A Million Acres of Wilderness
The Atchafalaya Basinkeeper
By Ava Hernandez
Photos by Atchafalaya Basinkeeper
In the spring of 1984 Dean Wilson was a restless young man of 23, with a dream of moving to the Amazon rainforest to help protect one of the most bountiful and wild places on earth. He was looking for a place where he could acclimate to the heat and mosquitoes of his final destination. He found what he was looking for in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin.

“I figured that there were no roads in there, so it must be wilderness… and wilderness it was! What I found forever captivated my soul.”

Dean never made it to the Amazon, but stayed in the Atchafalaya making his living as a hunter and fisherman for the next 18 years. In 2000 Dean started a swamp tour company to raise awareness about the Atchafalaya Basin. Recognizing that public education alone would not be enough to protect his adopted home, he founded the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper program in 2004.

The Atchafalaya Basin is a largely unknown wonderland that echoes the richness of the Amazon. The Basin is formed around an unusual river system known as a distributary – the Atchafalaya River is a 135-mile channel that breaks off from the main stem of the Mississippi River and runs to the Gulf of Mexico. The impressive Basin contains 885,000 acres of contiguous bottomland hardwood forest, and more than a half-million acres of marshland. These coastal forests of the Atchafalaya Basin are critical in maintaining Louisiana’s coastline, preventing coastal erosion and providing storm surge protection against hurricanes.

A paradise for birds — and bird watchers — the Basin supports more than 300 bird species, including half of America’s migratory waterfowl. No other coast in the entire world is as busy with migrating birds as the coast of Louisiana. Nearly the entire eastern North American population (and several species of the western population) of migratory neotropical songbirds migrates through Louisiana’s coast.

The swamps and forests of the Atchafalaya are among the last wild places that the Florida panther and Louisiana black bear call home. White tail deer, bobcat and coyote share this watery wilderness with alligators, beavers, mink, otters and armadillo.

For generations, the Cajun and Native American peoples of the Atchafalaya have depended on the bounty of the region, collecting fish, crawfish, shrimp and crabs. Recreational and commercial fishermen remain the backbone of local culture in this part of Louisiana. But logging has long had an important and devastating role in the history and economy of the area. After the Civil War commercial loggers hacked down the ancient cypress forests of the Basin to provide lumber for use throughout the region. By 1930 the entire basin had been clear-cut – stumps of these ancient trees are still visible today.

Today, the Basin’s second-growth forests face the same threat. In an echo of earlier days, logging operations are again eradicating stands of cypress – mainly to make garden mulch, sold to an unsuspecting public at Wal-Marts, Home Depots and garden stores across the nation.

Much of Dean’s time as the Basinkeeper is spent patrolling the swamp, introducing people firsthand to the swamp and fighting to stop this logging – much of which is done illegally. An unlikely ally in the fight to end cypress logging is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, New Orleans District, who would not issue permits for logging, using the jurisdiction granted to them under Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. But the Army Corps of Engineers has only eight people to enforce the conservation laws in all of southern Louisiana. Loggers know this and take full advantage of the situation. Dean’s knowledge of the Basin allows him to find illegal logging sites and report them to the Army Corps and U.S. EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division. As a result of his vigilance, one company is now under criminal investigation. However, Louisiana politicians are working to strip away the Army Corps’ jurisdiction over wetlands. This would give private landowners and timber companies unlimited access to logging cypress trees, disregarding the critical habitat that Louisiana’s coastal forests provide for wildlife.

Dean is working to develop a broad plan with other environmental groups to cripple, once and for all, the cypress mulch industry, “It’s critical for the public to recognize that whatever happens to the coastal forests of Louisiana directly impacts the entire western hemisphere.” It’s likely that few garden center customers realize that the bags of cypress mulch that they are spreading on their home gardens are the product of denuded Louisiana Cypress swamp. Making the link for gardeners between their home gardens, the songbirds that visit in the summer, and the Atchafalaya Basin is the key to preserving the largest contiguous bottomland hardwood forest and the largest river swamp in North America.