Tag: conservation

A Covenant Older than Clocks

Mobile is one of the nation’s oldest cities, and its allergy to modern sheen accounts for a lot of its charm. The rich architectural fabric in neighborhoods like Oakleigh and DeTonti Square leaves visitors agape, and the city’s arboreal character — most notably on display in the live oaks that canopy Government Street like great triumphant arches — eclipses even the Garden District of New Orleans.  

But even for such a deeply historical city, much has been lost. The erection of Interstate 10 through downtown Mobile in the early ’70s, and the opening of the George Wallace Tunnel, squashed remnants of the rich Creole culture that took root in the late 1800s in the Down the Bay community, an area that was previously home to Native Americans as far back as 2,000 years. And while Mobile’s Black history is well documented and celebrated at the Africatown Heritage House and Historic Avenue Cultural Center, it is a history that is often sidelined when, in fact, it should be standing front and center.  

This issue’s cover story looks at Baykeeper’s holistic oyster restoration project and our effort to revive the reefs that once flourished in our watershed. This is a story of history as much as ecology. Much of the restoration work is happening in Heron Bay near Dauphin Island, a pristine body of water that was once home to indigenous populations that sustainably harvested oysters for centuries. 

Our ecological history is a living thing. It is not taught in history classes, but its lessons are essential.  

Recent research suggests Native American tribes along the southern coasts had highly complex management practices when it came to oyster harvesting. These tribes harvested oysters at great levels and still the reefs thrived. And yet since 1950, we’ve managed to destroy an estimated eighty-five percent of the reefs in the Mobile Bay watershed — a sad and alarming metric brought on by stressors like predation by drills (small predatory marine snails), unsustainable harvesting practices, shell-dredging for construction materials, and ship-channel dredging.  

The scientific literature indicates Native Americans had hierarchical systems in place about best management practices for oysters, and even pooled resources. Clearly, they worked together for the greater good to protect what was vital, even as there were competing interests — something the modern era has often failed to achieve. 

Baykeeper’s reef restoration is hoping to turn the tide and bring the community together for a common goal. “One of the encouraging aspects of the Oyster Restoration Project is that it is community-driven and led by a variety of stakeholders,” says Baykeeper’s Dr. Kayla Boyd, who heads the initiative. “This project is not only restoring ecosystem functionality, but it also provides support for the commercial oyster fishery.”  

That communal understanding comes with an appreciation of the sacredness of the natural world, and how critical its protection is to our own survival. It’s an unspoken bond that goes back to a time before there were even words for it. 

This issue closes with Susan Rouillier’s poem, “Purple Martins Return to Bahia del Espiritu Santo.” In the poem, she writes, “February twenty-eighth, precise and unannounced/ a covenant older than clocks, truer than our forecasts.” 

These are the covenants we are bound to and have a duty to protect. 

— from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS, summer 2026

Born on the Bayou: Generational Shrimpers Say Industry is Facing Existential Threat

It’s Saturday morning in Bayou La Batre and the crew from SeaHarvest Shrimp is busy.

It’s Saturday morning in Bayou La Batre and the crew from SeaHarvest Shrimp is busy. Perseverance, the company’s 63-foot shrimp boat, has just returned from a three-day trip in early July, shrimping the night waters of the Bay and Gulf. Within hours of mooring they begin selling their catch to the public — straight off the boat, directly into buckets and coolers for three dollars a pound. In a matter of hours, the entire catch will be gone.  

“You find some more fresh than this, you let me know where you got ‘em,” says James Hunter. By the way he says it, he knows one cannot. A resident of nearby Irvington, he is a devoted customer, and now he is watching on as Perseverance crew member Jaylen Hall, a mid-twenty-something who grew up in the trade, shovels several pounds of brown shrimp into his ice-filled cooler. One hopes this will be enough shrimp to tide him over for the week. A former restaurant worker, he knows his way around the kitchen, especially when it comes to shrimp. Boiled, fried, prepared à la scampi, simmered in a gumbo, you name it, he can cook it.  

Fresh seafood, of course, is essential to the culture of Coastal Alabama. It’s part of our way of life. Yet this piece of our heritage is quickly slipping away. For the last two decades, the production of farmed shrimp in the Asia-Pacific region has grown at a staggering rate of 20 to 30 percent per year and the United States is one of the largest markets for this new supply. With the surge of imported shrimp our own shrimping business has come under existential threat, particularly in the past decade. In this new scenario, it is customers like James who are keeping the Hall family in the shrimping business.

SeaHarvest is a family-run business, operated by shrimper Reed Hall and his wife, Tammy. They started their retail operation back in 2020, not long after Covid dealt its first blows to so many businesses of every kind. The family bought the lot by the drawbridge in Bayou La Batre in August of that year, after most of the shrimp boats in town had shut down. They started selling directly to the public as a way to stay in business and keep the home fires burning. “Covid really blessed us in a way,” says Tammy, who runs the business side of things for SeaHarvest, “because it caused us to have to take a whole different route.”

Before that, they were selling directly to the processors and factories in town for less than the three-dollar retail price, which is no longer sustainable. Financial viability is a problem for shrimpers in Alabama and the Gulf Coast. Studies vary, but some reports put the percentage of shrimp imported into this country as high as 90 percent of the total supply. These imports drive down the price of wild-caught, domestic shrimp. 

The situation has grown so dire the city of Bayou La Batre issued a Declaration of Disaster for the town’s shrimping industry back in August. Henry Barnes, the town’s mayor, says the Seafood Capital of Alabama is in danger of becoming a ghost town due to the moribund state of the shrimping industry. He wants the federal government to put an end to the high volume of imported shrimp that are “dumped” — or sold at less than fair-market value — into the U.S. market. He’d also like the government to subsidize fuel for shrimpers. 

Eighty-five percent of the wild-caught shrimp in Alabama come out of Bayou La Batre alone, and more than 300 fishing and shrimping vessels are licensed to operate out of the Bayou. But the economics tell a different story. Barnes says shrimpers are now getting a dollar a pound for shrimp, compared to the rate of $6.50 for a pound in 1980. 

“We are not looking for a handout,” Barnes says. “We are looking for a way to make a living … this is one of the oldest professions in the world.”

There are other challenges as well. The industry took a big hit with the financial crisis of 2008 and there hasn’t been a big rebound, says Scott Bannon, director of the Alabama Marine Resources Division for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “And all the costs associated with shrimping are going up,” he adds. “Price of fuel, price of equipment. And maintaining a boat is extremely expensive.”

Starting in June when the shrimp season opens, the Perseverance can be found every Saturday docked next to the drawbridge. By 10 a.m., the company’s band of devoted customers begin to arrive. These are folks who know good shrimp when they find them. Some of the shrimp were swimming as recently as the night before, so the only way to experience a fresher catch would be to work on the boat itself and cook them on deck. You see orders of ten pounds, twenty pounds, even thirty pounds on Saturday mornings. Customers come from as far as Atlanta and Memphis. There’s even a couple from Michigan that makes the drive down every year and hauls them back up to the north country. “I just tell them to stop half-way to drain the water and swap out fresh ice,” Tammy says.

In Alabama, there have been marketing efforts by the state to help drive up the price for domestics. “We can’t produce enough from the wild harvest to meet the demand,” says Chris Blankenship, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “What we’ve tried to with the ten percent of shrimp that are wild-caught is to create a premium brand for that [in Alabama], so people will play a little more for domestic quality shrimp.”

History of the Bayou

Shrimping is the heart of Bayou La Batre, the Seafood Capital of Alabama. Not far from Dauphin Island, the town boasts a long and storied history that begins with its founding in 1786 when the French-born Joseph Bouzage was awarded a Spanish land grant in what is now south Mobile County. In the early twentieth-century the town began to make its name as a fishing village, not long after the hurricane of 1906 devastated the area and killed an estimated 150 people in south Mobile County alone. Almost ninety years later, Bayou La Batre would be imprinted upon the mind of global pop culture when Hollywood immortalized the richness of Bayou La Batre’s coastal heritage. As the hometown of Forrest Gump’s bosom war buddy, Bubba, whose dream of owning a shrimping boat inspired the title character to start a shrimping operation, it became the place where Forrest made his first fortune, drawing Lieutenant Dan along the way to the place where he would make his peace with God.

With a population of about 2,200, the Bayou remains a center for shipbuilding and is still home to a number of seafood processors and canneries (an industry also under threat with the current level of import “dumping”). For decades it has known a large Southeast Asian population. In the late 1970s, refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia settled in Bayou La Batre — as well as other parts of the Gulf Coast — to work in the shrimping and fishing industries. These immigrants had fled the ravages of a war-torn homeland, and the deltas and bays of the Gulf harkened back to the estuarine waters of the old country. Here, they could make a living and raise a family. Some worked on boats, while others worked jobs in the canneries, picking crab meat and keeping the production floor running. Even today, Bayou La Batre remains something of a cultural polyglot. Roughly a quarter of the town’s population is Southeast Asian, though many have gotten out of the seafood industry in the last decade or so.

 Continue reading at MobileBaykeeper.org.