Wetlands Restoration

Rebuild Green will work with the Common Ground Collective's Wetlands Restoration project by contributing funds from 20% of Rebuild Green's net profits into the project and by informing clients of the projects' work.

The Wetlands Restoration project, begun by Justin Hite and Jessica Neiderer, surveyed land surrounding New Orleans between April and July 2006 and formed alliances with already existing groups (such as Save Our Wetlands) intent on similar, remedial purposes.

Hurricane Katrina showed how damaging and perilous the losses of wetlands are. Since the 1930s more than 1900 square miles--an area nearly the size of Delaware--have eroded from Louisiana's coast. Since 1950 more than 8000 miles of canals have been sliced through Louisiana's marshes for oil-and-gas exploration, leaving them porous to hurricanes and storm-surges. Since 1968, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a channel dug 500 feet that serves an average of only two ships daily, has accelerated the erosion and flooding of land immediately east of New Orleans. (See a prescient 2004 article at http://www.saveourwetlands.org/lostcoast.html) for more information.

Human damage is, of course, reversible. Two days of planting by more than 60 volunteers at Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans East last July 6th and 7th put 3000 bunches of smooth-cord grass into the marsh there, as the Common Ground Collective and the City of New Orleans combined forces.

Many more of such efforts are planned as funds become available.