Reintroducing Nature to the City: Wetlands in New Orleans

Colten, Craig

For more than two centuries, New Orleans' builders struggled to expel the soggy wetlands from within their city. Early settlers saw little value in the swamps after they had harvested the virgin cypress forests and marshes held no value as urban real estate. The original city grew during the early 1700S along the natural levee, a narrow band of relatively high ground deposited by recurring river floods, and several faubourgs gradually extended into the miasmatic backswamps by the end of the colonial period (1803). Levee construction along the river coupled with canal excavation toward the lakefront were the key colonial public works projects to drain water from the city and thereby reclaim the swamps and marshes within the urbanized territory. Only after a viable flood protection barrier was in place by the mid-nineteenth century and the effective completion of major drainage systems by the 1930S were developers able to extend streets and subdivisions across the marsh to the Lake Pontchartrain shore. In addition to expanding usable real estate, the mas- sive drainage projects greatly reduced disease threats that had plagued the city for two centuries. To accommodate post-World War II suburbanization, wetland drain- age pressed westward into adjacent Jefferson Parish, into the marshes east of New Orleans, and southward beyond the natural levee on the Mississippi's west bank'By the late 196os, technical capability and real estate demand seemed poised to com- plete the wetland conquest within the city limits. Yet after more than two centuries, the drive to enlarge the drained territory re- versed itself. Fundamental changes in public attitudes toward the environment in general and wetlands in particular impeded the Crescent City's ever-expanding drainage program since about 1970. While the city will not abandon the existing drainage system, it has shelved expansion plans. There has arisen an overwhelming urge to protect marsh and swamp in and near the city, along with programs creating wetlands as relicts of Louisiana's natural history. This essay proposes to answer the question why there was a reversal in this fundamental aspect of urban development in New Orleans. It considers the abandonment of the belief that the city was no place for a swamp, and its replacement by practices that preserved wetland tracts to satisfy public will. Beyond sentiments about urban uses of wetlands, a second underlying attitude shift was necessary. This involved the adoption of notions about nature as utility. In order to justify the preservation of wetlands, citizens, and leaders in New Orleans first had to embrace the concept that these preserves would serve as educational settings and also provide necessary ecological functions. Finally, while social institutions refer to these preserves as nature, they must invest considerable effort to maintain highly modified environments. By considereing the forces and ideas behind the creation and maintenance of the Audubon Zoo swamp exhibit, the Louisiana Nature Center, the National Park Service's Barataria Preserve, and the Bayou Sauvage Wildlife Refuge, this essay examines thses sites as landscapes shaped to resemble pre-urbanized environments, that function in an urban setting as part of an evolving concept of parks and open spaces and stand as concrete evidence of changed public attitudes and environmental policies. Taken as a whole, the forces behind landscape modification and the actual transformation or preservation of wetlands speak to fundamental aspects of human use of urban space that are vastly different than a century ago and are altering urban form in the process.

Reintroducing Nature to the City: Wetlands in New Orleans

Series

Collections