Mark Davis is executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1988 and is based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As its name implies, the Coalition’s mission is to advocate for wise stewardship of the state’s coastal waters and shoreline. The organization also raises public awareness about the need to protect the region’s coastal system and works to secure state and federal support for a comprehensive restoration plan. Davis discusses issues related to the recent Gulf Coast hurricanes in an interview with Mott Communications Officer Maggie I. Jaruzel.
Mott: Contrast the Louisiana you knew prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita with the one that now exists.
Mark Davis: (MD) The Louisiana after these storms is largely unrecognizable compared to what we had before; we have a landscape that is dramatically reshaped and transformed. Up to this point, we were losing around 25 square miles of land each year. The land is vanishing and being replaced by open water. But just from Katrina alone, on the eastern side of the state, we lost nearly 60 square miles. We lost and reshaped barrier islands, and we have transformed areas on the western side of the state that were once fresh marshes into impounded salt and brackish ponds.
There’s the physical landscape and there’s also the human landscape and the cultural landscape. You not only wiped a number of communities off of the face of the map, but you also emptied the place of its population. That was an unprecedented event. It was a storm, it was a Diaspora, it was a political crisis, and it was essentially a reworking of the social and political fabric—all simultaneously—and it is still underway.
Mott: For you, personally and professionally, how has life changed since Hurricane Katrina hit?
MD: Well, I am out of my home. My home is structurally intact right now but I have no utilities and no neighbors. No place to buy groceries. No place for my son to go to school. None of those things. There are buildings, but they are not communities . . . It is almost as if the area has been put into a coma. You hope it recovers but you don’t know.
People have had their lives erased or changed. We still have board members that we haven’t heard from. We do not know anything. The one I am most concerned about is a commercial fisherman. I do not know where he is. [Note: The Coalition's missing board member finally has been located. He and his family made a harrowing escape during the storm as their home literally disappeared around them.]
On the other side of that, I just have seen an unbelievable well of compassion and generosity . . . We have had people coming to our website from around the country, and even overseas, with notes of encouragement and contributions. The one thing that you learn is to accept everything humbly and be far more generous with your time and your talents. You learn that you, in fact, are living on borrowed time.
Mott: So your organization is moving ahead with an even stronger sense of mission and purpose?
MD: Yes. I know a lot of organizations that do environmental work or civic work down here, and their funding base is exclusively in the state of Louisiana. They got wiped out and are struggling to get by . . . I had hoped we would be able to rise to the challenge, but I knew we were not going to go into a crisis mode organizationally [because the Coalition receives funding from resources outside Louisiana, including Mott].
It has been rather difficult to see your civic institutions and your governmental institutions that you normally turn to in times of crisis, to see that they are in crisis themselves. They essentially cease to exist, either because their sources of funds are gone, or their personnel lose their homes, or the banks they do business with are closed and will move away. It becomes a world without touchstones. We were lucky to have a few.
Mott: Is there any advice you would give to other environmental NGOs that are working in the region about ways to leverage this national focus for current and future gains?
MD: There is very little satisfaction in being able to say, “I told you so.” But I would be almost clinically depressed if I didn’t believe we had actually tried. One of the things that was incredibly gratifying was what we saw in the national media. We could actually see the response when the President and others said, “No one could foresee this.” Suddenly you hear, “Well, didn’t this group say that you could foresee this? Didn’t this report say that we could foresee this?” Then you realize that the work had been done—the work that we had either done ourselves or collaborated on—had made a difference.
If nothing else, that transformed what otherwise would have been a storm story into a policy and governance story. A story that shifted the onus from “What can we do because we are charitable as a nation?” to “What must we do because we are responsible as a nation?”
Mott: It sounds like you have taken time to reflect.
MD: When you spend as much time on the road as I have—in airplanes and in cars—and a lot of people ask you about what happened, heaven knows that you think about it . . . When you start to see the response—the people who are framing the response, the people who are at the table and are writing the recovery plans and reviewing the policies—they look a whole lot like the people who were there before. I don’t really see the planners, the scientists, the advocates—the ones who said, “This is what you should be planning to avoid and this is what you should be planning for.”
Mott: Are there any short-term goals as a result of Hurricane Katrina that you are now working toward that would not have been on your plate a few months ago?
MD: [At the Coalition], we have come to realize the importance of working on the sustainable culture piece. We have always stood for a sustainable environment, a sustainable culture, and a sustainable economy; always thinking that those things have to fit together in a place like this.
But an environment without a constituency, at least in human experience, tends to be ignored or abused because we don’t have a way of describing value. That is not to say that value is not there, but we don’t tend to treat things very well if we don’t have someone who can tell us that it matters to them. When we look at what’s happened in Louisiana, which is a landscape that has supported family fishers, a landscape that has supported the storytelling culture.
Without it, you wouldn’t have Zydeco, you wouldn’t have Cajun music, you wouldn’t have Rhythm & Blues, you wouldn’t have Jazz, you wouldn’t have James Lee Burke, you wouldn’t have Anne Rice, and you wouldn’t have Tennessee Williams. You start to realize that a lot of things here have been exported.
Those people are in Diaspora. Our musicians are gone. Our writers are gone. So we are working right now to create a version of the WPA Writer’s Project. A good example is nature photographer C.C. Lockwood, who had just finished a book with a painter named Maria Garry. He spent a year chronicling the seasons of our coast and he just published it.
Mott: Will the coastline that he photographed look dramatically different now?
MD: We realized that in order to really make a commitment to this place’s recovery—again, you have to have a reason and a way for people to care. For example, Yosemite would not be a part of America’s collective inheritance if it had not been for the work of Ansel Adams. I have never been to Yosemite, but I have seen thousands of Ansel Adams photographs over my life.
Accordingly, I understand that Yosemite is important to me. Anything that could look that good in pictures, I want to be able to see personally. When someone says, “Should we invest in our national parks,” all they have to do is show me an Ansel Adams photograph and I get it. I mean they are not showing me a chart or a graph. They aren’t showing me a loss/benefit figure. They are showing me El Capitan and I say, “OK, I am with you.”
The same way if you show me the Statue of Liberty, the Liberty Bell, or Mount Vernon, I just get it. We need people out there documenting what has changed in Louisiana and tracking what is happening, which is really like an incredible dust bowl on steroids. Back then, you moved a lot of poor farmers. But this time you moved everybody. So what do they learn? What do they come back with?
Mott: So will Lockwood now shoot the “after” photographs?
MD: He is basically going to just go out and shoot. Essentially, we are not telling him what he should photograph. We are saying, “The landscape and the people are your muse. Just go do what you need to do.”
We are not waiting 30 years to see something. There is a way of sharing this that is not what comes out of Congressional hearings. It is not like, “Who did something wrong?” It is not like, “How many dollars? How many people with MREs [Meals Ready-to-Eat]?” Those are important facts, but they are not the story.
We realize right now that there is so much that has changed out there and it is impossible for us or academics to capture it all. Keep in mind that half of our academic institutions are gone. We would normally go to the sociologists at the University of New Orleans or Tulane or folklorists here or there and ask them to work on a project. We can’t do that right now because they are gone.
Mott: So you are talking about a very broad scope of devastation and loss?
MD: Yes. That was one of those things that we didn’t know. We didn’t know this was our job until a few weeks ago. But in our view, it is absolutely essential. If you are not naming these as values, how can I go tell a congressman why he should spend $10 billion instead of $2 billion? What are you buying? It is not acres, it is not cubic feet per second, it is an intangible sense of history, ownership and possibility.
You then find out that if you don’t have a vision of where you are going, you never actually get there. That is why we now are working on how to create not only a vision of what a restored coast might be, but what a restored Louisiana might be—one that is culturally, ecologically, and economically sustainable. It is as close to a clean slate as we have ever had and we are not going to do it alone.
Additional Resources
- View a PDF version of this interview in its entirety.
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- Mott Foundation Program Officer Christine Doby discusses community organizing and social entrepreneurship: Chris Doby manages Mott’s grantmaking for community organizing. In a conversation with Communications Officer Duane Elling, Doby talks about the contributions social entrepreneurs and community organizers make during times of disaster.