WaterMarks Interview with Denise Reed

Denise Reed is professor of earth and the environment at the University of New Orleans. In this interview Dr. Reed shares some of her observations about the role of scientists and the goals of coastal restoration in Louisiana.

WaterMarks: From a scientific point of view, is restoring Louisiana’s coast really possible?

Reed: We can make Louisiana look like it used to, but it wouldn’t be sustainable — it would continue to deteriorate. To make it look like it used to look 80, 50, even 20 years ago denies that it’s a system that’s been in constant change for the last five to six thousand years.

If the goal is to return the ecosystem to a level of sustainability so that land loss is slow and balanced by gain — that goal can be achieved.

WaterMarks: How do scientists contribute to that goal?

Reed: Scientists might say to an agency sponsoring a project, “If you want marsh in this area to grow these plants, to support this particular fish, to do these things and be sustainable, we can tell you 1) if it’s achievable and 2) how to get there.”

And we would tell them the conditions they would need to provide — the salinity, flooding regime, land to water ratio, water depth — to support that kind of vegetative community, or that particular organism.

Or we may say, “You can’t get there; you might want to modify your vision to make it something you can actually achieve.”

WaterMarks: Do restoration projects promote the proper outcomes?

Reed: It’s not the scientists’ role to articulate what the outcome should be, what the vision is; that’s a decision for the community to make.

One of the challenges we face right now is that our various restoration programs don’t have well-articulated goals, a clear vision of what we want the coast to look like and how we want it to work in the future.

We have a map of what the coast will look like if we take no action, but no map of what it will look like as a result of actions we could take. We have a map for 2050 saying what we’re going to do, but not what the outcome of doing it will be.

WaterMarks: What is the difference between project goals and a vision?

Reed: Project goals address changing conditions in a discrete piece of real estate, a specific geography. A vision for Louisiana’s coast considers the entire system. It points the way ahead and helps to set reasonable expectations. A vision for coastal Louisiana must describe specifically what kinds of things will be where and what the consequences of actions will be.

When we set a very general goal, everybody understands it in a slightly different way. When they see what is done in the name of that goal, they don’t always see what they expected. If the problems in their area don’t get addressed, people are disappointed. This is the result of lacking a clear statement of what the vision is, of what our priorities are, of what we can expect the outcome to be. If your goals are very general, people always expect their problems to be solved — first!

WaterMarks: What challenges to coastal restoration lie ahead?

Reed: Climate change is clearly something we have to consider a lot more explicitly in our restoration planning. We need to think through how solutions we’re building would perform under different scenarios. We don’t have to wait until we know how the climate has changed to incorporate it into our thinking.

We need to take into account the complexities of economic dynamics as well as of environmental dynamics. I don’t deny that solutions need to move along as fast as possible, but as energy costs rise we may reconsider some of our choices. For example, we’ve got the river to do it, we’ve got gravity, but we’re using pumps running on fossil fuel to deliver sediment because we’re impatient.

Sometimes we give people the impression we can do things we can’t do with the resources — the sediment and fresh water — that we have available. We can’t be serious about restoring the coast while ignoring the fact that year after year we’re dumping one of our most valuable resources into the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico. This is not to say we have to do a lower river diversion, but if we continue to talk restoration on the coast of Louisiana while not addressing this issue, we have to be much more honest with people about what the consequences are.

If restoration really is a problem of the magnitude that we keep telling the rest of the country and world that it is, then surely we should really take a look at how to use the river to solve it. Some say we can’t go there; I say we have to go there.

WaterMarks: What are the issues involving a lower river diversion?

Reed: The river is not merely an ecological asset. It presents the largest water resources management project this country’s ever undertaken. We haven’t yet addressed it because it’s a very complex study that involves not just ecosystem science, but hydrologic engineering, river management, economics, international trade — all these kinds of things. It affects the entire country, not just Louisiana.

We have to decide if we’re going to manage the river, the navigation, the same way we’ve been doing it for 150 years, or if we’re going to come up with a new plan for managing the water resources of the lower river that provides for navigation, provides for flood control and provides for ecosystem restoration. If we’re not going to do that, our vision of restoration must be much more modest.

WaterMarks: Do we need more studies?

Reed: There’s a frustration about needing action, not studies. But we can’t afford any major unintended consequences, not in the way of the past. We have a responsibility to show clearly thought-out processes and a reasonable assurance of the outcome. We have to do studies, and we can do them efficiently, in focused ways, so the outcome is to make a decision, not to do another study.

Some things we’ll never know. But we’ll have to go ahead in spite of that.