastructure – waterborne shipping as well as oil and gas production – has disrupted the Mississippi River’s ability to sustain, build, and repair its delta wetlands.  While river levees built to facilitate oceangoing navigation kept the river from flooding the wetlands with needed sediment, more than 10,000 miles of canals were dredged through the wetlands, disrupting water flows and introducing poisoning saltwater.  The canals and their spoil banks alone make up just under 10 percent of the area of the coastal zone.  Since the 1930s, the result has been the loss of more than 2,300 square miles of coastal wetlands – an area larger than the state of Delaware and representing more than 90 percent of the nation’s annual coastal wetlands loss.  With the current pattern of losing in excess of 1 billion tons of desperately-needed sediment every decade, combined with the challenge of sea level rise, this incredible world-class ecosystem will be largely gone by 2100 if the river’s natural land-building process is not restored.

The people of the delta, their cultures and the ways they make their living, have been impacted by this ecological collapse and the only adaptation tool available to them has been evacuation and transition away from economic engines like fishing.  Scientists and engineers now understand that the landscape can be revitalized by a set of tactics the greatest of which is redirecting the river sediment and water back into the wetlands thereby restoring the natural river delta dynamic.  This incredible landscape will never again look like it did before modern man began altering it, but we can stabilize the collapse and return to an era where the river builds land.  Ironically, the BP oil spill has both increased federal focus on, and the likelihood of funding for, restoring the coastal wetlands by using the natural resources and natural processes available.  But just as communities and economic interests have had to adapt to the change brought about by ecosystem collapse, they will have to adapt to the change, and benefits, brought about by large scale ecosystem restoration.  blue  moon fund is targeting its program in the Louisiana wetlands on developing the people, tools, and non-profit capacities necessary to ensure that the delta’s communities and natural resource-based economies are able to play a key part of this restoration, becoming healthier and more resilient through transition.  Large-scale restoration will bring about not only new jobs and higher demand for science and engineering skills, but it will also open up new opportunities in traditional industries like fishing, tourism, construction, and even energy development.  By funding NGOs that evaluate and support the informed and deliberate transition of communities and small businesses to take full advantage of the oncoming restoration and resilience program and economy, blue  moon fund is helping create not only new economic opportunity but also a strong stakeholder class supporting restoration of the Mississippi delta wetlands ecosystem.