Saving Seafood

LSU Sea Grant’s Director Julie Lively Balances Organization’s Mission With Seafood Community’s Hurricane Recovery

April 18, 2022 — Sea Grant’s mission is to enhance the practical use and conservation of coastal and marine resources in order to create a sustainable economy and environment.  With four hurricanes in two years, Julie Lively, the executive director of Louisiana Sea Grant at LSU, has had to balance the organizational mission with that of assisting the state’s seafood community’s recovery from the storms.

“I have been on a lot of calls with the EDA, FEMA, NOAA and other government organizations,” said the director who is also sits as a member of the Louisiana Fishing Community Recovery Coalition (LFCRC).  “On one of them I was asked to provide a rough list of bulleted items caused by the storms.  Marine debris in the water topped my list. Several members on the call were like, ‘who did a bad job at cleaning up?’ We just all stopped on the call and went “like what”, and they asked again. ‘Who didn’t do a very good job when they cleaned it up?”

Read the full story at the Gulf Seafood Foundation

 

NORTH CAROLINA: SCIENTIST GOES IT ALONE ON CLIMATE CHANGE TO SAVE HIS STATE

October 31st, 2016 — This 19th century fishing village stands three feet above sea level at the bottom of the coastal plain known as the Inner Banks. It is home to 301 people, a small fishing fleet that has seen better days, and is surrounded by 18 miles of dikes, including a 7-foot steel barrier installed a couple of hurricanes ago, courtesy of FEMA’s millions.

When Stan Riggs, a coastal geologist, visited here two weeks after Hurricane Matthew blew through, Swan Quarter was dry behind its barricade. But the surrounding landscape remained sodden, and the signs of saltwater intrusion from storm surges and rising tides that Riggs likens to “a creeping disease” are visible all across the plain. Whole “ghost forests” poisoned by saltwater stand sentinel to rising tides.

“We cannot engineer our way out of this,” he says. “We can build bigger and bigger dikes, but the net changes are driven by ocean dynamics, and it’s on a one-way track right now.”

Read the full story at the National Geographic