GO TIME IN THE GULF
IN 45 YEARS OF FLYING SEAPLANES over Louisiana’s coastal marshes, Lyle Panepinto has never tired of the view from the cockpit of his DHC-2 Beaver—even as that view has changed dramatically. “I love it here,” he says, barefoot in shorts and a windbreaker, one January morning after landing along the coast of the Chandeleur Islands, a 50-mile-long chain of barrier isles arching along eastern Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. These uninhabited swaths of sand and seagrass meadows are some of the most pristine and remote landscapes along the Gulf Coast. Hundreds of thousands of birds nest, rest, or feed on the Chandeleurs, and fat redfish and speckled seatrout swim in the shallows. What’s more, they provide an important buffer to protect New Orleans and other areas on the mainland from storms. “If this goes away,” he says, “it will be a travesty.”
The Chandeleurs are in fact slowly disappearing. Hurricanes have lashed their shores, and the natural deposits of
