Captain Dean Wilson is the Executive Director of the Atchafalaya Basin Keeper in Louisiana. He grew up in Spain, and then he came to Louisiana in 1984 en route to the Amazon. After living in the basin s deep swamps for four months with only a spear, a few hooks and a bow and arrow, he fell in love with the swamps, lakes, and bayous and the rivers of the Achapalaya basin. He is a proud member of the Water Keeper Alliance, and his passion for the basin is known to all who know him when he is not out patrolling or educating communities about the basin and its threats and treasures. He works with his family, owned and operated a swamp tour business called Last Wilderness Swamp Tours, and he is one of my great heroes. I'm fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in the Basin and spent a summer living with him for a summer in the middle of the swamp with Dean and his family. I m really glad that we got to have him on the podcast today. Thank you, Dean! -Bobby & Pam at the Chafala Basin Keeper The Chafalia Basin is the largest forested wildland in North America. It is larger than the Everglades. It s spread out in a bunch of tributaries, and the biggest part of that was the largest and the first distributary of the Mississippi River. And so it s one of the biggest migratory staging grounds for water birds and shore birds in North American or anywhere in the world. And for many of them, the wetlands in the coast of the Delta is where they breathe and feed and feed, and they can go all the way to Alaska. And they fly from Yucatán across the Gulf of Mexico through the other places in the other parts of the Western Hemisphere. - And they don t like to fly over hills over flat areas. The Mississippi River when they fly over the North And South Flyway in the North and they do all of them in the South and they re not like that? - That s right, they fly to the South And the Atlantic Flyway, they can fly to Alaska and they have all the places that they do it in the south and they are in the And they can come to Alaska, they have the best of the South, they are all of that And they have it all of the places and they . - --
00:00:00.000My guest today is my friend, Captain Dean Wilson, who is Executive Director of the Atchafalaya Basin Keeper in Louisiana.
00:00:09.000He's American-born, believe it or not, when you hear his accent, but he grew up in Spain, and then he came to Louisiana in 1984 en route to the Amazon, where he was going to live after living in the basin's deep swamps for four months with only a spear, a few hooks, and a bow and arrow.
00:00:30.000Dean fell in love with the swamps, lakes, and bayous and rivers of the Atchipalaya Basin.
00:00:36.000Dean chose to stay in the basin working as a commercial fisherman before forming Basin Keeper in 2004.
00:00:44.000He is a proud member of the Water Keeper Alliance.
00:00:48.000Dean's passion for the basin is known to all who know him when he is not out patrolling or educating communities about the basin and has many threats and treasures.
00:00:59.000He works with his family owned and operated a swamp tour business called Last Wilderness Swamp Tours.
00:01:06.000I'm fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in the basin with Dean.
00:01:11.000My son lived with him for a summer and worked before he went to college.
00:01:17.000It was a really exciting summer living in the middle of the swamp with Dean and a whole arsenal of weaponry, which my son was kind of surprised about.
00:01:26.000But at that time, Dean was targeted by the cypress industry.
00:01:31.000And there were a lot of people interested in silencing him.
00:01:35.000But, Dean, you're one of my great heroes, and I'm really glad that we got to have you on the podcast today.
00:02:19.000So this was before the levees were created.
00:02:23.000The Mississippi River, when it approached the coast, is spread out in a bunch of braided tributaries and The biggest part of that was the Achapalaya Basin.
00:02:35.000It was the largest and the first distributary.
00:02:38.000And so it's one of the biggest migratory staging grounds for water birds and shore birds in North America or anywhere in the world.
00:02:49.000So we have birds that come from the tropics every year, like hummingbirds, sunbirds, herons, peregrine falcons, kites, you know, they're called neotropical migrants.
00:03:03.000The eastern North American population that goes to the east, the western North American population that goes to the west.
00:03:10.000So nearly the entire eastern North American population of these birds and many species of the western population come through the coast of Louisiana.
00:03:18.000The Mississippi Delta is one of the largest in the world.
00:03:24.000So what they do is they fly from Yucatán across the Gulf of Mexico through the coast of Louisiana.
00:03:30.000For many of them, the wetlands of the Delta is the most important habitat by itself.
00:03:37.000That's where they breathe and feed, you know.
00:03:39.000For many other ones, they step over to go to, they can go Central Flyway toward the Pacific Flyway or along the coast to the Atlantic Flyway, and they can go all the way to Alaska.
00:03:51.000So, you picture, you know, the ecology of the planet, the Western Hemisphere, and you see all these migratory bursts coming to North America through Louisiana.
00:04:00.000You have all the wetlands in the coast.
00:04:02.000The wetlands in the coast are disappearing.
00:04:05.000There is no hope to save those wetlands.
00:04:07.000So, you look like 50 to 100 years in the future, the only wetlands that we have left, and especially forested wetlands, will be the area that are away from the coast.
00:04:17.000With the Chakalaya Basin, we'll be the largest And most important of all of them.
00:04:22.000So, for the ecology of the planet, we're talking about probably the most important single ecosystem in the whole in North America for migratory birds.
00:04:30.000On top of that, the Chafalaya Basin have the most productive wetlands in the entire world.
00:04:36.000Now, productivity is different than diversity.
00:04:38.000Like, if you go to a tropical wetland, it's going to have more species of birds and mammals and animals, you know.
00:04:44.000The Chafalaya Basin is more productive, meaning you have more quantity per acreage.
00:04:49.000The reason being that we have the largest production of wild crawfish in the entire world.
00:04:53.000So, you know, the amount of birds and animals you can feed per acre is greater than any of the world, which is very fortunate for the birds.
00:05:36.000We have the largest production of wild craffies in the entire world.
00:05:39.000So you get an idea of the importance of the Chocolate Basin for the ecology.
00:05:42.000On top of that, the Basin is critically important for the whole nation for floor protection.
00:05:48.000So, to whoever is not familiar with Louisiana, you have the Mississippi River going through Louisiana.
00:05:54.000And it used to be a time when every time you have a flood in the heart of the country, it used to spread out in 24 million acres of forks.
00:06:02.000The Mississippi River was called North American Amazon.
00:06:06.000And so you could have gone by boat from Louisiana all the way to Missouri through the forest in Howard.
00:06:12.000Now you have all the floodwaters confined in one channel.
00:06:15.000As the Mississippi builds up toward the coast and through the Louisiana, you really cannot build levees high enough to protect all these communities at all times.
00:06:24.000So what the Corps did is build two spillways.
00:06:28.000A spillway is an area you spill the water if it's over the levees.
00:06:31.000So the first one, you know, from the coast is going to be the Bonacare spillway to protect the city of New Orleans.
00:06:39.000So the water will go, big gates along the levees, they open the gates, go underneath I-10, they coach a train, they burn, go for Mexico, save the day for New Orleans.
00:06:48.000The other one that they build is to protect everything above it.
00:06:51.000And we're talking about the largest port in the United States, which is between Baton Rouge and the Orleans.
00:07:48.000When they built the levee systems in the Chafalaya Basin, they cut the surface of the Chafalaya Basin by less than half of where it used to be.
00:07:55.000That creates huge environmental problems because when they build those levees, they have no consideration for the ecology of the basin.
00:08:03.000They cut rivers in half, entire lakes in half, so huge problems.
00:08:08.000So now you have an 18-mile-wide bathtub.
00:08:11.000So imagine there's a bathtub in your house.
00:08:16.000One of the threats to the Chafala Basin is we're building land within the levee systems away from the coast.
00:08:22.000When you build land within the levee systems, within the levee, you know, within the levee systems, afro, from the coast, what you're doing is reducing flood capacity.
00:08:30.000And every time you reduce flood capacity, the basin can handle a lesser flood.
00:08:34.000So eventually, by doing that, what they're doing is putting at risk 150 plus chemical plants and different refineries and all that.
00:08:43.000The Port of Butternut and New Orleans is going to come to a point where the basin won't be able to handle a major flood.
00:08:49.000If that ever happens and the Mississippi level fell, we're talking not only about the environmental catastrophe like we've never seen in the United States.
00:08:56.000We're talking about economical impact that I don't know if we can ever recover.
00:09:00.000Imagine you just have the Port of Baton Rouge and New Orleans out for months and over 150 plants go out for months, you know, what would cost the economy of the country.
00:09:10.000So the basin is very, very important for the planet and very, very important for the nation.
00:09:15.000Tell us a little bit about your personal story.
00:12:30.000And I talked with different environmental groups and nobody was taken seriously because it's hard to prove and it's all hearsay or whatever reasons.
00:12:39.000But anyway, in the year 2000, they actually started occurring in the suburbs.
00:12:56.000You know, what they did, they dammed the tributary, and they make a channel And we land it to the top of a river at the end of a curve of the river.
00:13:05.000So what happened, when you have a lot of sand coming through a river, sand is heavy, so it moves with the current.
00:13:10.000So when you have a curve on the river, that's where the current goes, that's where the bulk of the sand goes.
00:13:14.000So you make a cut at the end of that curve, what you're doing is directing the sand away from the main river into the swamps.
00:13:21.000So the court did that, you know, saying they did it to minimize the amount of sand.
00:13:54.000Just to interrupt you for a second, the Corps of Engineers is a captive agency.
00:14:01.000It is not serving the American public.
00:14:04.000It's not serving the interests of future generations and the public trust and the shared commons and the environment.
00:14:13.000It is serving the interests of big oil companies, and the shipping companies, and the big lumber companies, and the land companies who want to get at those resources, exploit them, and privatize them.
00:14:28.000In other words, to privatize, to take a publicly owned wilderness area.
00:14:34.000And turn it into private cash, liquidate it for cash.
00:15:17.000But at that point, I started following the trucks and found out what they were doing with it.
00:15:21.000And to back out, I was going to say before that, the main reason I got involved in protecting the cypress, it was more spiritual reasons, is I didn't think we have any hope to stop anything.
00:15:33.000But I just couldn't see myself walking this planet at a time of history, when that was taking place, and do nothing about it.
00:15:40.000I believe there is a heaven, and I don't think I will go to it if I just looked the other way.
00:15:45.000And, you know, because I really think that...
00:15:47.000I strongly believe that we inherit everything we own from our, you know, we are stewards of everything we own from our kids and grandkids.
00:16:17.000And what I did, they started following the trucks.
00:16:19.000And that's when I found out they were making mulch.
00:16:21.000By the year 2006, they were logging 20,000 acres per year.
00:16:26.000And they have seven mulch plants in Costa Louisiana.
00:16:29.000The mulch was being sold in, you know, mainly, in many different places, but mainly Home Depot, Los, or Walmart was the big driver of all that.
00:16:37.000The mulch was being sold in bags that would say made with environmentally harvested cypress.
00:16:43.000So when you go to the stores, you think it's nothing green.
00:16:47.000You think you're coming from Florida, so there will be no connection to what's happening in Louisiana and the most exciting in the stores.
00:16:53.000So that's what I found out, and we went from there.
00:16:56.000And the Cyprus industry did not like you.
00:17:01.000Well, I think many people in Louisiana, other than the fishermen, like me.
00:17:07.000And what kind of conflicts did you have because of that?
00:17:11.000Well, I had many conflicts at the beginning.
00:17:13.000What we did in the year 2005 is start flying with volunteer pilots over the logging sites.
00:17:18.000Many of the logging sites, they were illegal logging operations because you need permits to make roads to bring heavy equipment through the Netherlands.
00:17:25.000So with the flights, we were able to document The illegal roads.
00:17:30.000And then we will share those pictures with Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers.
00:17:35.000And they start using these pictures to stop the logging.
00:17:38.000Not everywhere, but there's places like the Morapa swamp with these people that have a lot of money, they have mansions, and they have political influence.
00:17:45.000And the mansions are there because the beautiful swamp.
00:17:47.000So when they log in the swamp behind the back, in the backyard, they didn't like that too much.
00:17:51.000So in those places, the Corps and EPA will actually stop the logging using our pictures.
00:17:57.000In other places, they refuse to enforce.
00:17:59.000We have to do the enforcement ourselves.
00:18:00.000But the first threat came, you know, before the media told the story, there was a meeting with somewhere around the Morapa swamp with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Corps of Engineers, and the Luciana Forest Terrorization, the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and landowners and timber companies.
00:18:22.000And they asked, and I can mention the name now because he was one of my heroes.
00:18:27.000He was the head enforcer of the Corps of Engineers at the time.
00:18:30.000And he helped build our battle plans for how to stop the surface logging.
00:19:51.000Another thing they do is lie to the public to put people against basin keepers or the When we flooded last year, they're telling people that the reason everybody flooded is because it was a levy that was going to protect us from flooding and Dean Wilson Basin Keeper stopped the levy.
00:20:07.000They're telling all workers that Obama was paying me to shut down the oil industry in the Chapala Basin.
00:20:12.000People believe it, and they came to my house, tore my mailbox, pulled my garbage all over the road.
00:21:52.000We stopped most of the logging in Costa Luciana was stopped in 2008.
00:21:55.000It was a logging operation that kept going in the Chaffala Basin that we managed to stop in the year 2012 after we threatened the company to go to court.
00:22:04.000And we met with the company, and the company pretty much said that they cannot afford the attorneys to keep logging.
00:22:13.000And then the Corps of Engineers and EPA intervened because the politicians started complaining about that, and they gave that company an after-fact permit to resume logging.
00:22:24.000When they were waiting for the permit, the contract was only 10 years contract.
00:22:31.000So they went, they couldn't wait for the permit, so they went back again, logging without a permit, with a system, the system, the names, and log on how water, which is forbidden under, you know, best marginal practices that they had to follow.
00:22:54.000The second market was for wood pellets.
00:22:56.000I don't know if anybody in the audience knows what wood pellets are, but what they do is they put the trees down, they pulverize the wood, and they compress the wood in little pellets, little like rabbit feet, and they can use that for stoves, or in the European Union, they use it for power, as a biofuel.
00:23:11.000So it was a company from Canada that was going to cut down all the forest in Costa Louisiana, Or most of them, to make wood pellets.
00:23:20.000A company from England called Drax was going to buy them to burn in a power plant.
00:23:25.000And they were going to get the permits, so there was no way we could stop that.
00:23:30.000And so Drax, we contacted Drax, and they sent a couple people here to the basin.
00:23:37.000We took them into the swamp, and they said, oh my God, what a treasure to humanity, and they refused to do it.
00:23:43.000So we saved the swamps a second time, you know, but it took a foreign company to do that when our own estate is lobbying and pushing to get these trappistries cut out.
00:24:31.000But these corporations, they can put dams, you know, build roads, and do whatever they want, and there's no consequences.
00:24:37.000You know, they couldn't find a single enforcement action against a pipeline company, an old company in the Tampala Basin, in all the time I've been working here.
00:24:44.000We got FOIA's request, you know, to get that information, and there is nothing out there.
00:24:50.000So it was pretty much Wallace, you know.
00:24:55.000They were all companies dumping, produced waters, all the waste water from the wells into this bay, polluted water into the swamps, killing all the trees.
00:25:04.000I mean, we pretty much stopped all that.
00:25:06.000It was an attempt to bring all the frack waste from Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and all that down with barges.
00:25:14.000Disposed in the injection well in the Chapala Basin, in Bell River, which Bell River, half of the area of the basin is the most pristine part of the Chapala Basin.
00:25:21.000We're going to do like an industrial complex in there.
00:25:24.000The state gave them a permit to build that.
00:25:50.000But also, it's even worth the cypress logging.
00:25:53.000Because you lost, part of the habitat is the cypress trees themselves, and you cut the trees down, you lose that, and you lose the beauty and the ecological benefits they provide, which is many, into the basin.
00:26:03.000But if you build land in there, you lose, normally you lose the cypress, you don't have a wetland anymore.
00:26:08.000Even you cut the trees down, you still have crawfish, you still have the birds can feed on crawfish, you still have something, you know.
00:26:14.000But building those swamps is the end, that's the end for those wetlands.
00:26:19.000So what the federal government, through the Corps of Engineers, and the state of Louisiana is doing is, you know, doing projects, the river diversions, in the name of water quality.
00:26:30.000The way they do is they make cuts from a sediment source straight into the wells.
00:26:37.000And once they do that, you can build land very, very fast.
00:26:41.000You know, they did one project, the Buffalo Corp project, and Close to the cuts, we're talking about six, seven feet of sand in one single year, the build-up.
00:26:51.000You know, you go like 3,000 feet away from the cuts, and we found crafty straps, they were four foot tall, like Almost to the top full of sand, so three feet plus of sand in those areas.
00:27:04.000So they can build land very, very quick.
00:27:07.000And not only are they destroying the wetlands and the ecological, you know, treasure that we have there, but also they put it in jeopardy to the safety of the entire economy of the country and the safety of millions of people.
00:28:07.000Having members is very important for us because also, well, if they're in Louisiana, they keep standing in lawsuits.
00:28:13.000And also, you know what's going on, then it may be something you can do about it.
00:28:17.000Maybe you know a senator, a politician, or somebody from a company.
00:28:21.000So getting engaged by becoming a member is very, very important for us.
00:28:25.000We rely very heavily on volunteers, so it may be an opportunity that people can volunteer for a Chapalaya Basin Keeper.
00:28:32.000They can go to the website, it's basinkeeper.org, very easy to remember, basinkeeper.org, and there's some information on how you can become a member, how you can volunteer, and you can actually look at some of the things that we did and we're doing in the Chapalaya Basin.
00:28:51.000We have If you want to learn about the Atchafalaya Basin, we have a mini-series of three films that talks about the importance of the Atchafalaya Basin, talks about sedimentation, and talks about the importance for birds.
00:29:01.000They're like two, two and a half minutes long.
00:29:31.000I don't know what happened, but they found one for you, and I don't know if they tried to get in touch with you, and I don't know what happened because I was out of that one, but we found one.