As early as the nineteen-thirties, oystermen in southern Louisiana began to notice the shoreline that they worked was creeping inland. In the years since, with sea levels rising and erosion accelerating, more and more coastal land has been overtaken by water. To date, the state’s wetlands have shrunk by about two thousand square miles—an area the size of Delaware. Those wetlands—marshes, swamps—are more than rich ecosystems. They also mitigate the effects of storms, soaking up stormwater and serving as a natural barrier between hurricanes and populated lands. “The effects of the land loss are all around us,” the New Orleans-based filmmaker Paavo Hanninen told me recently. “When the hurricanes come through, you’re dealing with a situation where hundreds of miles of buffer land are now gone, so these storms hit the city with torrential force.”
For Louisiana’s coastal parishes, reduced wetlands mean the areas are more vulnerable to flooding. In just four years in the mid-two-thousands, Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike knocked out three hundred square miles of marsh. In the absence of ample wetlands acting as a kind of sponge, future hurricanes of similar magnitudes, travelling unimpeded over the open waters of the Gulf of Mexico, will be even more destructive. And the attrition of the land is of deep personal significance to coastal communities. “For people in south Louisiana, this is an existential issue,” Hanninen said. “These are places that they know, and that their parents knew, and they’re vanishing.”
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In his documentary short “What Remains,” Hanninen presents one local program to slow that loss. Since 2014, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana has collected some ten million pounds of oyster shells from restaurants in New Orleans, laid them out in the sun to cure (i.e., allow any food and bacteria to break down), and returned them to the water in steel crates and marine-grade mesh bags at four sites along the coast. James Karst, a spokesman for the nonprofit, who appears in the film, told me that the resulting underwater structures—simply put, man-made oyster-shell barrier reefs—cut the rate of shoreline recession by about half.
“We’re sort of mimicking the natural process,” Karst said. “When predators eat oysters, they just drop the shells right back in the water, and that creates a habitat for new oyster larvae.” But the oyster trade disrupts nature’s recycling program—shells that are harvested and transported to distant restaurants and grocers mostly wind up being dumped in landfills to rot. The coalition recently asked Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to conduct a study to determine how much shell is recycled, transported out of state, or diverted to landfills. Karst does not want diners to give up shellfish. He also happens to be a professional competitive eater—he once tied for fourth at the New Orleans Oyster Festival, consuming a hundred and eighty oysters on the half shell in eight minutes—and he appreciates them char-grilled, crusted with garlic butter and Parmesan. But, he says, “in a perfect world, all of the shells that come out of the water would go back into the water.”
In 2017, government agencies in Louisiana modelled a range of plausible land-loss scenarios and concluded that “there is a 100% statistical probability that additional erosion will occur in the future.” If no additional action is taken, they warned, another two thousand square miles of shoreline will recede within fifty years, dislocating communities and precipitating the collapse of commercial fisheries. At present, only fourteen restaurants participate in the coalition’s shell-recycling program—a dozen fewer than when the program was at its apex. To offset some of the organization’s operating costs, most restaurants pay a hundred and seventy dollars a month. The recycling program is partially funded by oil and gas companies, including Shell, which drills in the Gulf of Mexico. (One supposes these companies could fully subsidize the participating restaurants.)
Hanninen and his crew filmed in winter, capturing long shots filled with a subdued color palette. They cut ten hours of footage down to thirteen minutes, a visual eulogy for a dying coastline more than a paean to activism and resiliency. The score, by members of the Cajun group Lost Bayou Ramblers, is severe and sad, even eerie, dissipating and dissolving like the land itself. “We didn’t want it to feel too joyful,” Hanninen said. “It’s kind of a tragic story of the herculean effort that’s required just to build 1.3 miles of coastline.” Hanninen went on, “Clearly it’s been a very effective program, but compared to the amount of land that’s been lost—I mean, can we really make all that up?”
