he overarching goal of The McKnight Foundation's river program is to maintain and restore the Mississippi River. We do this by supporting efforts to protect land and water, to expand the capacity of other organizations to do this work, and to transform systems that impede progress. Our grants go to organizations working within the 10-state corridor through which the river flows: from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

Restoration of coastal Louisiana has been an integral part of the river program since its creation in 1991. This is because how the river is managed matters — the river affects the stability of the coast. As a result, we support organizations now at the forefront of planning coastal restoration and storm protection. Some funding relationships began after the hurricanes of 2005; others date back nearly 15 years. (Links to several organizations are at the end of this article.)

The following presentation by McKnight environment program director Gretchen Bonfert was part of an introduction to a panel discussion at the Smart Growth Funder's Network 2007 annual conference in Baltimore. In it, she explores how decades of human-caused coastal land loss, combined with certain specific water resource management policies and decisions, actually increased the devastation from hurricanes. These harsh realities illuminate the need for more wetlands and directly controlled flows to restore the coast.

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The topics in this presentation are two: coastal land loss in Louisiana and the damage caused by hurricanes and engineering failures in 2005.

his is an image of the storm surge in the lower ninth ward. At its worst, Katrina reached 120 mph winds with a 27-foot wall of water. Hurricane Katrina hit on August 23, 2005 and caused damages worth $80 billion. A month later, Hurricane Rita hit the same region of the country and cost $11 billion in damages. Together, the storms killed nearly 1,500 people in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas. Half the counties in Louisiana and Mississippi were declared disaster areas. Along the coast of the state of Mississippi, the storm pummeled one half-mile inland. In those areas 90 percent of the structures were gone. The storm surge of Rita traveled inland six miles up bays and rivers.

This image shows the extent of flooding in New Orleans. The royal blue color represents part of New Orleans that flooded less than a foot. The reddish color is 12 feet deep. The lower ninth ward is just left of center in the image — the brightest, widest swath of red on the map. It is not lower in terms of sea level; rather it is lower in terms of being down-river. New Orleans is about 140 square miles; of that, 120 square miles was flooded. The storm caused only 20 percent of the flooding; the remaining 80 percent was due to other levees that failed in the 24-48 hours following the hurricane. To the right of the reddish area in the center of the image you see a whole swath of land that looks quite bare. That's St. Bernard Parish, where prior to the storm stood 28,000 structures. After Katrina, only 52 were left standing.

This image helps to explain why St. Bernard Parish was so damaged. Notice the angled canal in the lower right corner of the image. This is the last portion of a 66-mile stretch of a channel that starts in the gulf and proceeds northwest to New Orleans as a shortcut for navigation. It is known as MRGO (pronounced "Mister Go"), which stands for Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. The canal was built 40 years ago in spite of much opposition, as people feared it would weaken the marshes that protect the region.

The coastal marshes are a dense shrubby mat of vegetation. When MRGO was built, the 700-foot-wide channel destroyed 27,000 acres of wetlands. Cutting through it changes everything. Salt water rushes in and changes the salinity of the water; plants that thrived in freshwater conditions are destabilized and the whole fabric of the wetlands is weakened. St. Bernard Parish passed a resolution to close MRGO in 1998, fearing that MRGO would make the parish more vulnerable by allowing storm surges to accelerate northward.

f course the hurricanes greatly accelerated loss of marshlands surrounding New Orleans, with hundreds of square miles vanishing. However, this erosion started with the oil industry in the 1930s. One third of the nation's oil and gas comes in from pipelines to New Orleans. The rate of loss for the subsequent 70 years has been about the size of a football field per hour.

Here is a broader look of the coast of southern Louisiana. Because New Orleans is below sea level it has its challenges, but these are manageable challenges. It is important to note that parts of cities such as Tokyo and Rotterdam are below sea level. The real problem in New Orleans is the loss of the coastal wetlands that protected the region. On this map, the areas shaded in red are the predicted loss of the Louisiana coast by the year 2050 if nothing changes.

There are three main causes for the loss:

• MRGO, and oil industry pipelines, ditches, and roads, have perforated this area that provides 30 percent of the nation's oil and gas.
• Cypress logging.
• Subsidence due to the way the Mississippi River is managed. On the upper half of the river we have dozens of locks and dams. Below St. Louis there are no locks and dams, but there are levees the entire length of the river — all the way out to the lower right corner of that image. Water stays inside the levees. This allows for farming, but stops any natural periodic flooding that would deposit layers of rich sediment and dissolved fertilizers that nourish marshes.

The damage that Hurricane Katrina caused made it very clear that how the whole Mississippi River is managed matters.

his final image is about restoration. This is the Caernarvon Fresh Water Diversion, an existing project that allows the kind of flooding I talked about earlier. This is a controlled direction of river water that has dissolved fertilizers and soil that can help restore wetlands and marshes and remedy subsidence. These kind of projects on large and small scales, plus direct planting of trees and shrubs and grasses, are the keys to restoring coastal Louisiana.

Since the hurricanes, the Foundation has increased its funding to organizations working in Louisiana by more than $1 million. Some of the groups are in Louisiana, others are national organizations headquartered thousands of miles away. Many are working on policy initiatives for coastal restoration. Organizations receiving support include:

• American Rivers
• Coalition to Restore Coastal Louiana
• Coastal Extension and Research Program at Louisiana State University
• Ducks Unlimited
• Environmental Defense
• Grist.org
• Gulf Restoration Network
• Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation
• National Wildlife Federation
• The Nature Conservancy of Louisiana
• Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy

Thank you. This concludes my presentation. Next you'll hear from the other panelists about their lessons from the hurricanes.

Grantmaking to support the environment, which includes both our energy and river programs, represents 15% of The McKnight Foundation's total annual payout. In 2007, the Foundation granted more than $9 million to maintain and restore the Mississippi River. Of that total, McKnight approved more than $675,000 in new grants to nonprofits working to preserve and rebuild coastal Louisiana.

Related Links

McKnight's environment grantmaking program
Browse McKnight environment grantees