Thank you Francois, Eric, Frans, and Mark. I appreciate all that you've said.
Here is some context to these fotos that I should have provided.
There has been substantial loss in the La. wetlands. Since the 1950s an area bigger then the state of Rhode Island is gone. At present the loss is app. one acre every hour.
The two main causes of the ruinous blow to this place and these people are an enormous engineering blunder in the early 20th century and the invasion of the O&G industry in the mid 20th century.
1. To control spring flooding such as the calamitous flood of 1927, the federal government dug and heaped up thousands of acres of irreplaceable blue ribbon farmland to construct massive earthen barriers along south going American rivers. Effectively, it walled in free flowing rivers, turning them into man managed channels, the Mississippi River being the grandest example.
Spring floods were stopped, but at the cost of lands domestic and wild – all irreplaceable --for it's the rich life-creating-mud in those brown flood waters that makes, enriches and renews this ecosystem. The annual occasion of spring floods, a process dynamic and complex, has been replaced by a simplistically grand engineering feat that has not and cannot enrich life, but only sacrifice it.
2. During the 1950s the petroleum industry began exploiting oil and gas deposits from under this southern marsh. To get to well sites it dug canals into the soft mud flanks of marsh areas and many of the marsh island's eastern and western sides to bore and set oil well heads, some at the very edge of resident’s gardens, orchards, and backyards. None were dug with the resident’s consultation or consent. In a few short years these canals and the hundreds they linked to, brought in seawater from the Gulf of Mexico, flooding the ecosystem, salting the marsh soil and burning the marsh grasses that were not tolerant of the high salinity. Vast areas of marsh turned brown, died, and sunk. And they continue to.
It's those vast marsh areas that protect people from hurricane storm surges and are the nurseries for all the great local seafoods.
About making a record of just one spot: I don't know how I could've done that. The marsh is a highly dynamic ecosystem. A healthy patch of it can be gone over night without leaving a trace. A sequence showing healthy to dying to gone is not easily done. I wish it were possible to do a time lapse sequence but it would require an almost other worldly amount of luck.
Hoping these words makes sense, thank you all again.
Richard