Minutes from the New Orleans Central Business District, an airboat whisks us into another world, a seemingly untouched place populated by alligators, bald eagles and cypress trees. But Russell Easley grew up here, and he’s seen dramatic changes in the southeast Louisiana landscape since his childhood.
“The trees used to come way out here. Now when you ride through, you’ll hit the stumps. You’ll find the stumps, but there are no longer any trees. Salt water intrusion killed them.”
Easley owns New Orleans Airboat Tours, and he finds the wide open spaces that once were forested swamp disturbing. “It’s very dangerous,” Easley said. “Here in Louisiana, where we’re at, we lose 31 square miles of coast every year. That’s a football field every 30 minutes. We’ve been on this boat for an hour and a half now. That’s three football fields we’ve lost. They ain’t coming back.”
“We shouldn’t even have to wear sun shades right here,” added tour boat Captain Brent Bourgeois. “We should be sitting underneath cypress that’s about 300, 400 feet tall.” There are growing concerns about the declining numbers of the Louisiana state tree, the bald cypress. There were 2 million acres a century ago, but there’s just 800,000 now.
Arborist John Benton owns Bayou Tree Service, and as our boat passed small clumps of bald cypress, some dying where forests once stood, he worried. “When I see the bald cypress, which is your largest aquatic tree down here, when I see it declining, I don’t like the idea of a loss of a particular species,” said Benton.