My Cause
Our Last Stand
By: Dean Wilson, as told to Josh Dean
May 16, 2008 - 4:52:18 PM
A simple choice you can make at your local garden center can help save it.
I came to the Louisiana swamp in my twenties, planning to stay only
long enough to get used to obnoxious heat and giant mosquitoes before
heading to the Amazon to study indigenous peoples. For four months, I
lived in a tent among the cypress and tupelo trees, catching or hunting
my food. I fell in love with the Atchafalaya Basin and never made it to
South America. Yet it became clear to me that the swamp was in trouble.
Our primary natural hurricane barrier against future storms like
Katrina, the 1.4-million-acre swamp is the last remnant of the
Mississippi River’s floodplain, which once stretched from Louisiana to
Illinois. It was originally drained to create farmland, yet it
continues to shrink, largely due to illegal logging operations that
cull the swamp’s trees to fill the bags of mulch stacked in the garden
centers of America’s three biggest home retailers: Home Depot,
Wal-Mart, and Lowe’s.
I moved out of the swamp in 2000 and started doing tours to raise
awareness of the problem. Along the way, I met some friends of Bobby
Kennedy and I proposed preserving the Atchafalaya to his Waterkeeper
Alliance; I was appointed basinkeeper.
My responsibility is to help people understand how mulch, a seemingly
innocuous product, threatens one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in
America. The trees here slow the powerful wind and water that come with
hurricane surges, saving coastal areas from catastrophic damage, while
trapping wayward debris. It’s also the most important bird flyway in
North America, a stopping point for 40 percent of the continent’s
migratory birds. For some bird species, it’s the only habitat left. If
we lose this ecosystem and other coastal forests, then some neotropical
migrants may also disappear.
So we’re destroying our habitat and putting our southern coastline at
risk, essentially for nothing. The logging companies that harvest
cypress trees hire cheap labor (mostly immigrants), which means little
money goes into the community. The companies that sell the stuff to
garden centers often mark their bags “environmentally harvested.” The
truth is, there is no environmentally friendly cypress mulch. Buying it
more than likely means you’ve unknowingly chosen to kill trees in order
to grow flowers.
Fortunately, you can stop this disaster-in-the-making by taking a good
look at your garden. Are you using red mulch? It’s likely cypress from
Louisiana. There are plenty of better alternatives: Pine needles,
eucalyptus, straw, shredded leaves, and even commercial mulch made from
pine bark are more environmentally sound choices.
Our cypress and tupelo trees are made by God to sustain the swamp, the
coast, and every species that lives here. Either we protect it or we
destroy a piece of America that never can be replaced.
Dean Wilson, 45, lived off Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Swamp for 20 years and became its baskinkeeper in 2004.
Click here for more on how you can protect your plants
and save America's cypress swamps.
© Copyright 2007 Best Life Magazine