Honey Island Group, Sierra Club -- Cypress-mulch industry threatens our wetlands

Cypress-Mulch Industry Threatens Our Wetlands

What can you do?

Next time you're there, tell the garden-department manager how opposed you are to their selling cypress mulch.

Watch for the same product to come back with a different name.

Before you buy any mulch, ask them where it came from.

Best of all: Don't put your lawn trimmings out with the garbage. Use them for mulch!

We're circulating a petition to Governor Blanco that calls for her to step in on behalf of our endangered cypress trees. Click here to to download a copy. Sign up your friends and send it in!

Links:
The Save Our Cypress Coalition
Delta Chapter
Waterkeeper Alliance (Atchafalaya Basinkeeper)
Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper
Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation
University of Florida
BR Advocate
AP-wire story
Environmental News Network
CNN

Look for our table or people at several Northshore Farmers' Markets and other community events.

Stop by and chat. We'd love to meet you!

Cypress-Mulch PowerPoints

Our Group's Leslie March has prepared a PowerPoint presentation highlighting many of the key issues related to our campaign against cypress mulch. Click here to view it.

(This is a very large file and will take some time to download over a dialup connection. And, you may need Microsoft's free PowerPoint Viewer. If you have trouble viewing this presentation, click here to download the PP Viewer.)

Please feel free to download this and share it with your neighbors. This is a problem that we can do something about!

Click here for a video from the Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper.

Did you know that your next work in your yard may contribute to the irretrievable and unnecessary loss of Louisiana wetlands?

Your local home-products-warehouse store or garden center may be selling horticultural mulch made from ground-up young cypress trees! This is not the residue of lumber production; wetlands and marshes are being cleared of immature cypress, just for the immediate financial gain of the harvesters.

We've put together a small brochure about this that you can download and print. Click here for that -- and here for a whitepaper from the Atchafalaya Basinkeeper. (These may require Adobe Acrobat Reader. Please click here for more on that.)

Many buyers think that cypress mulch is termite resistent. This is not true for such young trees and when ground up for mulch!

Cypress mulch is receiving such a bad reputation that some manufacturers are repackaging it as 'Red Mulch'. Please don't be misled; it's still the same thing.
Responding to initiatives from local environmental organizations -- including our Group -- various forward thinking municipalities are prohibiting the use of cypress mulch on their property! To date, the following governments have passed resolutions banning use of cypress mulch on property they manage:

City of Hammond
City of Covington
City of Mandeville

City of Ponchatoula
St. Tammany Parish
Livingston Parish

...and more are on the way.
(The City of Slidell has an informal policy not to use cypress mulch.)
Click here to read the City of Covington's resolution (requires Acrobat plug-in).

The Gov Steps In

It appears the environmental community is being heard on this. Governor Blanco has established a Governor's Science Working Group to create forestry guidelines for coastal Lousiana. Their web site is here, and you can click here for their report. (The latter is 121 pages long, requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader, and could take some time to download over a dialup connection.)

The GSWG has identified three categories or classes of cypress habitat, based on each area's ability to regenerate after logging. Class III means "with no potential for either natural or artificial regeneration", the most critical group. We feel that the keys to saving our cypress relate to who monitors and enforces these definitions and whether we can protect the most endangered habitats on both public and private land.

The Political Problem

Vested interests are trying to recast this whole issue into extremes and so avoid effective discussion on its true merits. This has little or nothing to do with what homeowners can do in their own backyards! It does have everything to do with whether we're going to exhaust our environment as we did a hundred years ago -- and whether we choose to save something for our children.

Please check back here frequently for more!!