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Our Path to a Healthy Coast
Common Ground Relief’s integrated platform of programs, projects and services are designed to achieve two primary goals: (1) create sustainable, healthy and functioning coastal wetlands; and (2) foster a new generation of environmental stewards who have the skills, knowledge, passion and commitment to create and sustain robust wetlands in the Gulf Coast and beyond.
To help rebuild and stabilize our vital greenscape, Common Ground Relief has initiated a community based, community-led program to grow, plant and monitor native plants in Southeast Louisiana.
Survive & Thrive
Plant a tree, face your fears, and have fun.
Common Ground Relief is a place to bring people together to combat the overwhelming regional challenges. It’s a space for fielding heavy topics and enjoy being alive.
Our Common Ground
Get out of the French Quarter and into the wetlands
Just outside the levee walls, explore a world of wonder: imagination, nature, history, and autonomy.
Bulbancha: Place of Many Tongues
Southeast Louisiana, where Common Ground Relief performs our environmental restoration work, is the historic home of the Choctaw, Chitamacha, Atakapa and Houma and other native peoples. Coastal communities, accessible only by boat, survive and thrive in the wetlands to this day.
Our Most Precious Resource
The landscape includes bays and lakes, barrier islands, cheniers, natural levee forests, swamps, and marshes and cypress forests; these distinct ecosystems are home to incredible biodiversity, from bears and raccoons to roseate spoonbills and alligators. They serve as spawning grounds for fish, and crucial habitat for migratory birds. To this day, Louisianans depend on wetlands for food and shelter: Fish, shrimp and oysters reproduce in wetlands, and wetlands also lessen the severity of hurricanes by absorbing storm surges.
Fighting Land Loss
However, these varied and beautiful ecosystems are in grave danger. Land loss, where marshes and wetlands become open water, is a huge threat to the coastal marshes, and is changing the very shape of the state of Louisiana. With the stakes this high, Common Ground has focused much of its work on restoring coastal wetlands by planting species that thrive in the unique conditions of Southeast Louisiana. Planting cypress and sedges creates new habitat, and their root system also helps retain sediment to rebuild the land itself.
A Disappearing Coast
Between 1930 and now, the state of Louisiana lost an estimated 2,000 square miles of marshland, and is still losing a football-field size of land to open water every 100 minutes. And while Louisiana holds 40 percent of the wetlands in the continental US, 80 percent of wetland losses have also been in Louisiana. Sea level rise, oil and gas exploration, invasive species, deforestation, dredging and draining swamps for commercial and residential development all contribute to land loss.
Restoring the Land
Our environmental programs are focused on rebuilding wetlands and forest habitat to promote biodiversity and climate resilience. To meet these goals, we use volunteer labor and native plants such as rushes, bald cypress and Louisiana irises that we grow in our plant nursery. We do this work with the understanding that environmental justice means meeting people’s current needs, understanding their environment and empowering them to protect and rehabilitate the land and water for future generations.
We all have a role to play in wetland conservation
Our approach leverages the passion and knowledge of the community, the volunteers who come from across the globe, as well as our committed group of staff, experts, and supporters.
Help us change the tide of land loss and habitat destruction. Help us protect and restore everybody’s coastal wetlands!
You're Allowed
To Try and Fail