Their vital work to save their bayou home and heritage is part of a broader trend around the world of faith leaders and environmental activists increasingly joining the fight against climate change. “It’s saving what we know that’s going to be destroyed from both the change of the heat and the rising of the water,” said Peterson, the pastor of Bayou Blue Presbyterian Church in Gray, Louisiana, and a former professor of environmental planning at the University of New Orleans.

Working with scientists and members of Pointe-au-Chien and two other tribes, they’ve set out thousands of oyster shells to protect sacred mounds, obtained financing to refill abandoned oil field canals and built an elevated greenhouse to save their plants and medicinal herbs from flooding. He and his wife have a mission: protecting Pointe-aux-Chenes and other communities at risk in a state that loses about a football field’s worth of wetlandsevery 100 minutes.įor years, Donald and Theresa Dardar have joined forces with the Rev. He points to the partly submerged stumps of oak trees killed by salt water on land where he rode horses as a kid, and to his mother’s home, gutted by Hurricane Ida. POINTE-AUX-CHENES, Louisiana (AP) - On a boat ride along a bayou that shares the name of his Native American tribe, Donald Dardar points to a cross marking his ancestors’ south Louisiana burial ground - a place he fears will disappear.

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