November is planting season for Josh Benitez's coastal restoration crews, and his workday will often start around 6 a.m. His crew loads trucks or boats with shovels, gloves and other equipment along with young trees grown at a nursery in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. They then head into one of the rapidly receding wetlands around the city.
"On a typical day, we would plant anywhere between 200 to even 1,000 trees," Benitez told Newsweek in an interview. "Or if it's marsh grass, we would be planting somewhere around 2,000 plugs of marsh grass."
They'll get up the next day and do it again. Day by day, tree by tree, the group is pushing back against the coastal erosion and land loss that threatens to wash away much of southern Louisiana.
The 33-year-old New Orleans native is co-director of Common Ground Relief, a community group formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina to focus on habitat restoration, ecological education and community aid.
"Over the next few years, we're going to be planting 65,000 trees just here in this one little part of Louisiana," Benitez said of the revegetation work his group and others in the Central Wetland Reforestation Collective are doing.
The bald cypress, hackberry and tupelo trees, marsh grass and other native species the groups plant will help hold soil in place, gradually building up land, and land is what southern Louisiana desperately needs.
Thousands of miles of canals and pipelines cut through Louisiana's coastal wetlands, increasing wave action against fragile soil, interrupting the natural flow of water over the land and introducing saltier water from the Gulf of Mexico that can kill wetland plant life. That, combined with the natural subsidence of land in a river delta, means that Louisiana has been losing about a football field's worth of land every 100 minutes, according to 2017 estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey.
An estimated 2,000 square miles of land in the region have turned to open water since 1930, leaving New Orleans even more exposed to storm surges from hurricanes.
This became painfully obvious in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed a flawed system of levees and canals and devastated the city, an event Benitez said tore away "the veil of safety and security" residents felt. He was 15 at the time.
"It was very apparent to me that we were in a position of vulnerability here in New Orleans," he said, "and the response to that vulnerability on a systemic scale wasn't really happening."
Common Ground Relief was created in response to Katrina and the flawed government response to the disaster, Benitez said, part of a long tradition of grassroots action in the city.
"New Orleans has centuries of history in cultural aid and community aid and so we have a deep-rooted system of aid and supporting each other through hard times," he said.
Benitez has taken a curious path to his current work. His background is not in ecology or forestry but music. But he says there is a logical connection between music, culture, community action and the restoration work he does now.
"Some of the origins of New Orleans music are found in resistance to oppression," he said. Enslaved people who played in the city's Congo Square to keep their cultures alive and the "second line" brass band parades that celebrated emancipation from slavery all sent a common message, Benitez said.
"We are firm in our values, and we are committed to our culture, and some folks may try to undermine that but we're not going anywhere," he said.
That resolute attitude now extends to the work to restore the coast where the metaphorical grassroots action takes on a very literal meaning.
Benitez said that long before Katrina struck, citizens had called for action on misguided engineering projects that degraded the coastal environment and put the city at greater risk from storms. One such project was the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, the MR-GO, or, as locals called it, "Mr. Go." That long shipping channel from the city's Industrial Canal to the Gulf of Mexico not only created a ready pathway for surging stormwater to reach the heart of the city, it also introduced more saltwater and greatly eroded surrounding marsh.
When Katrina's surge barreled up the waterway, it laid bare those risks, and the MR-GO was finally closed.
"The restoration efforts that are happening now, they're happening because there is a legacy and a history of people advocating for an equitable response to land loss," Benitez said.
The state now has a $50 billion master plan for coastal restoration featuring large-scale engineering fixes such as diverting sediment-rich water from the Mississippi River to help replenish soil in swamps.
The tree planting and other revegetation work in concert with those efforts. Benitez cited Common Ground's recent work in a wetland east of the city called Bayou Bienvenue. With the MR-GO's closure, the salinity began to drop in the surrounding marsh, allowing the revegetation work to succeed.
"We just vegetated 15 terracing projects there that were just built," he said. Over time the vegetation and the land it protects will, in turn, help to protect the city from future storm surges.
The group's work is also generating public support for coastal restoration by exposing volunteers to the marshes and planting conservation values.
"We see a huge change in people from having never been into a wetland environment to being fully immersed in it," Benitez said. "They're really able to connect with the culture here that just sort of naturally reveals just how special it is."
Just as New Orleans music and culture reach far beyond the city, Benitez said, the city's long recovery from Katrina resonates for many other places now suffering from storms and other weather extremes driven by climate change.
"If you ask New Orleanians who survived Katrina, the things that are happening right now around the world are absolutely no surprise," he said. Building resilience to the effects of climate change, he said, can begin with recognizing the value in the natural places all around us and taking meaningful local action.
"When we talk about habitats, everywhere is a habitat. Out in front of your house, outside of the office building, the lot across the street," he said. "When you start viewing those as habitats, we can start making more responsible decisions about what we create."
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