Ode To Pecan Island, While Thinking of Elon Musk
Today it hit the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune that a deal is being finalized for Elon Musk to gain control of 136,000 acres of land in rural Vermilion Parish, Louisiana, between Pecan Island and Freshwater City, to build a spaceport for Space-X rocket testing. The deal was done in near-total secrecy, with no public input, no studies for feasibility or environmental impacts, and no regard for the area's history and culture.
Pecan Island and the area of Vermilion Parish south to the Gulf shore is a place rich in indigenous and pioneering history. Occupied by native tribes since at least 1000 AD, it was settled for cattle ranching beginning in 1840, and is a combination of wetlands, coastal prairie, and part of a rare chenier plain -- a type of coastal ridge formation that only appears in four places in the world: Guyana; Essex, UK; New Zealand; and southwest Louisiana. Pecan Island has traditionally been known as a place where people have come to live private lives away from the hustle and bustle of the regular day-to-day world. For more than 100 years, Pecan Island was home to trappers, fishermen, and settlers who lived off the land. It still supports fishing and hunting industries that are the backbone of rural Vermilion Parish.
Much of the land around Pecan Island has eroded due to canal digging from the oil and gas industry. Large square land parcels were pumped out to build oil wells. The land sank and contracted like a dry sponge, and later filled in with water from tropical storms and flooding, erasing these large blocks of land. Over decades the land has become more prone to flooding, while land continues to erode from saltwater intrusion, which has already killed many 200 year old live oak trees that are abundant in the area. It has also experienced 15-20 foot storm surges from hurricanes Ike and Laura in the past 15 years or so.
And now Musk proposes the area be used as his personal playground to play with his rockets. The effects this kind of operation will have on Pecan Island are staggering to consider -- and it is becoming clear that Musk and Space X have not considered them at all.
Pecan Island sits in the middle of the Mississippi migratory flyway, and is adjacent to three major wildlife refuges: the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, gifted to Louisiana by the Rockefeller Foundation; the White Lake Wetlands Conservation Area; and the Paul J Rainey Wildlife Refuge. Rocket launches planned here (at least two per month) will have incalculable environmental impact, killing birds, their nests, and disrupting environmental balances due to noise, which will scare away surviving wildlife, decimating the fishing and hunting industry. True, rural Vermilion Parish is well known to have some of the best duck hunting in the United States, attracting even US Presidents for recreation. That will be severely disrupted and likely taken away entirely by Space X operations.
Just west of the planned launch pad sits Mulberry Island, a chenier ridge that is the site of one of the last surviving coastal cattle ranches in southwest Louisiana. For more than a century, cattle grazed Mulberry Island, just 200 yards from the Gulf shore, to be driven up north to Abbeville in the event of encroaching tropical storms. Mulberry Island will likely be bought out and controlled by Space X, as will the entire area being rendered off-limits to the public. It also seems likely state route 3147, which runs from Pecan Island to the launch site at Freshwater City will become a private company road. The public will no longer be able to fish, launch boats, or enjoy a peaceful day in the wild.
As I photographed the Louisiana coast for more than 20 years, I have visited Pecan Island and Freshwater City more times than I can remember. The thing I remember most about it is the silence of it. Standing on the front ridge road in Pecan Island, I have felt an undeniable sense of calm and serenity, humbled by the natural beauty, feeling both awe and respect for the pioneers who settled the area and lived off the land. Indeed, it is a place with great appeal for those who know how to listen to silence. The old school in Pecan Island, built in the early 1960s, and closed after Hurricane Rita in 2005 for lack of enrollment, was recently sold to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to become a coastal and environmental research center. But now it will become a noisy fantasy playground for Elon Musk. The deal Musk will enjoy exempts him and Space X from property tax and sales tax on supplies bought in Louisiana, and renders Space X immune to lawsuits for any environmental damages. There is even a provision in the deal that grants total immunity to all Space X employees for trespassing on private land or causing any damage to it, as well as immunity for causing the demise of any small businesses in the area. I am very sad to see this place be torn up to accommodate the science fiction fantasies of the world's richest man -- who has a long history of taking away jobs and destroying the lives of his competitors. As an unelected, appointed government official -- a position he bought by donating over $200 million to Donald Trump's presidential campaign -- he fired over 350,000 career civil servants. As the CEO of Twitter (now X), he fired over half the existing staff on the day he took control of the company. I hope his ventures in Vermilion Parish fail miserably. I hope Louisianans will wake up to the fact that Musk is not interested in creating jobs, and has not a care in the world for the culture, history, and communities of Louisiana, and that he will be sent packing. I am sad for the wildlife that will be killed; the people who will no longer be able to fish or make their living from the sea; and the scientists who have dedicated their careers in efforts to preserve and restore Louisiana's coast to its former unique beauty.
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