Acclaimed blues guitarist Tab Benoit is a south Louisiana boy through and through, using his musical talent to help fight for the area he loves.
Benoit grew up in and still lives in the oil and fishing town of Houma, which sits about 60 miles south-southwest of New Orleans.
“The gulf (of Mexico) is 20 miles closer to where I live than it was when I was a kid. And that’s a big difference,” Benoit said in an interview this week about his efforts to protect the Gulf Coast wetlands.
Two years ago he started a nonprofit, Voice of the Wetlands, with the mission to bring worldwide attention to the coastal erosion problem and to get the public involved in fighting it.
“Since I travel all over the country, I wanted to use the notoriety that I guess I have in other states to try and help the people of my own state,” said Benoit, who is on the road more than 250 days a year.
He plays Herman’s Hideaway tonight.
Benoit planned to kick off the Voice of the Wetlands campaign last week in Vail with benefit concerts and a benefit golf tournament in Grand County.
Scheduled before the hurricanes, both events ended up raising money to benefit victims of the violent storms.
“Colorado has always been real supportive of Louisiana music and culture,” he said. “I think it was a perfect place to start something like this.”
Wetlands have been vanishing for decades. The problem, however, did not become widely known throughout the country until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans.
“Where I live, we have been losing land at the rate of a football field every half hour,” Benoit said. “That’s over 30 square miles a year of land that has been washing away because of he changes we made (beginning) in the late ’20s to the Mississippi River, diverting the river out of the delta system. We went from a river that builds land to erosion.”
At one time, the river carried fresh water to the wetlands, allowing trees, grasses and other vegetation grow. They collect sediment and eventually the area becomes land.
The diversion of the Mississippi took the fresh water away, letting seawater take over the wetlands. Saltwater kills the vegetation, causing erosion. Also, canals dug for gas and oil exploration connect different wetlands, spreading the salt water even more.
Benoit said he became concerned about how the problem was being addressed when he started going to public meetings and never heard any discussion about the people.
“I just felt like, ‘Before you people do anything, we’ve got to talk about the people here,”‘ he said. “It can’t just be about industry. And it can’t just be about the land itself. What about the people? Voice of the Wetlands is a push to get the people heard and use the culture to try and do that.”
You have to save the land to save the culture, he said.
“There was a culture that was born there that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” he said. “The Cajun culture comes from Louisiana. It comes from the wetlands. … There are a lot of things there that are important to us, not just as Louisiana but as a country.”
It also is a national economic problem because of the area’s numerous gas refineries and oil and gas wells, as well as being home to the country’s largest seaport, he said.
One goal of Voice of the Wetlands is to drive that point home to the rest of the United States, Benoit said.
People who once could depend on the wetlands for protection from nature no longer can do so.
Therefore, a quick decision is needed whether to spend billions of dollars to restore the delta wetland or to move the people and energy and seafood industries, Benoit said.
As a Louisiana boy, his vote is already in: Let nature do what it did before man messed with the river.
“But that decision has to be made as a country, not as a state,” he said.
Staff writer Ed Will can be reached at 303-820-1694 or ewill@denverpost.com.
Tab Benoit
BLUES|Herman’s Hideaway, 1578 S. Broadway, 8 tonight | $15|303-830-8497 or ticketmaster.com
