Cover by C.C. Lockwood ; Story by Doug Daigle; photos by Charlotte Latham.
Country Roads 2004 cover and story on C.C. Lockwood and Rhea Gary's Marsh Mission Project
In the April 2004 issue of Country Roads, Doug Daigle wrote about the project Marsh Mission, an effort by C.C. Lockwood and Rhea Gary to use art to spread awareness of coastal erosion.
This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2004 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.
A war is going on in Southern Louisiana. The collapse of a once vast complex of coastal wetlands has put the state in a fight for its life, one made even more challenging by the need to educate ourselves as well as the rest of the country about its seriousness. With ecology, economics, engineering, mass media, and the mighty force of the Mississippi River all being enlisted in the struggle, it may be easy to forget that art can play a role as well.
Two streams of work have come together to correct that oversight.
Marsh Mission is a joint project of naturalist and photographer C.C. Lockwood and landscape painter Rhea Gary, aimed at bringing more attention to this still under-recognized crisis. This means linking the artists' painting and photography with the power of the Internet to connect a wider circle of interest and involvement, culminating with the publication of a book that will pull together these efforts in a form that people will want to look at again and again.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
“Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
Page 2 of “Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
Page 3 of “Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
Page 4 of “Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
Page 5 of “Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
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Story by Doug Daigle ; Photos by Charlotte Latham
Page 6 of “Mission for the Marsh” published in the April 2004 issue of Country Roads.
A Photographic Journey
Like many of C.C. Lockwood's projects, Marsh Mission takes the form of a journey, just as an earlier trip down the Mississippi River was recorded in the book Around the Bend. With the realization that Louisiana's coastal wetlands, like the very soil that forms the state, have their origins upstream, Marsh Mission began with a launch of the Lockwood's houseboatThe Wetlands Wanderer on the Ohio River. However, engine trouble at the outset required that the expedition to relocate to the area that was the goal of the trip: coastal Louisiana. To document the dramatic changes underway in these irreplaceable wetlands, Lockwood and his wife Sue are spending much of the next year living on the houseboat as they traverse the coast from the Mississippi River to Texas and back again. Living in the marsh provides the Lockwoods with ready access to a rich variety of photographic subjects: wetland vistas, birds and otherwildlife, as well as Lockwood's particular favorites, stars and sunsets. But it also provides an opportunity to experience, and record, this vanishing system in a way that fewer and fewer people are able to see. For Lockwood and Gary the experience is one of vivid colors—as grey winter trees, red maple buds, and white egrets and ibises against the brown and green marsh backdrop. Less accessible to photography and painting are the sounds: the calls of snow geese and moorhens, the whistles of teal and pintails, and the passage of deer on the spoil banks.
"There are still beautiful areas in this highly altered system," Lockwood points out, "but you see over and over again that our fingers are everywhere." The degree of change that he has observed since his first southern Louisiana journey in the 1970s has been "tremendous." Some changes have been positive, such as the comeback of the bald eagle following the banning of the pesticide DDT. When Lockwood made his film about the Atchafalaya nearly thirty years ago, there were seven known eagle nests in the state. Today there are seventy nests observed in Terrebonne Parish alone.
Yet far more of the dynamic change that coastal Louisiana is experiencing is negative. Twenty-five square miles of coastal wetlands continue to be lost each year, a rate that reflects the disappearance of more fragile areas, as well as the ongoing rise of the Gulf of Mexico. This trend puts at risk two million people and billions of dollars of infrastructure, both tied to one of the country's great ecosystems, and to the economy of Louisiana and the nation as a whole. Watching the activities of the oil and gas and marine navigation industries from the deck of the Wetlands Wanderer houseboat serves as a reminder that the state has a working coast that has been an important part of people's lives in South Louisiana. At the same time, the development growth in many of these wetlands, even in areas threatened by coastal land loss, seems a serious contradiction.
"We listen to everyone's opinions," says Lockwood. "There are a lot of different viewpoints on what should be done and how." He has heard a clear consensus, however, that the coastal situation has reached a stage of unprecedented danger. Local officials have taken the Lockwoods on tours of their communities, and given voice to their concerns about the future.
Windell Curole, director of the South Lafourche Levee District, showed them how the Gulf is encroaching on the parish's hurricane protection system as the wetlands buffer disappears. Curole and his colleagues are charged with protecting communities that reach like fingers into the Gulf, shielded by levees that more and more resemble the famous dikes of the Netherlands.
Whether this situation is sustainable for southern Louisiana is an unanswered question.
Painting with a Purpose
The sight of "ghost" cypress forests killed by saltwater intrusion shocked Rhea Gary when she revisited Terrebonne Parish after a long absence.
She began painting wetlands around twelve years ago, and even since then, the change has been "amazing." In her paintings, she has tried to document both the beauty of the region and the changes she has observed. Gary now spends half of every week in the wetlands of Terrebonne Parish, the highly endangered area that lies between Bayou Lafourche and the Atchafalaya River, painting in a bateau that serves as a floating studio.
Gary has also undertaken the larger effort of organizing the art community to support saving Louisiana's coast, because "people interested in the arts tend to be movers and shakers." Gary has been surprised at the number of artists who are working in wetlands in coastal parishes. One such association is the Terrebonne Fine Arts Guild, which has been active for almost forty years and maintains an active gallery in Houma. "Interestingly, many of them are women living along bayous," she noted.
Gary's hope is that the Marsh Mission will catalyze artistic collaborations capable of reaching a broader audience that hasn't yet been engaged. Supporters of art include leaders in business and sources of capital, more of whom are coming to see saving coastal Louisiana as a cause worth investing in. These partnerships, coupled with a growing number of paintings, can help educate the wider art community and their supporters about "what we have in Louisiana and what we're about to lose forever."
Paintings and photographs can convey the same information about coastal land loss contained on charts and graphs, but in a vivid and immediate manner that both Lockwood and Gary hope will make a real difference. This goal forms the crux of the mission: to catalyze and enlist the deeper response that art elicits in its viewers to help mobilize supporters of the coast.
Making the Mission
Education is the final component of the Marsh Mission. Sue Lockwood has utilized her experience as a classroom teacher to develop a Coastal Correspondent program through which school groups can follow the journey and ask questions about wetlands and wildlife that they encounter over the Web site. This information is also being integrated into classroom work and assignments, such as essay and poetry writing and art contests.
Having used the Internet to connect with a broad audience through photography, art, adventure, and the classroom, the project's next step will be a show at the LSU Museum of Art early in 2005. A two-year tour around the country will include a public awareness event and exhibit in Washington, D.C., where Louisiana is directing an increasing amount of its coastal outreach efforts. Marsh Mission's final product is envisioned in a more traditional form, as a book that ties all these elements together, tentatively titled Two Views: The Vanishing Wetlands of Louisiana.
The education of Marsh Mission goes both ways, of course, even if only to remind the participants of things they already knew. This includes the famous generosity of the inhabitants of southern Louisiana. The people Sue Lockwood calls "the nicest in the world" have on many occasions provided food, shelter, and local knowledge (such as the best spots for bird watching) to the Marsh Mission. That generosity of spirit will I be put to the test in the coming years, as Louisiana enlists the rest of the nation to help us meet our coastal challenge. If efforts like Marsh Mission are successful, it's a challenge we can all meet together.
