WaterMarks Interview
with Todd Masson

South Louisiana native Todd Masson has been editor of Louisiana Sportsman magazine for 12 years. An avid outdoorsman, Masson is passionate about the health of the marshes and swamps that support his hobbies and are so vital to the culture and charm of the Bayou State. In his career, he’s written more than 250 feature stories about Louisiana’s wetlands, including “Paradise Lost,” a chilling look at coastal Louisiana’s future that appeared in Louisiana Sportsman in August 2003. Masson is also the author of Specks, Louisiana’s best-selling outdoors book ever. He lives in the New Orleans area with his wife and three children.

WM: We hear a lot of noise about land loss, but you talk to people, you look at the records, and fishing and hunting in coastal Louisiana continue to be superb. Why should sportsmen be concerned?

TM: In Louisiana we’re cursed by what we’re blessed with. The wetlands are vast. For years we’ve witnessed their degradation, and we’ve grown used to it. We fish one stretch of bank, watch it decline and disappear, and then move on to the next stretch of bank. There’s always more, and the fishing and hunting remain fantastic.

But as more and more marshland converts to open water, those strips of bank become fewer and fewer. They will continue to dwindle until the entire ecosystem crashes.

WM: But why isn’t the quality of hunting and fishing declining along with land mass?

TM: Ironically, degradation boosts a marsh’s productivity. As a marsh erodes, it puts more nutrients in the water and creates more edge habitat, which is great for fisheries. A slightly broken marsh supports more waterfowl than a solid one. So, in the short run, wetland loss means there are more fish to catch, more ducks to shoot.

But as time goes on and more marshland converts to open water, we lose wetland habitat. Fish, waterfowl and other wildlife populations dependent on the marshes will inevitably decrease.

WM: But aren’t changing conditions part of the natural order of things? Ducks leave one place, they go to another. Marsh erodes here, builds up over there. Why should we be concerned about that?

TM: Erosion isn’t catastrophic if a marsh receives sediment to maintain its shallow base. But over the past century, our success in suppressing river floods, in developing the oil and gas industries, in accommodating building and development has unbalanced the natural equation of land accretion and erosion.

New marsh springs up where sediment collects. Arguably the best duck hunting in the state is now in Atchafalaya Bay. Marshes to the east and west protect the bay, and river silt collects on its relatively shallow bottom. There is lots of emergent vegetation — three-corner grass and duck potato — and water fowl flock there by the tens of thousands.

WM: Then why do you think plentiful harvests in other coastal areas are a sign of impending doom?

TM: We can compare satellite images taken over years and see where land is accreting and where land is disappearing. Good harvests in deteriorating areas demonstrate how productivity increases in broken marsh. And we know once the marsh is gone, species that depend on the wetlands disappear too.

WM: Has that happened in Louisiana?

TM: Maybe in the Barataria basin. It used to be that you stood on Grand Isle and all you saw were stands of wire grass stretching into the bay. Now it’s virtually nothing but wide-open water. Essentially the bay’s become the Gulf of Mexico. Fishing’s still good, but you talk to people who have fished the basin the past 10, 20 years, and they’ll tell you the basin is producing nowhere near what it used to.

WM: So you’re saying that, at least in Barataria Bay, land loss is already affecting anglers’ experience.

TM: And not just anglers’. The fresh to intermediate marshes of Little Lake Hunting Club, out of Lafitte, used to be the envy of duck hunters across Louisiana. Now the area is brackish, even saline, and hunting is nothing like it was. So it’s not just loss of land that affects our sporting experiences, it’s also marsh conditions changing and altering habitat.

WM: You describe a huge problem years in the making. Can sportsmen really do anything about it?

TM: If there is any silver lining to hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is the realization that we have to fix this problem no matter what it takes. For the sportsman, that means looking beyond the afternoon’s catch or the season’s take and pressing for actions that will produce healthy wetlands 25, 50 years from now. Those of us who have a favorite fishing hole or hunting ground have to be willing to give it up so that in the future, our kids and grandkids will have the chance to hunt and fish.

Land loss is going to affect fisheries, it’s going to affect waterfowl habitat, it’s going to affect wildlife populations. It’s going to affect every person who enjoys outdoor sports in coastal Louisiana: There is no way to avoid it. To be effective, coastal restoration has to change present conditions. We can resist change and enjoy things as we know them a few more years — and then watch it all disappear — or we can accept change now in the hope that down the road, in the big picture, we and the generations that follow us will continue to enjoy coastal Louisiana as a sportsman’s paradise.