Salt marsh

The South's most endangered landscape

A feature I wrote about the efforts to “unleash” the Mississippi and restore Louisiana’s coast was published last week in Hakai magazine. For this edition of Southlands, I wanted to go deeper on this essential—and imperiled—landscape at the heart of that story: the salt marsh.

Louisiana salt marsh / Photo by Stephanie Moody on Unsplash

What is a marsh? Think of it a swamp’s close cousin, but instead of trees, the featured plants are grasses. Marsh is particularly common along coastlines—and especially sheltered coastlines, where there’s little wave action, and where rivers may provide a supply of mud. Here, tides wash over the soils, leaving them salty and waterlogged, limiting what plants can survive. Roughly half the nation’s salt marsh appears along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River delta is, in essence, one great marshland empire.

In …