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April 21, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
29:49
Defending American Wetlands with Dean Wilson

Dean Wilson, the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper in Louisiana, discusses the importance of America's coastal wetlands and defending them with RFK Jr. For more info on Atchafalaya Basinkeeper visit: https://www.basinkeeper.org/

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Hey, everybody.
My guest today is my friend, Captain Dean Wilson, who is Executive Director of the Atchafalaya Basin Keeper in Louisiana.
He's American-born, believe it or not, when you hear his accent, but he grew up in Spain, and then he came to Louisiana in 1984 en route to the Amazon, where he was going to live after living in the basin's deep swamps for four months with only a spear, a few hooks, and a bow and arrow.
Dean fell in love with the swamps, lakes, and bayous and rivers of the Atchipalaya Basin.
Dean chose to stay in the basin working as a commercial fisherman before forming Basin Keeper in 2004.
He is a proud member of the Water Keeper Alliance.
Dean's passion for the basin is known to all who know him when he is not out patrolling or educating communities about the basin and has many threats and treasures.
He works with his family owned and operated a swamp tour business called Last Wilderness Swamp Tours.
I'm fortunate enough to spend a lot of time in the basin with Dean.
My son lived with him for a summer and worked before he went to college.
It was a really exciting summer living in the middle of the swamp with Dean and a whole arsenal of weaponry, which my son was kind of surprised about.
But at that time, Dean was targeted by the cypress industry.
And there were a lot of people interested in silencing him.
But, Dean, you're one of my great heroes, and I'm really glad that we got to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you, Bobby.
You're one of mine.
Thanks.
So, tell us about the Atchvalia Foundation.
Well, the Chafalaya Basin is the largest forested wildland in North America.
It is larger than the Everglades.
We have over 800,000 acres of forested wildlands and over half a million acres of moors.
It is the basin of the Chafalaya River, which used to be the first distributary of the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi River used to have a lot of distributaries spreading the water and the sediments from the coast of Louisiana.
The first one was the Atahafalaya River.
So it's the basin of the river.
So this was before the levees were created.
The Mississippi River, when it approached the coast, is spread out in a bunch of braided tributaries and The biggest part of that was the Achapalaya Basin.
It was the largest and the first distributary.
And so it's one of the biggest migratory staging grounds for water birds and shore birds in North America or anywhere in the world.
Yes, that's right.
So we have birds that come from the tropics every year, like hummingbirds, sunbirds, herons, peregrine falcons, kites, you know, they're called neotropical migrants.
And it's divided in two populations.
The eastern North American population that goes to the east, the western North American population that goes to the west.
So nearly the entire eastern North American population of these birds and many species of the western population come through the coast of Louisiana.
The Mississippi Delta is one of the largest in the world.
Birds don't like to fly over hills.
They like to fly over flat areas.
So what they do is they fly from Yucatán across the Gulf of Mexico through the coast of Louisiana.
For many of them, the wetlands of the Delta is the most important habitat by itself.
That's where they breathe and feed, you know.
For many other ones, they step over to go to, they can go Central Flyway toward the Pacific Flyway or along the coast to the Atlantic Flyway, and they can go all the way to Alaska.
So, you picture, you know, the ecology of the planet, the Western Hemisphere, and you see all these migratory bursts coming to North America through Louisiana.
You have all the wetlands in the coast.
The wetlands in the coast are disappearing.
Sea level is rising.
There is no hope to save those wetlands.
So, you look like 50 to 100 years in the future, the only wetlands that we have left, and especially forested wetlands, will be the area that are away from the coast.
With the Chakalaya Basin, we'll be the largest And most important of all of them.
So, for the ecology of the planet, we're talking about probably the most important single ecosystem in the whole in North America for migratory birds.
On top of that, the Chafalaya Basin have the most productive wetlands in the entire world.
Now, productivity is different than diversity.
Like, if you go to a tropical wetland, it's going to have more species of birds and mammals and animals, you know.
The Chafalaya Basin is more productive, meaning you have more quantity per acreage.
The reason being that we have the largest production of wild crawfish in the entire world.
So, you know, the amount of birds and animals you can feed per acre is greater than any of the world, which is very fortunate for the birds.
They have to depend in the future.
They will lose all the habitat and we have to depend in the future on the Atchafala Basin.
So, it's amazing.
It's an amazing place.
When the water comes up in the basin, it becomes like a crawfish buffet.
Everything is filled on crawfish, you know.
Orders, minks, raccoons, alligators, fish, birds.
You know, you have fishing spiders.
Big spiders like this big around with the legs.
They live in the trees.
One, they need the water with a bubble of bears, scuba diving, and they catch craffies.
Owls catch craffies.
Frogs, bullfrogs catch craffies.
And, of course, people.
We have the largest production of wild craffies in the entire world.
So you get an idea of the importance of the Chocolate Basin for the ecology.
On top of that, the Basin is critically important for the whole nation for floor protection.
So, to whoever is not familiar with Louisiana, you have the Mississippi River going through Louisiana.
And it used to be a time when every time you have a flood in the heart of the country, it used to spread out in 24 million acres of forks.
The Mississippi River was called North American Amazon.
And so you could have gone by boat from Louisiana all the way to Missouri through the forest in Howard.
Now you have all the floodwaters confined in one channel.
As the Mississippi builds up toward the coast and through the Louisiana, you really cannot build levees high enough to protect all these communities at all times.
So what the Corps did is build two spillways.
A spillway is an area you spill the water if it's over the levees.
So the first one, you know, from the coast is going to be the Bonacare spillway to protect the city of New Orleans.
So the water will go, big gates along the levees, they open the gates, go underneath I-10, they coach a train, they burn, go for Mexico, save the day for New Orleans.
The other one that they build is to protect everything above it.
And we're talking about the largest port in the United States, which is between Baton Rouge and the Orleans.
It's all a long port.
On top of that, we have 150 plants, industry, chemical plants, refineries, aluminum factories, all kinds of things in there.
Baton Rouge, you know, there's so many people that depend on that.
So to protect all that section of the river, they built the Morgansa spillway.
So what they did, they used the Atchafalaya Basin as a spillway.
Now, if they would have put levees along the Atchafalaya River, they would have the same problem.
But they got to move the flow water 135 miles or so from Sinsport around Baton Rouge and all those plants.
All the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
So what they did, they needed flood capacity.
Float is like a bathtub to hold the floodwaters until it can reach the Gulf.
Because the water is going to build up faster than it can drain.
So what they did, they built levee systems along the Chafalaya Basin.
At this time, they put them like 18 miles apart on average.
So that's your bathtub.
When they built the levee systems in the Chafalaya Basin, they cut the surface of the Chafalaya Basin by less than half of where it used to be.
That creates huge environmental problems because when they build those levees, they have no consideration for the ecology of the basin.
They cut rivers in half, entire lakes in half, so huge problems.
So now you have an 18-mile-wide bathtub.
So imagine there's a bathtub in your house.
So that's flood capacity.
One of the threats to the Chafala Basin is we're building land within the levee systems away from the coast.
When you build land within the levee systems, within the levee, you know, within the levee systems, afro, from the coast, what you're doing is reducing flood capacity.
And every time you reduce flood capacity, the basin can handle a lesser flood.
So eventually, by doing that, what they're doing is putting at risk 150 plus chemical plants and different refineries and all that.
The Port of Butternut and New Orleans is going to come to a point where the basin won't be able to handle a major flood.
If that ever happens and the Mississippi level fell, we're talking not only about the environmental catastrophe like we've never seen in the United States.
We're talking about economical impact that I don't know if we can ever recover.
Imagine you just have the Port of Baton Rouge and New Orleans out for months and over 150 plants go out for months, you know, what would cost the economy of the country.
So the basin is very, very important for the planet and very, very important for the nation.
Tell us a little bit about your personal story.
How did you end up there?
Well, I came here, you know, like you mentioned, you know, by accident.
I didn't even know there was an Atchafalaya Basin.
I just came to the basin because when I look at a road map, it's an emptiness.
It's a space between Lafayette and Baton Rouge where there's no roads, no towns.
So I figured it had to be a wilderness.
And I didn't know I was looking at Atchafalaya Basin.
And when I came here, I fell in love with the basin.
It was so beautiful.
You see all the beautiful green cypress trees.
I came here in the spring.
They're my favorite time of the year.
And see the big, beautiful egrets flying like angels through the forest.
I mean, it was just amazing.
Your plan at that point was to go live like an Indian in the Amazon.
That's correct.
And you wanted to test whether you were able to survive in the wild in that kind of ecosystem with minimal equipment.
That's correct.
And I wanted to get used to the heat because when I grew up in Spain, I grew up in the mountains.
You know, I was very used to the cold.
I'm very, you know, I'm like torch man.
You know, like, I do wet weather in cold weather than hot weather.
And I figure if, you know, every time a mosquito bite me, I get a wee whelp.
So I figure if I go to the Amazon, I cannot get out, you know, easily, you know.
So I wanted to get used to all that before I ventured into the Amazon.
And what happened?
Well, when I came here, I stayed for four months, leaving all the land in the basin, and I just fell in love with it.
And at that point, I decided to stay in the Chapala Basin.
I made my living off the land in the basin instead of going to the Amazon.
So for over 20 years, 16 years full time, I made my living hunting and fishing.
My family ate, well, what I catch.
You know, we have a big garden and we buy some things, but we depend very heavily for food.
And for money in the Chapala Basin to pay our bills.
And then, you know, one reason I stay in the Chapala Basin also because you look in paper, everything is fine and protected.
So I figured it was a stable place on the planet where I can live there without any stresses and conflicts, you know, in my entire life.
And then I realized that what they put on paper It's completely different than the reality.
So there's a couple of things that really got me involved in protecting the Chapala Basin.
The first one happened in 1991.
You know, in 1987, it was a series of easements.
It's supposed to protect the surface rights of the Chaffala Basin in perpetuity, El Saples included.
And then somewhere around 1999 or 1990, the mulch industry contacted the big landowners in the town.
And they told them they could make a lot of money by logging the El Saples trees down and all the willows and everything else.
And they're all up together and making mulch.
So, and then...
Their proposal was to take the cypress trees, these beautiful cypress trees with beautiful root systems.
And some of them are a thousand years old.
Oh, two thousand years old.
Two thousand years old.
They were here when Jesus Christ walked in the earth.
And they're going to take those trees and turn them into garden mulch and sell them at garden stores.
Yes.
So I knew that.
And I talked with different environmental groups and nobody was taken seriously because it's hard to prove and it's all hearsay or whatever reasons.
But anyway, in the year 2000, they actually started occurring in the suburbs.
And another thing happened in 1991.
The Chafalaya River had these tributaries.
These tributaries bring all the water to the swamps.
And they realign one of them.
You know, what they did, they dammed the tributary, and they make a channel And we land it to the top of a river at the end of a curve of the river.
So what happened, when you have a lot of sand coming through a river, sand is heavy, so it moves with the current.
So when you have a curve on the river, that's where the current goes, that's where the bulk of the sand goes.
So you make a cut at the end of that curve, what you're doing is directing the sand away from the main river into the swamps.
So the court did that, you know, saying they did it to minimize the amount of sand.
They were lying.
You know, they actually...
They were maximizing the amount of sand in the swamp.
So that year, within the next three years, my fishing grounds went completely submerged by sand, completely disappeared.
So that's, I realized, I mean, they're lying to the public.
What they're saying is not true.
They intentionally fill in the basin for oil companies, pipeline companies, and large line corporations.
And then in the year 2000, when they started going, the sub-price down, and nobody was doing anything about it.
At that point...
Just to interrupt you for a second, the Corps of Engineers is a captive agency.
It is not serving the American public.
It's not serving the interests of future generations and the public trust and the shared commons and the environment.
It is serving the interests of big oil companies, and the shipping companies, and the big lumber companies, and the land companies who want to get at those resources, exploit them, and privatize them.
In other words, to privatize, to take a publicly owned wilderness area.
And turn it into private cash, liquidate it for cash.
That's correct.
So, as you know, marketing is the science of deception.
In this world, the only thing that matters is perception is not the truth.
Whether you're an attorney going to court, you're a good attorney, you're a good marketeer.
You know, the truth is no matter in that courtroom.
It matters the perception you create to the jury of the judge.
It's the same thing with the public, you know, industry, politicians.
So the state was promoting the logging, and they were saying they were making beautiful homes and lumber, and it was all sustainable.
It's part of our culture.
It's been ongoing for generations.
I had no clue what they were doing with it.
I knew they was going to make molds.
I knew that much.
But at that point, I started following the trucks and found out what they were doing with it.
And to back out, I was going to say before that, the main reason I got involved in protecting the cypress, it was more spiritual reasons, is I didn't think we have any hope to stop anything.
But I just couldn't see myself walking this planet at a time of history, when that was taking place, and do nothing about it.
I believe there is a heaven, and I don't think I will go to it if I just looked the other way.
And, you know, because I really think that...
I strongly believe that we inherit everything we own from our, you know, we are stewards of everything we own from our kids and grandkids.
That's the inheritance.
At least we call landowners, instead of landowners, we call them land stewards because really that's what we are.
And I just couldn't see myself looking the other way and just live my life like nothing's happening.
So that's, at that point, spiritually speaking, it didn't matter because The day I die, I can say I'll try.
And I know I did.
So I just went after them.
And what I did, they started following the trucks.
And that's when I found out they were making mulch.
By the year 2006, they were logging 20,000 acres per year.
And they have seven mulch plants in Costa Louisiana.
The mulch was being sold in, you know, mainly, in many different places, but mainly Home Depot, Los, or Walmart was the big driver of all that.
The mulch was being sold in bags that would say made with environmentally harvested cypress.
So when you go to the stores, you think it's nothing green.
They will put a Florida address.
You think you're coming from Florida, so there will be no connection to what's happening in Louisiana and the most exciting in the stores.
So that's what I found out, and we went from there.
And the Cyprus industry did not like you.
Well, I think many people in Louisiana, other than the fishermen, like me.
And what kind of conflicts did you have because of that?
Well, I had many conflicts at the beginning.
What we did in the year 2005 is start flying with volunteer pilots over the logging sites.
Many of the logging sites, they were illegal logging operations because you need permits to make roads to bring heavy equipment through the Netherlands.
So with the flights, we were able to document The illegal roads.
And then we will share those pictures with Environmental Protection Agency and the Corps of Engineers.
And they start using these pictures to stop the logging.
Not everywhere, but there's places like the Morapa swamp with these people that have a lot of money, they have mansions, and they have political influence.
And the mansions are there because the beautiful swamp.
So when they log in the swamp behind the back, in the backyard, they didn't like that too much.
So in those places, the Corps and EPA will actually stop the logging using our pictures.
In other places, they refuse to enforce.
We have to do the enforcement ourselves.
But the first threat came, you know, before the media told the story, there was a meeting with somewhere around the Morapa swamp with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Corps of Engineers, and the Luciana Forest Terrorization, the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, and landowners and timber companies.
And they asked, and I can mention the name now because he was one of my heroes.
He was the head enforcer of the Corps of Engineers at the time.
And he helped build our battle plans for how to stop the surface logging.
He was an amazing human being.
And they asked him, you know, well, where are you getting these pictures?
And he said, well, I cannot tell you.
I said, well, we know who is doing it.
We're going to take care of him.
So he called me and warned me.
And then, I don't know, it was like two weeks after they came at night, and my dog started barking like crazy.
I turned off the lights at the house so they couldn't see me.
Got my gun, walked through my living room.
My laptop was open.
So every time you have a light inside the house, they can see you from the outside.
So at that point, they saw me, and they left.
And within, I think it was 10 days or two weeks, they poisoned my dog.
After that, it was a big story on Mother Jones magazine called Malt's Madness.
That's probably when you put immediate attention on those kind of threats, then to kill somebody may cause a backlash.
They will hurt the industry more than what I was doing at the time.
And I believe that's what saved my life.
I have several situations like that along the way.
I have death threats.
You know, they call me and say they're going to kill me.
I got another company waiting for me at the landing.
Say they're going to find me floating in the water.
I got attacks.
Another thing they do is lie to the public to put people against basin keepers or the When we flooded last year, they're telling people that the reason everybody flooded is because it was a levy that was going to protect us from flooding and Dean Wilson Basin Keeper stopped the levy.
They're telling all workers that Obama was paying me to shut down the oil industry in the Chapala Basin.
People believe it, and they came to my house, tore my mailbox, pulled my garbage all over the road.
So they tried different things.
They tried to buy me out.
They offered me up to $350,000 per year if I will stop all litigation in the basin.
Zappers campaign and support projects to fill wetlands in the Chefalaha Basin.
So they try everything on the book.
The latest one was a story they did in Channel 2, saying that Chefalaha Basin keepers dumping rust switch in the Chefalaha Basin.
That was not the case.
Matter of fact, the pipes that they show in, it wasn't even my pipes, it was somebody else's pipes.
So, I mean, they're trying desperately to do anything they can to destroy a tough player, basically.
Does your family support you?
Oh, yes.
Because my son Connor really enjoyed the summer that he spent with you down there.
But he came at a time when, you know, there was still a real potential for violence against you.
And he was very aware of that at the time.
Yeah, he became friends with my son.
They were the same.
What are the big threats?
Let's finish what happened.
What happened to the mulch industry?
Because ultimately you shut them down.
Yes.
Okay, well...
Like I said before, the court refused to enforce, like in Pleasant and the Chaffala Basin.
In Pleasant and the Chaffala Basin, the companies that were doing it, they had a lot of political influence.
So they refused to do that.
So when, finally in the year 2008, Home Depot lost a Walmart for a moratorium on the logging.
And that shut down the market.
And that's when we shut down, you know, all the moats plants.
But the logging didn't stop there.
We stopped most of the logging in Costa Luciana was stopped in 2008.
It was a logging operation that kept going in the Chaffala Basin that we managed to stop in the year 2012 after we threatened the company to go to court.
And we met with the company, and the company pretty much said that they cannot afford the attorneys to keep logging.
So we stopped that.
And then the Corps of Engineers and EPA intervened because the politicians started complaining about that, and they gave that company an after-fact permit to resume logging.
When they were waiting for the permit, the contract was only 10 years contract.
The contract was about to expire.
So they went, they couldn't wait for the permit, so they went back again, logging without a permit, with a system, the system, the names, and log on how water, which is forbidden under, you know, best marginal practices that they had to follow.
So we call them again doing that.
So they finally give up and left the basin.
And at the same time, they already didn't have any market.
So they found a new market.
The second market was for wood pellets.
I don't know if anybody in the audience knows what wood pellets are, but what they do is they put the trees down, they pulverize the wood, and they compress the wood in little pellets, little like rabbit feet, and they can use that for stoves, or in the European Union, they use it for power, as a biofuel.
So it was a company from Canada that was going to cut down all the forest in Costa Louisiana, Or most of them, to make wood pellets.
A company from England called Drax was going to buy them to burn in a power plant.
And they were going to get the permits, so there was no way we could stop that.
And so Drax, we contacted Drax, and they sent a couple people here to the basin.
We took them into the swamp, and they said, oh my God, what a treasure to humanity, and they refused to do it.
So we saved the swamps a second time, you know, but it took a foreign company to do that when our own estate is lobbying and pushing to get these trappistries cut out.
And that's where we are today.
We are in a situation where deeper companies, it's very hard to log in these wetlands.
It takes a lot of effort and they just don't want the stress of having to lead litigation.
So We're the only thing standing right now between the loggers and the cypresses.
What are the other big threats?
Well, the biggest one, when we started, it was everywhere.
I mean, the Champella Basin is like the Wild West.
It was nothing guessing port.
And what makes it worse is, like, the Corps, you're a little guy, they put a little deck in the water, something minor.
They have no consequences to the college whatsoever.
I mean, they crucify you.
But these corporations, they can put dams, you know, build roads, and do whatever they want, and there's no consequences.
You know, they couldn't find a single enforcement action against a pipeline company, an old company in the Tampala Basin, in all the time I've been working here.
We got FOIA's request, you know, to get that information, and there is nothing out there.
So it was pretty much Wallace, you know.
It was illegal dams, illegal roads.
They were all companies dumping, produced waters, all the waste water from the wells into this bay, polluted water into the swamps, killing all the trees.
I mean, we pretty much stopped all that.
It was an attempt to bring all the frack waste from Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and all that down with barges.
Disposed in the injection well in the Chapala Basin, in Bell River, which Bell River, half of the area of the basin is the most pristine part of the Chapala Basin.
We're going to do like an industrial complex in there.
The state gave them a permit to build that.
We sued the state.
The George was on our side.
We blocked the permit.
So we...
It's a massive amount of work that we have done in the last few years.
Well, more than a few years.
It's been a few years to me.
It's been like 16 years now.
But the biggest threat to the Chapel Island Basin is sedimentation.
Like, if you build land on wetlands, there are no wetlands anymore.
That's the end of the cypress forest.
But also, it's even worth the cypress logging.
Because you lost, part of the habitat is the cypress trees themselves, and you cut the trees down, you lose that, and you lose the beauty and the ecological benefits they provide, which is many, into the basin.
But if you build land in there, you lose, normally you lose the cypress, you don't have a wetland anymore.
Even you cut the trees down, you still have crawfish, you still have the birds can feed on crawfish, you still have something, you know.
But building those swamps is the end, that's the end for those wetlands.
So what the federal government, through the Corps of Engineers, and the state of Louisiana is doing is, you know, doing projects, the river diversions, in the name of water quality.
The way they do is they make cuts from a sediment source straight into the wells.
And once they do that, you can build land very, very fast.
You know, they did one project, the Buffalo Corp project, and Close to the cuts, we're talking about six, seven feet of sand in one single year, the build-up.
You know, you go like 3,000 feet away from the cuts, and we found crafty straps, they were four foot tall, like Almost to the top full of sand, so three feet plus of sand in those areas.
So they can build land very, very quick.
And not only are they destroying the wetlands and the ecological, you know, treasure that we have there, but also they put it in jeopardy to the safety of the entire economy of the country and the safety of millions of people.
I mean, it is criminal.
Because every time you get a square yard, square foot of sand, it's a square foot, square yard of water that you cannot put in there.
So we're fighting those projects to thumbnail.
Dean, how can people support you?
Other than supporting Waterkeeper Alliance, how can they specifically support the Atchipalaya Basin Keeper?
Well, there's many, many different ways.
Funding is extremely limited.
You know, we don't have any major foundation that litigate here in Louisiana.
So that's one of the problems.
We only have two employees and a part-time attorney.
And you go to the website.
We don't have anything within the website because we don't have the time to put it there.
But it's a massive amount of work with only two full-time employees and volunteers, of course.
We depend very heavily on volunteers.
So funding is very important for us.
Having members is very important for us because also, well, if they're in Louisiana, they keep standing in lawsuits.
And also, you know what's going on, then it may be something you can do about it.
Maybe you know a senator, a politician, or somebody from a company.
So getting engaged by becoming a member is very, very important for us.
We rely very heavily on volunteers, so it may be an opportunity that people can volunteer for a Chapalaya Basin Keeper.
They can go to the website, it's basinkeeper.org, very easy to remember, basinkeeper.org, and there's some information on how you can become a member, how you can volunteer, and you can actually look at some of the things that we did and we're doing in the Chapalaya Basin.
We also have some very good films.
We have If you want to learn about the Atchafalaya Basin, we have a mini-series of three films that talks about the importance of the Atchafalaya Basin, talks about sedimentation, and talks about the importance for birds.
They're like two, two and a half minutes long.
It don't take a lot of time.
They are not in the front page.
You've got to go Atchafalaya Basin, And Basin Keeper, ABK in action, and then videos.
And then you click on videos, and the videos are there.
So it's a lot of information you can get on the website.
Dean Wilson, Nigel Delaya, Basin Keeper.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Bobby.
It was so nice to see you again.
Yeah, you do.
You still have to send me those nutria.
Well, we found one for you.
My kids are waiting for them.
I don't know what happened, but they found one for you, and I don't know if they tried to get in touch with you, and I don't know what happened because I was out of that one, but we found one.
You still want one?
Yeah, I still want one, of course.
The next one, I'll let you know.
I'll talk to you soon, Dave.
Bye, Bobby.
Thank you.
Thank you, Dean.
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