From an overflying airplane, a century of cypress logging is painfully visible everywhere. Within sight of the New Orleans Central Business District skyline to the southeast, vast grassy prairies soak in coffee-black water where a thick cypress forest once stood. What remains today are thousands of dark stumps slowly rotting in the black water, second and third-growth cypress trees struggling for survival, thousands of felled trees graying in the hot sun, and narrow logging canals, cutting across the watery landscape like long, festering wounds. From each canal, small feeder ditches radiate off in every direction like spokes in a wagon wheel. From the air, these surreal and watery radiants glisten like silver starbursts in the late afternoon sun.
Scientists generally agree that natural and man-made forces are slowly killing the swamp and marsh.
Clear-cut logging, however, is not the only culprit. They say other factors include natural land subsidence and rising global sea levels caused by long-term earth warming, the digging of logging and highway canals, the Mississippi River levee system that prevents natural sediment deposits in the swamp, and the introduction of nutria in the 1930s. Biologists and state agencies are working on several fronts, however, to save Manchac. In 1982 the Joyce Foundation of Chicago donated 13,569 acres of swamp land to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The department then leased an additional 2,040 acres from landowners to form the Joyce Wildlife Management Area.