Restoration otherwise: Towards alternative coastal ecologies

Abstract

This article considers how to rethink ecological restoration as a process tethered to ongoing formulations of racial and environmental justice. It is situated in the context of coastal Louisiana's wetland loss crisis and the state's unprecedented investment in large-scale wetland restoration projects as a technoscientific fix that comes at the expense of several small, Black and Indigenous bayou communities. Critical of approaching restoration as a practice predicated on loss and return, this article builds upon scholarship in Black and Indigenous ecologies and ethnographic fieldwork among Black coastal communities in southeast Louisiana to reimagine restoration as an intergenerational, socioecological set of practices grounded in cultivating cultural continuity and community care across time and space. Working with the Black feminist geographic concepts of the plot and the shoal, the article develops the notion alternative restorations—or restoration otherwise—around three reformulations of restoration: As a practice of cultural continuity, as a mode of cultivating self-reliance, and as a scientific practice of integrity and humility. It concludes by reflecting the ways Black ecological practices and values can shift the course of restoration science toward sustaining Black life in the era of climate change.

A place out of time

“We have no time left to lose.” This is a mantra reiterated by officials from Louisiana’s Coastal Restoration and Protection Authority (CPRA), the state agency charged with coordinating all flood protection and wetland restoration projects across south Louisiana. To be out of time, past the point of return, conveys the sense of urgency emanating from an array of scientific reports and political efforts that have coalesced around understanding and trying to reverse extensive rates of coastal wetland loss in Louisiana over the past decade. The pace, rate, and scale of wetland loss in Louisiana is indexed by the spatial-temporal metaphors of losing an average of a “football field per hour” of wetlands since 1932 (Couvillion et al., 2011). It is a metaphor that substantiates the deep anxieties about sea level rise and climate change conveyed in popular journalism and documentary films that depict coastal Louisiana as the place on the edge of a temporal cliff defined first and foremost by the inevitable fate of becoming a place that will be “here today, gone tomorrow.” ¹ Though such narratives reflect a concern for the slow erasure of distinct bayou communities and their cultures, the geophysical entropy of the coast is also mobilized as a point of scientific and political rationale for investing in large-scale, master plans for rebuilding disintegrating wetlands and facilitating coastal communities in adapting to a smaller coast. These plans embody the “necessary trade-offs” that policymakers, environmentalists, and scientists say must be made so the future of bayou communities will not become the future of all south Louisiana. But for the Black, Indigenous, southeast Asian, and low-income communities who live the geography of loss and restoration in coastal Louisiana, the prospects of their inherent vulnerability woven into scientific projections of loss and plans for restoration are examples of a long history of mobilizing science and environmental reason to abandon their communities.

Narratives of decline create an air of unease that frequently permeates the atmosphere of public meetings about restoration and adaptation in coastal communities increasingly marked by the absence of places that “ain’t there no more” (Brasseaux and Davis, 2017). I felt this firsthand in community centers, church halls, and in the grassy bayou backyards of people like Ms. Shanice, who hails from a community of African American fishermen, public officials, neighbors, and kin living due south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish (county) along the thin spine of high ground that clings to the edges of the Mississippi River as it makes its final descent into the Gulf of Mexico. Ms. Shanice’s community exists in ambiguous spaces in the projections of risk and decline scientists have produced since the 1980s, when coastal land loss first became a significant environmental issue in Louisiana (Gagliano, 1981). Since then, the life expectancy of communities living along the narrowing coastline of Plaquemines Parish has been measured by decadal increments of 10, 50, and 100 years into the future with an eye towards grounding the urgency of this environmental crisis in timeframes that will resonate with a variety of audiences, from federal agencies to people like Ms. Shanice who live in the material analog of projections of a shrinking coast.

Ms. Shanice grumbles under her breath as we scan a table-top map of Plaquemines Parish for her beloved communities along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, or the “sliver by the river,” as she affectionately calls the east bank. The metrics, models, and maps produced by coastal scientists and CPRA all tell the same story: Ms. Shanice and much of south Plaquemines' days are numbered. Though her community is surrounded by levees that rest between homes, open water and marsh, and the river, future projections of storm surge from hurricanes exceeding 14 feet offer Ms. Shanice, her daughters, and granddaughters only two options for their families’ futures: Elevate or relocate. In addition to the risks posed by rising sea levels and sinking land, the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in southern Plaquemines are also the sites of the state’s most ambitious wetlands restoration projects: Large-scale, river sediment diversion projects. The Mid-Barataria (west bank) and Mid-Breton Sound (east bank) river sediment diversions—or simply “the diversions” as they are colloquially known in southeast Louisiana—promise to build and maintain up to 30,000 acres of wetlands over 50 years, offering sustained, future flood protection for all of southeast Louisiana. ² But these projects come largely at the expense of their neighbors in Plaquemines Parish, who are anticipated to endure increased flood risks and changes to local estuaries that will accompany the construction of diversions.

“I don’t understand this,” Ms. Shanice said to a CPRA official that passed by our table. “Where is our town on the east bank? And why are some areas considered low or high scenarios of risk? I’m so confused.” She is frustrated. It is not only the third meeting of the day for her, but another instance where she must remind CPRA that her community exists and ask why there are not any “real options” for them. “Why don’t we get projects? We’re the ones living with all this climate change,” she noted to me after the official from CPRA leaves. “If they’re sayin' our only option is to leave or elevate then they don’t understand anything about our community.”

I quietly shook my head and pursed my lips, as I often did, when Ms. Shanice and I had these exchanges at restoration meetings. CPRA pitches restoration as something for “everyone” and the broader future of coastal Louisiana. But restoration—its material and temporal contours and possibilities—are not for Ms. Shanice, the east bank, and most of Plaquemines Parish. In the matrix of scientific predictions that define the scope and possibility of a restored coast, Ms. Shanice and the east bank are already out of time.

What can be learned from attending carefully to the ways frontline communities of color define their relationships to changing environments, the possibility of restoration, and desirable futures for living on shifting coastal grounds? Can these stories lead to imagining alternative forms of restoration tied to actualizing more just climate changed futures?

This article embraces these questions to consider how we might approach environmental restoration from the perspective of communities like Ms. Shanice’s, poised upon the shifting frontlines of global climate change and unprecedented experiments in environmental restoration. In particular, I explore how mainstream definitions of environmental restoration rooted in ecological notions of loss and return might be thought otherwise—in ways that subvert, redefine, and shift the dominant (dis)course of environmental restoration towards enactments of cultural continuity, self-reliance, community care, and justice. To echo the work of the Critical Restoration Geographies Collective, to imagine restoration otherwise is an attempt to tell new stories about restoration that stretch and refashion its meaning as a cultural, political, and environmental practice (CritRest, 2021). To think with the otherwise is to work with what Ashton Crawley describes as the “ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped” (Crawley, 2016: 24). For Crawley, the otherwise directs our attention towards the ways Black communities fashion, or plot, “livable worlds” (Lloréns, 2021) beyond the death dealing logics of anti-Blackness in its myriad forms. In this article, I invoke the otherwise to rethink the unlivable binaries of “restore or retreat” predicated on the expendability and untimeliness of Black life engulfed in Louisiana's distinct “crisis epistemologies” (Whyte, 2020). Specifically, I focus on how Black coastal communities in Louisiana re-route hegemonic ideologies of ecological crisis away from a zero-sum game that pits acres of wetlands gained or lost against frontline communities, and towards the protection and sustainability of Black life and ecologies.

I approach the proposition of imagining restoration otherwise in relation to the provocations of Black feminist theorists and geographers committed to reading and re-reading landscapes of domination and extraction through Sylvia Wynter’s (1971) notion of the plantation-plot dichotomy: A geographic framework for critically attending to formations of violence constituted by the settler colonial plantation that simultaneously generates conditions of resistance, or “alternative futures” (plots), to the totalizing violence of the plantation (McKittrick, 2013:14). Invoking the slave garden plot as a material and metaphor of transformation, Wynter underscores the plot as an insurgent geographic and ecological practice (Golden, 2021; Roane, 2018) that interrupts, or “shoals” as Tiffany Lethabo King (2019) posits, the smooth flow of racialized political, economic, and environmental domination that characterizes the logics of the plantation and its afterlives as unending ecological crisis (Alagraa, 2021; McKittrick, 2013).

Bringing work in Black and Indigenous environmentalisms/ecologies—modes of thinking human–environmental relations through Black and Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies—into dialogue with critical geographies of restoration, this article considers Wynter and her interlocutors’ notion of the plot and King’s formulation of the shoal as spatial-temporal concepts through which to think about restoration as an incomplete and unfolding process tethered to cultivating racial and environmental justice for Black coastal communities. Moving between ethnographic and theoretical material, I consider how the geographic and temporal configurations of the plot and shoal reflect the alternative frameworks of restoration that communities like Ms. Shanice’s offer to mainstream technoscientific narratives of coastal restoration. Building from the insights of Black leaders from coastal Louisiana, I offer three modes of re-routing the time and possibilities of ecological restoration: As a practice of cultural continuity, as a mode of cultivating self-reliance, and as a scientific practice of integrity and humility. I conclude by reflecting on how thinking with Black ecological practices and values can reorient us towards alternative notions of restoration and repair predicated on the future of Black life on a shifting planet.

Methods and materials

This article draws from 24 months of ethnographic research I conducted among coastal communities and scientists in southeast Louisiana between 2015 and 2018. This larger ethnographic project focuses on how coastal wetland restoration science and projects in southeast Louisiana impact Black coastal communities living south of New Orleans in Plaquemines Parish (county), a place at the intersection of Louisiana’s land loss crisis and unprecedented experiments in coastal restoration. Here, I focus on my ethnographic work among leaders in Black coastal communities from Plaquemines Parish who were in regular attendance at workshops, public meetings, and events pertaining to coastal restoration projects like sediment diversions and community adaptation planning projects between 2015 and 2018. Restoration and adaptation projects (adaptation to land loss and restoration) exist across the Louisiana coast. However, some of the most ambitious projects are located on the sparsely populated, rural bayou communities of Plaquemines Parish. I highlight the offerings, and disruptions, many community leaders in Plaquemines Parish gave to state officials and scientists who attempted to cultivate the “buy in” of communities sidelined by official definitions and enactments of environmental restoration. ³ In particular, I consider the ways community leaders theorize the relationship between coastal landscapes, community histories, and political activism as the grounds for imagining restoration as a practice of doing justice for coastal communities.

At the edges of restoration ideologies

Coastal Louisiana opens a space for re-thinking mainstream understandings of environmental restoration for several reasons. First, scientists and state agencies in Louisiana are at the forefront of envisioning and enacting an unprecedented scale of environmental restoration projects in response to the state’s ongoing coastal wetland loss crisis. Accelerating rates of wetland loss since the 1930s are the result of several environmental and human forces. Delta geomorphological processes related to the growth and decay of deltaic lands have shaped the movements of the Mississippi River over several hundred thousand years, dictating a cycle of land growth and decay scientists largely characterize as “natural.” This pattern of growth and decay has maintained a steady balance of semi-solid, semi-liquid expanse of wetlands. Over the past century, however, extensive engineering of the alluvial floodplain and coastal wetlands for land reclamation, flood control, and natural resource extraction (agriculture, oil, gas) have disrupted this “natural” cycle of land growth by cutting-off the river from rebuilding sinking wetlands with fresh sediments. Without new land to replenish sinking wetlands, increasing rates of wetland subsidence and erosion have made south Louisiana increasingly vulnerable to the devastating impacts of hurricanes and persistant sea level rise. Yet approaches (and resources) for coastal wetland restoration research and projects have been largely piecemeal since the 1980s when it became a more prominent matter of public concern (Theriot, 2014 ). In the wake of the exceptionally destructive hurricane season of 2005, efforts by the US Army Corps of Engineers and state environmental agencies were consolidated into the Louisiana CPRA, the state’s central clearing house for all flood control and environmental restoration projects. Since 2007, CPRA has developed several iterations of its “Master Plan” aimed at developing the most ambitious and state-of-the-art environmental restoration projects in the world.

At the center of CPRA’s various Master Plans (LA CPRA, 2012, 2017) is the goal to abate, if not reverse, rates of wetland loss (Peyronnin et al., 2013). Focus on building land has translated into unprecedented technoscientific and fiscal investments in wetland restoration. This includes the Mid-Barataria River Sediment Diversion: A project that proposes to rebuild hundreds of acres of wetlands over the next 50 years by diverting almost a fourth of the volume of the Mississippi River (about three times the size of the Hudson River in New York) into subsiding wetlands at a cost of $1 billion (LA CPRA, 2017). Diversions encapsulate dominant ideologies of restoration defined by the mobilization of scientific practice and reason to control and fix the so-called “broken” landscapes and the people connected to them. The contemporary discursive twist on seemingly dated modernist impulses to control Nature, however, is the notion of “working with Nature”—an appeal to ecological processes, which reflects reformist approaches to environmental restoration popularized in the late twentieth century (Ogden, 2008).

Despite attempts by state officials and environmentalists to distinguish ecological engineering of the past from restoration efforts in the present, coastal restoration is a product of settler colonial ecological practices of wetland reclamation that have long come at the expense of the region’s Black and Indigenous communities. Since the first European settlers displaced the Indigenous communities of the Biloxi, Chittamacha, Choctaw, Chawasha, and Houma tribes throughout southeast Louisiana and subsequently enslaved Africans to build crude levees to protect private property and large plantations carved out of water logged wetlands, natural processes of land growth and subsidence in coastal Louisiana have been tethered to the subjugation Black, brown, and other non-white European bodies, lands, and waters (Barry, 1997; Follett, 2005; Horowitz, 2020; Kniffen et al., 1994). As Atakapa-Ishak Chawasha Grand Bayou Indian Village tribal elder Rosina Phillipe, whose tribal lands rest in the footprint of the Mid-Barataria River Sediment Diversion project, notes in a recent interview, these histories stretch into the present, marking the exclusions and absences of Indigenous and Black communities in the imaginaries and policies of coastal restoration. “We are not just communities pushed to the edge,” Elder Philipe emphasizes in her reflections on unequal relations of power between tribal peoples and state agencies in Louisiana. “We are survivors, original inhabitants, and contributors” (Jessee et al., 2020b). Ms. Shanice, whose community neighbors a second river diversion project on the east bank of the river, similarly chafes at the idea being defined by state agencies solely as a vulnerable “community on the edge.” As Ms. Shanice told me after one particularly stressful exchange with CPRA about how to engage her community: “They come down here with their clipboards and try to tell us what to do [but] what they [CPRA] don’t understand is that we take care of our own … It’s part of our culture.”

The limited scope of ecological crisis and “decontextualization” (Jessee, 2022) of the settler colonial and racialized roots of coastal engineering are particularly troubling for communities worldwide who find themselves disproportionately on the frontlines of weathering not only global climate change, but experiments in climate change adaptation projects and policies (Barra, 2021; Jessee, 2020a; Maldonado, 2018; Marino, 2014; Vaughn, 2022). Adaptation practices narrowly built upon cost-benefits models and scientific reason risk reproducing racial and economic inequalities in ways that continue to devalue the lives, livelihoods, lands, and futures of economically and geographically marginalized communities (Marino, 2018). Such mainstream discourses of environmental restoration not only sideline non-western forms of knowledge but, more insidiously, leverage western science and expertise as an innocuous justification for enacting seemingly universal visions of environmental stewardship, responsibility, and restoration (Moore, 2019). In the context of coastal Louisiana, the state’s singular focus on the future at the expense of critically reflecting on the historical and political conditions that have spiraled the coast and its people into crisis, is part of why coastal scientists and state agencies struggle to win over the public—especially Black and Indigenous coastal communities—with their multi-billion investments in climate change adaptation and restoration efforts.

Ongoing tension between coastal communities and state agencies about unprecedented environmental restoration, however, is not the only reason coastal Louisiana is an illustrative place to think about imagining restoration otherwise. South Louisiana is also one of the many places on earth where environmental racism has been on blatant display over the past century. Known as a “Cancer Alley” and “Louisiana’s chemical corridor,” the region below Baton Rouge following the Mississippi River out the Gulf of Mexico has long been the subject of environmental justice organizing and scrutiny since petrochemical plants began establishing themselves in the footprints of former sugar plantations (Allen, 2003; Misrach and Orff, 2014). Nestled next to the fencelines of many Freedman’s communities, Louisiana’s chemical corridor, along with many Black and low-income communities in the South, have been at the epicenter of the environmental justice movement and scholarship since the 1980s (Bullard, 2018[1990]; United Church of Christ, 1987). Community groups have organized for not only the right to a healthy and clean environment, but against the pernicious forms of anti-Black racism that manifest in the racial capitalist extractive industries that have shaped the contemporary ecologies of the region from sugar, to oil, to petrochemical production, to a new frontier of climate change science and engineering (Austin, 2006; Lerner, 2006). In Louisiana, battles over environmental justice are extensions of long histories of community organizing—from the slave revolts of the early nineteenth century (Paquette, 2009) to the efforts of Black communities in the twenty-first century to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Adams, 2013; Browne, 2015)—for not only emancipation and freedom, but political power, self-determination, and the right to live in a healthy and safe environment in the face of systemic racial discrimination and white supremacy.

Efforts to make, protect, and grow spaces for freedom and justice are central to the past and ongoing ecological practices of Black communities across the US South alongside more traditional environmental justice battles (Bruno, forthcoming). Whether it is the radical farming practices of Fannie Lou Hammer’s Sunflower Farm in the mid-twentieth century as a plot against the entrenchment of Jim Crow laws and culture in rural Mississippi (McCutcheon, 2019; White, 2018), or the work of Gullah/Geechee farmers to re-establish the growth, harvest, and use of sugarcane upon Black-owned (former plantation) land in Sapelo Island, Georgia in the twenty-first century (Heynen, 2021), these practices enact the material and temporal dimensions of Wynter’s plantation-plot dichotomy across time and space. Such re-imaginings and reformulations of the historic and future relationships of southern Black communities to the land reflect what Lillian “Ebonie” Alexander, Executive Director of the Black Family Land Trust, describes as a “Black land ethic:” Cultural, political and environmental reformulations of environmental relations based on African American histories and values. ⁴

As simultaneously aspirations (plots) and disruptions (shoals), Black ecological practices are not merely reactionary responses to undesirable environmental projects. They are reformulations of human–environment relations otherwise: Otherwise predicated on sustaining and nourishing Black life, from the production of food from backyard gardens and local fisheries, to the use of natural spaces for sharing time, space, and intergenerational knowledge among youth and elders. They shoal the space and time of environmentalisms circumscribed by the utilitarian values and linear temporalities of mainstream environmental conservation and restoration practices defined by settler colonial practices and their afterlives within the US and worldwide. ⁵

Restoration as a practice of cultural continuity

Many of the Black coastal communities I worked with were similarly steeped in histories of autonomous worldmaking deeply rooted to local ecologies that shaped their approach to coastal restoration. Compared to frameworks of restoration predicated on land loss and natural processes, many Black community leaders in Plaquemines Parish approach questions about land and future of Plaquemines around the past—specifically through invocations of holding land across generations of kin over time. My visits with Ms. Irvine in the small town of Ironton, which neighbors the proposed Mid-Barataria River Sediment Diversion project, regularly reinforced this point to me.

Ms. Irvine, like her neighbors, has deep roots in Ironton—a self-identified Freedman's community—and other parts of disappearing Plaquemines. During one of my visits to Ironton on a hot spring day, Ms. Irvine and I walked around the grassy lots surrounding her home, ducking under trees for some shade while talking about her family history. Gesturing towards the river levee, about four houses down the block, she told me about the courtship between her parents, each from one side of the river, and how short trips across the Mississippi (which was not as wide “back then”) built familial ties across many Black communities in Plaquemines Parish. She laughed about her father paddling across the river to court her mother, and her trips as a young girl across the river to her grandmother’s house, where she and the other children would anxiously await getting “penny candy” from their grandmother. As we walked, she described playing in the old overseer’s house with her brothers and sisters. “It used to be right over there,” she said, pointing to the next grassy lot. “Katrina took it,” she said, in an unremarkable tone that seemed to indicate that this loss of places of significance like the old overseer’s house was a routine part of living in southern Plaquemines. As a young girl, she did not know the house to be the overseer’s house, but just a family home she and her siblings played in. When her mother thought she was old enough, Ms. Irvine explained, she told her that she was not only descendant from the enslaved people who worked the lands surrounding present day Ironton when it was a sugar plantation, but also descendant from the plantation owners who owned her African ancestors. “He [the plantation owner] gave his Black mistress five lots” she told me, raising an eyebrow as she looked over in the direction of where the house once stood. “That’s how we got this land.”

Ms. Irvine's reminiscent tone turned serious as she brought up efforts to move her community away from Ironton. “You know,” she said, “the parish thinks they can just relocate us … coastal restoration or this coal terminal … they think they can just move us down the road.” She was talking about several recent battles Ironton had faced as parish leadership tried to see their community and most of southern Plaquemines as an “industrial corridor,” not unlike Cancer Alley farther upriver, where companies could pick up property in exchange for moving Freedman's communities like Ironton that have lived on former plantation lands for generations. My visits with Ms. Irvine often wound back and forth across time on these topics. They contextualize her community’s concern that coastal restoration projects are just the next in a long line of government bureaucrats and businessmen reimagining Ironton's lands and waters as nothing more than a natural economic resource to be extracted and its people as a stubborn permitting obstacle (Barra, 2021) .

For Ms. Irvine, the relationship between coastal lands and people is entwined with values that exceed the metrics of ecological and economic value. “What they [non-Black landowners and officials] seem to miss,” she explained,

is that inherited land, even if it’s a very small piece … but just the fact that it was passed down through a generation … it means so much more to an African American person than it would to a general person on the street.

Part of the significance of the land Ironton and other Black communities in Plaquemines hold is the material continuity that the land contains: Troubled plantation histories, trips to grandma's house, cemeteries, lots where homes of significance once stood, and a place to host and hold space for family. “Every couple of years, this is where we end up for our reunions,” she noted, gesturing to the land all around us. “We have tents lined up all over the property and we cook a barbecue,” she described.

And on the final day we light a candle for every deceased person in here. And we have the oldest family member present light the first candle to start that celebration off [and] then everybody be in tears here … That’s why I said the land means so much to us.

Potawatomi scholars Kyle Powers Whyte and Robin Kimmerer suggest ecological repair is a cultural practice that mends and strengthens relations between human and nonhuman kin across time. Whyte calls this as “collective continuance:” the practice of (re)establishing restorative relations between humans and the environment through ecological practices. Collective continuance refers to relations of interdependence, responsibility, and care for the social resilience of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and the environment as they shift and evolve over time (Whyte, 2018). For Whyte, this encompasses restoring relationships between Indigenous societies and the environment that foster their capacity for self-determination, particularly their capacity to self-determine how to adapt to environmental change (Whyte, 2018: 131). Kimmerer foregrounds reciprocity as a key element of this practice of repairing ecological and cultural relations. As Kimmerer writes: “Reciprocal restoration is the mutually reinforcing restoration of land and culture such that repair of ecosystem services contributes to cultural revitalization, and renewal of culture promotes restoration of ecological integrity” (Kimmerer, 2011: 258). Restoration, in this regard, is a practice of cultural continuity: A cultural and environmental process akin to the maintenance of the ties of responsibility for, and accountability to, kin as it ebbs, flows, and changes over time.

Kimmerer and Whyte's works are not merely calls to incorporate more diverse forms of environmental knowledge into restoration practices as another input into models of restoration predicated on crisis and loss. ⁶ Rather, restoration as a reparative practice points us towards the centrality of tending to kin and the ancestors as ecological practices that contribute to sustaining cultures and ecologies over time. For Black communities, who situate their histories in the long afterlife of the plantation, we can see cultural continuity as an elaboration of the plot as a time-traveling set of practices utilized by Black people to shift and shoal the seemingly inevitable arc of crisis in the wake of the plantation and its uncharted futures (King, 2019; McKittrick, 2013; Sharpe, 2016). Refusing a model of restoration that anticipates Black removal, Ms. Irvine brings ongoing ancestral presence to the foreground to underscore the ecological and cultural significance of maintaining ties with kin as a key element of what restoration means. Ms. Irvine's reconfiguration of restoration has urban analogs in New Orleans, where Black communities have actively contested urban redevelopment practices that have defunded critical social infrastructures like public schooling and housing in the name of repairing and improving post-Katrina New Orleans (Hosbey, 2018; Thomas, 2014). These contestations and reconfigurations of restoration offer a means of imagining restoration as a plot to overcome and sustain, not sacrifice, Black life. This requires, as Ms. Irvine's stories imply, refusing the logics of loss and removal that tether Blackness to environmental crisis (Davis et al., 2019; Hare, 1970; Wright, 2021). And, instead, reimagine restoration as a process wherein maintaining cultural ties across time are values central to envisioning ecologically sustainable futures.

Ms. Irvine and other members of the Ironton and other Black coastal communities in Plaquemines continue to assert their presence on Louisiana's sinking coast. When Hurricane Ida drowned Ironton under eight feet of water after a poorly maintained marsh side levee broke a half-mile from town, almost every home that was not elevated was swept off its foundation and destroyed. Caskets emerged from cemeteries and roads were caked in marsh and mud for weeks. ⁷ Though there was speculation among environmentalists that this would be the end of Ironton, community leaders were quick to insist that they would persist. “We'll rebuild,” Ms. Irvine's neighbor told me when I spoke with her a few weeks after the storm. “We always do.” Across the river, minor damage from the storm slightly delayed the opening of the Museum of the Forgotten People, a project local activist and historian Reverend Tyronne Edwards has been working on for over a decade. In February 2022, the museum had its grand opening. That same month, Ms. Irvine moved back into her home in Ironton.

Restoration as a mode of cultivating self-reliance

As Ms. Irvine and Rev. Edwards efforts to maintain ancestral connections demonstrate, Black ecological practices in Plaquemines exceed the confines of mainstream understandings of coastal restoration as a singular biophysical endeavor. This is in part, as the previous section suggests, a result of the ways cultural ties and traditions are connected to coastal landscapes. To shift the land and move the community is both an environmental and spiritual transformation. And this is not a trade-off many community leaders easily accept. Closely related to questions of cultural continuity is the desire of Black leaders and elders in Plaquemines to link discussions about restoration to the political activism of Black fishermen who have been at the forefront of organizing for civil and political rights in the parish over the past century.

Since the release of the first comprehensive coastal Master Plan in 2012 (CPRA, 2012), some of the most persistent opposition to state-sponsored restoration efforts have been led by fishermen from a variety of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. These fishermen share a mutual concern for how projects to rebuild sinking wetlands with freshwater inputs and/or the imposition of new environmental regulations will dramatically transform (i.e. destroy) the estuaries of commercial fish (and shellfish) species. ⁸ For Black fishermen in particular, frustrations with contemporary restoration plans echo battles between their communities with state agencies in the 1970s and 1980s about managing coastal resources like oyster leasing and past restoration projects as well as their efforts to become economically independent and provide for wider networks of kin and community. Access to nearby oyster reefs, waters with abundant shrimp, and coastal marshes for hunting have historically been (and still are) key modes of sustaining and feeding the people and culture of rural coastal communities, especially for Black and Indigenous people who are largely excluded from, or refuse to work for, employment regional natural resource industries not historically owned or managed by people of color (Barra, 2023) . Fishing and hunting coastal wetlands reflect deeply held values of “self-reliance,” to use Ashanté Reese’s (2018) term, and community care that extend histories of mutual aid among Black communities in Plaquemines Parish from the Jim Crow era to the present (Edwards, 2017).

Beyond providing economic and edible sustenance, access to environmental resources and fishermen have been central to struggles for racial equity, laying the groundwork for confronting the racist and exploitative political culture of parish leadership that suppressed Black voting rights, denied Black communities basic infrastructure like running water, and persistently blocked efforts of Black residents to have fair political representation in parish government from the 1920 s onwards (Edwards, 2017; Jeansonne, 1977). When Plaquemines Parish elected its first Black political representative to the parish council since Reconstruction in the 1980 s, it was due to the political activism of Black fishermen and concerned citizens who worked together to oust what historians have called a political dictatorship in Plaquemines rooted in white supremacy, rampant natural resource extraction (oil and gas), and “good old fashioned capitalist greed” as one veteran fisherman described to me (Horowitz, 2020; Jeansonne, 1977). In a place where environmental control has historically been a mode of trying to dispossess Black communities of economic autonomy and political rights, fishermen's transformation of coastal ecologies into political allies reflect environmental ideologies predicated on freedom and care.

Black ecological practices challenge a culture of anti-Blackness that has geographically and politically marginalized their communities. The efforts of Black fishermen in Plaquemines reflect how Black communities have historically mobilized their knowledge and ecological practices to subvert the dominance of anti-Black political institutions. In the US South, the establishment of Black towns, or “freedom villages” as Clyde Woods describes them, were self-governing and economically autonomous spaces where Black people could embrace pride in place alongside forms of land ownership against the dominance of the plantation bloc in the years following Reconstruction (Woods, 2017: 84–85). Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta, rural Black towns in Oklahoma, and Black freedom colonies in Texas are regional examples of the plots many Black communities nurtured for physical, cultural, and economic survival as white supremacy repurposed itself under Jim Crow laws in the twentieth century (Roberts, 2017; Slocum, 2019; Woods, 2017). These examples of autonomous Black worldmaking are aligned with the efforts of Black coastal communities in Plaquemines who have historically enrolled coastal ecologies as close allies and co-conspirators in political plots/shoals to regional development blockades predicated on the exploitation and degradation of local ecologies and Black life (Woods, 2017).

Traditions of self-reliance and autonomy within Black coastal communities were frequently invoked by community elders in Plaquemines, who made an explicit effort to not only voice these histories and values at restoration meetings, but to also remind the next generation of community leaders to continue to advocate for these community values and ways of life as physical and political environments shift around them. “Who are our most valuable resources?” One elder fisherman posed to a group of six youth gathered around a table to discuss future flood risk. “The people!” he exclaimed as his audience respectfully listened. He later told me he was there to set an example and remind the “young folks” of the people and traditions they come from. But state officials, scientists, and other supporters of large restoration projects frequently write-off the concerns of fishermen and their advocates as the lament of stubborn fishermen who do not understand the inherent need for large-scale restoration projects to safeguard the future and “greater good” of all of coastal Louisiana. The measure of that greater good, however, is steeped in the values programmed into predictive models that calculate the value of wetlands in terms of avoided costs/costs saving (from anticipated natural disasters) in comparison to the value of local seafood industries (calculated in terms of economic value). This is a metric that will never prioritize the value of subsistence fishing and community traditions. More importantly than that, though, it reduces the value of coastal lands and waters to biophysical metrics and becomes a means of bolstering the rationalization of further displacing the values that are central to the cultural foundations of Black coastal communities.

As sociologist Nathan Hare wrote over four decades ago, the “real solution to the environmental crisis,” resides not in the reproduction of technoscientific fixes to ecological problems, but addressing the racial-capitalist structural conditions that produced the twinned crises of racism and ecological demise (Hare, 1970: 8). This begins, as Hare writes, with the “decolonization of the black race,” which creates the conditions for Black communities to achieve “self-determination” (Hare, 1970: 8). Hare’s calls for an environmentalism that reimagines the racialized, colonial structures of American society is reflected in the creation of Black independent towns and spaces and echoed in the work of critical geographers highlighting the ways Black communities enact ecological practices in ways that intentionally critique and undermine structures of anti-Black racism and white supremacy. J.T. Roane and Justin Hosbey define Black ecologies as “alternative epistemic entry points for historicizing and interrupting mounting ecological crisis” that attend to the “insurgent corpus of knowledge” held and fostered by Black communities across space and time (Hosbey and Roane, 2021; Roane and Hosbey, 2019). Orienting environmental relations towards goal of “get(ting) free and feel(ing) safe,” as Purifoy and Wilson (2020) write, Black ecological practices embody the aspirational nature of the plot to seed the possibilities of alternative worlds that center Black livingness and shoal existing structures of ecological and racial domination. The ecological practices of Black communities remind us that freedom and autonomy are not “experiments” or discreet fixes, but “constantly evolving conversation[s],” for rethinking how ongoing racialized struggles, violence, and dispossession can have alternative futures (McKittrick, 2013: 10). Like the fleeting life and oft-times disruptive nature of an offshore shoal, “the practice of getting free constantly changes and can never be anticipated” (King, 2016: 1037, 2019).

Envisioning restoration from the grounds of Black ecological practices foregrounds the relations of resistance and liberation that coastal lands and waters have provided for Black communities that exists beyond the metrics of risk and narratives of crisis. This is why community leaders ask how coastal restoration is serving or helping their communities beyond acres of wetlands “saved.” It is a challenge to imagine restoration as something that can be tied to cultivating forms of self-reliance and community care into climate changed futures.

Restoration as a scientific practice of integrity and humility

Attending to the ways diverse cultural values and knowledge shape notions of restoration, several scholars have pushed to expand definitions and practices of ecological restoration by asking questions such as: Which humans and whose ecological values are we restoring to? Within what political and historical contexts? And to what (and whose) desired ends? Although such questions indicate that restoration is as much a cultural practice as an ecological one (Bliss and Fischer, 2011; Kimmerer, 2011), deeper interrogations of the ethical dimensions and cultural norms of restoration science are often left untouched.

One of the most persistent concerns voiced at meetings with the state restoration authority in Plaquemines Parish focused on the integrity and ethical orientation of coastal restoration science. Though my fieldnotes are filled with comments about the questionable integrity of “paid for science,” Mr. Percy, an elder and community leader from the east bank, always seemed to have the most incisive and direct thoughts to offer on this matter at public meetings. A particularly striking example of this from my time in Plaquemines was at a meeting about the state of research on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion restoration project, which neighbors Ironton and Grand Bayou Indian Village, Elder Philipe’s tribal community, which is surrounded by marsh and open water . The meeting space, a former plantation turned bed and breakfast, was a standing room only when I arrived. Mr. Percy, along with a few other Plaquemines residents, stood in the back during a series of PowerPoint presentations and discussion among scientists about the calibration of different modeling programs used by state and federal agencies to predict the biophysical impacts of the diversions to nearby wetlands. When it was finally time for public comments, Mr. Percy minced no words with the audience:

You know, these meetings have become toxic to me. I'm frightened. We need more integrity in science. We need honesty. People are losing their lives […] We need to see the politics as much as the science […] Don't let them turn you into academician prostitutes.

As the wider field of political ecology teaches us, ideas of nature/naturalness that inform approaches to environmental restoration practices are co-constituted (if not entirely constituted) by cultural values and political forces that exceed the material characteristics of the environment. Efforts to be more “cautious” (Bliss and Fischer, 2011: 138) of the seemingly common-sense understandings of restoration that define what is considered to be a “natural” or “baseline” environment necessitate recognizing that establishing environmental baselines are not inherently value-free, objective reflections of what an environment should or should not be (Ureta et al., 2020). Such critiques reflect the fact that ideologies of restoration rooted in technoscientific frameworks defined first and foremost by measures and valuations of the natural world frequently work to rationalize the expulsion of peoples and cultures embedded within landscapes that are candidates for restoration. Ethnographic examinations from geographers and anthropologists focused on ecological restoration projects in North America document the limited capacity of state and federal restoration efforts to shift away from scientific paradigms focused on purely material functions of ecosystems as the ultimate goal of restoration and towards incorporating more diverse set of cultural values and desired outcomes for restoration (Cattelino, 2015; Paolisso et al., 2015). As anthropologist Laura Ogden (2008) notes in her analysis of ecosystem-based restoration in the Florida Everglades, notions that humans (their social and cultural systems) are “inseparable” from the long-term sustainability and restoration of the Everglades were largely sidelined as the restoration of the Everglades become institutionalized as a water management plan defined by technoscientific knowledge and ecological metrics (Ogden, 2008: 29–30). Such patterns point to how efforts to integrate human values into restoration frameworks often reproduce a pattern of subsuming, and subsequently erasing, sociocultural values into hegemonic ecological frameworks. For communities who live within the spaces of restoration ideologies and projects, such efforts to advance environmental goods (as the most proximate so-called beneficiaries of such projects) can exacerbate historic and ongoing struggles over political power and naturalize the further marginalization of communities in visions of future environments.

For Mr. Percy, calling restoration meetings “toxic” and questioning the capacity of those in attendance to think for themselves (that is, not to sell themselves out to the coastal restoration science industry), was a blunt refusal of this pattern of erasure so often reproduced in discussions about coastal restoration in Louisiana. By insisting on the presence of his community and their erasure for restoration plans to move forward, Mr. Percy shifted the terms of conducting restoration science, if only for a moment, from the safety of the course of peer review and debates over the nature of natural systems, to the deeper political work and stakes of these scientific discussions on the lives of residents. It was a reminder to those in attendance that they do not work in a sanitized laboratory free of conflict, politics, and competing values, but a messy, unpredictable environment as much shaped by the movement of sediment and subsidence of wetlands as histories of political corruption and sacrifice. It was a moment of interruption that forced the otherwise unencumbered current of ecosystem science to swerve and make space for other feelings, questions, and values to enter the official dialogue about coastal restoration. And it was also a reminder that western environmental science is not a practice inherently associated with ethical integrity (as apolitical, objective science) but, instead, a field of power and struggle over differentiated values, environmental knowledge, and political priorities that exceed the metrics of land lost and land gained. In the dozens of meetings on coastal restoration I attended since that afternoon, similar imperatives to expand the scope of whose knowledge and values are used to drive coastal restoration research were consistently voiced by residents, fishermen, tribal leaders, local politicians, and community leaders—groups whose lands and communities are at the center of restoration projects, yet whose voices and values are categorically marginal to projects for environmental restoration predicated on rebuilding wetlands.

Over time, I have come to think about these interruptions as ideological shoals that are examples of what science and technology studies scholar Sheila Jasanaoff described almost two decades ago as “technologies of humility”: “[…] habits of thought that try to come to grips with the ragged fringes of human understanding – the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the uncontrollable” that allow for disjuncture and friction typically purged from scientific praxis to emerge (Jasanoff, 2003: 227). In contrast to “technologies of hubris” predicated on control and safeguarding of science’s autonomy from (and accountability to) society beyond the boundaries of disciplinary methods, theories, and peer review, technologies of humility aspire to embrace and wrestle with the multiplicity of knowledge, uncertainty, and historical-political contexts science is entangled with (Jasanoff, 2003: 238–243). As leaders from communities that have long been in footprint of experiments in riverine and coastal engineering in south Louisiana understand, the boundaries between science and society are elaborate fictions that often shield science from accountability to diverse publics as basic science bleeds into and shapes policy. Such demands for restoration with integrity and humility are means of slowing and re-routing the flow of scientific reason, and holding coastal science accountable for the society dynamics that shape the possibilities of its production and application. To shift towards science with humility—to value Black people beyond the confines of algorithms and technoscientific models crisis that have normalized their control and erasure (Benjamin, 2019; McKittrick, 2021)—is a key route through which restoration science can have an alternative future that anticipates the future of Black life instead of it untimely demise.

Conclusion: Life beyond scientific fact

Black and Indigenous ecologies offer points of friction, differentiation, and interruption to singular notions of repair and crisis that normalize the “necessary tradeoff” of frontline communities for an ecological “greater good.” Imagining environmental restoration through the plots and shoals frontline communities place in the pathway of mainstream restoration reminds us that such tradeoffs are not necessary, but contingent. And that restoration could be otherwise predicated on alternative sets of ecological values, histories, and goals that exceed the confines of ecological metrics and economics of cost–benefits analyses. Throughout this article, I have highlighted how Black ecological practices disrupt mainstream discourses and practices of ecological restoration in coastal Louisiana and redefine the meaning and possibility of ecological repair as a practice tied to maintaining multi-generational histories and cultural values, and cultivating scientific integrity that begins with protecting Black life and futures.

To conclude, I would like to turn to the writings of novelist Sarah Broom. There is a section of Broom’s memoir of growing up in pre-Katrina New Orleans, The Yellow House (2019), that has stuck to me as I have worked through questions about the future of coastal communities as the forces of restoration and climate change move forward. It comes towards the end of the book, when Broom is looking out at the lot where her childhood home once stood, and remembering what it felt like to play on that land:

Behind Ms. Octavia’s house all of the lots ran together … leading me to imagine a time before houses, back when this was marshland and dense cypress swamps. I thought of the stories we made as children, how we called the ground quicksand, the nature of our world evident. We didn’t need scientific fact. We were on sinking ground and knew it as children and still we played. (Broom, 2019: 364)

Broom’s reflections on her childhood home and the layers of past, present, and future bound to a tenuous dance with the material forces of entropy remind me of Ms. Shanice, Mr. Percy, and Ms. Irvine navigating the changing political and material grounds around them through a commitment to envisioning a future of their community, of restoration, grounded in ecological relations that have held and cared for their communities across time and in defiance of scientific fact.

Ms. Shanice carries the ethos of living beyond scientific fact with her as she continues to shuttle from meeting to meeting between hurricane evacuation orders, high school functions, church, and family gatherings. When Hurricane Ida rolled through southeast Louisiana in August 2021 with a force not seen in the region since the late nineteenth century, Ms. Shanice evacuated 300 miles away to a cousin’s house, where she waited, along with her neighbors, for the roads to be cleared and the lights to come back on in Plaquemines. She was grateful that the damage was not worse in their community. She was mostly grateful, though, to have time with her cousins and celebrate the news of having a second grandchild. Time moves forward with or without restoration and scientific facts.

Her optimistic tone during our chats in the weeks following Hurricane Ida reminded of conversation we had after the meeting about 14-foot-high storm surges, elevation, and relocation described at the beginning of this article:

I’m leery of climate change. I’m aware that things are changing. I also believe in a higher power, so I didn’t stress too much about what the maps say and what the scientists say. I pay attention, but we’ve been through so much and we still here …. Your maps tell me one thing but history tells me different. Plaquemines is still here. We were raised in the church to believe. We’re sinking, I know. But I believe it will turn around. We’re still here and we’re gonna be here.

I’m not sure what the “it” that will be turned around is in the context of Ms. Shanice’s comments. In the moment, I nodded my head with cautious optimism, hoping that whatever turn “it” would take would be an opportunity to change course in the direction of Ms. Shanice’s faith in the future of her community. “We're gonna be here,” she insisted. Perhaps that is how and where an approach to alternative restorations in coastal Louisiana can begin to be imagined: On the possibility, desire, and aspiration to “be here” into unforeseen futures.