Voice of the Wetlands Festival 2008, Part 1: Mr Bill and the Gulf Restoration Network

Interview with Collin Thomas, Gulf Restoration Network Spokesman

Mac: I'm down here at the Voice of the Wetlands Festival. There are a lot of environmental groups down here, and I ran into one fellow. What's the name of your organization? 

Collin:  We're the Gulf Restoration Network.

 

M: And your name, sir?

 

C: My name is Collin Thomas.

 

M: Tell me about your network

 

C: We're a non-profit organization based out of New Orleans. We've been around for about fifteen years now. We work in all five Gulf States and we're made up of diverse groups, community groups, environmental organizations, as well as individual members.

 

M: What specifically are you doing here today at the Festival?

 

C: Well today, we're down here - this is our second year here - working with the Voice of the Wetlands and we're focusing on our Natural Defenses Campaign, which is partly public education to raise awareness about losing a football field worth of wetlands every 45 minutes due to coastal erosion and what we can do to mitigate this impact, which also involves putting pressure on congressional and state legislatures to make coastal restoration a priority issue.

 

M: How much is the loss of the wetlands a man-made problem?

 

C: Well, a lot of it is attributed to men. Some of the actions of the Army Corps of Engineers, with the diversion of the Mississippi from its original floodplain, the (indiscernible) river diversions, and they have a couple of (indiscernible) projects going on right now, so we need it (wetlands awareness) on a large scale, especially down here in the Terrebonne Parish area.

 

M: By the way, how badly was Terrebonne (Parish) hit by Hurricane Ike and Hurricane Gustav?

 

C: Well, from what I've heard from the Voice of the Wetlands website, Gustav pretty much came right up their alley and did a lot of flooding, and even Ike, even though it just passed by down there, did a tremendous amount of flooding from just the rains and there's a lot of wind damage. And wetlands are tremendously important in mitigating these attacks, because for every three to four miles they have, it scoops up to an entire foot of storm surge.

 

M: I heard Tab Benoit say last night that there was a ten foot surge, and that's happened in the past, but never with the consequences with Ike.

 

C: Perhaps, I'm not actually sure about what he said - my first day here - but I'm sure, he lives in the area and he's familiar with the issues.

 

M: OK, I also heard that several levees gave way, not Federal levees, but local levees.

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