Dean Wilson slams forward the throttle on his 18-foot aluminum bateau-a flat-bottom skiff that he welded together himself-and catapults us downriver. It's April and I'm in the Atchafalaya Basin, the nation's largest swamp-1.4 million acres (roughly 10 times the size of Chicago) wedged between the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico in southern Louisiana.

Dressed in full camo and knee-high rubber boots, Wilson, 45, skims through a bayou only a couple of feet deep, and nearly pitches me overboard when he swerves left to avoid a hapless butterfly that's fluttered into our path. A minute later he yells "Duck!" then cranks the wheel. We slide to the right, doing a nascar-style drift turn into a smaller canal. Sharp reeds and spiky underbrush scrape the hull; it sounds like a thousand swamp trolls clawing at our boat. Fearing decapitation, I wedge my head between my knees as overhanging branches graze my back.

Suddenly, Wilson kills the engine. The air is heavy and acrid, infused with the smell of organic decay. We drift silently into a cove ringed with cypress trees. Left to their own devices, these sturdy, 100-foot-tall giants live an average of 500 years but have been known to celebrate birthdays in the thousands. They reign over all life in the Atchafalaya, a stunningly diverse wetland that is home to at least 300 bird species. In addition, half of all migratory birds in North America-up to 2 million a day-use the Atchafalaya to nest, mate, or rest. The critter count also includes bobcats, foxes, alligators, minks, armadillos, coyotes, and otters, as well as endangered peregrine falcons, Louisiana black bears, and Florida panthers.

Since the mid-1980s, Wilson has been an unlikely addition to this menagerie. Born on a U.S. Air Force base in Torrejón, Spain, to a GI father and Spanish mother who soon divorced, he lived there until the age of 20, when he decided to volunteer with an environmental group dedicated to saving the Amazon. Before heading to Brazil, Wilson reckoned he should do a trial run somewhere a bit less hostile. "I needed to get used to the heat and mosquitoes." He chose the Atchafalaya.

When he landed in the United States in 1983, Wilson couldn't speak a word of English. His first stop was Belleville, Illinois, where his father lived. After a short stint working as a busboy for ihop, he borrowed money to buy a red VW bus that he named "Churrumbel" after a dinosaur in a Spanish comic book and headed for southern Louisiana. He bought a hammock, tent, bow and arrows, rubber boots, and a spear, then found a plot of dry land in the swamp to set up camp. Aside from a few fishing trips, he had no wilderness experience. "I stayed for four months by myself," says Wilson. He dined on a smorgasbord of squirrels, frogs, crawfish, and whatever else he could catch. "I ate only what I hunted. Sometimes I had too much to eat; sometimes I didn't have enough."

The Amazon would have to wait. "I fell in love with the swamp and never left," he says. He eked out a living as a commercial fisherman. By 1987, he'd leased a half-acre plot in Bayou Sorrel for $150 a year, where he built a home propped three feet off the ground on cinder blocks-floodwaters lap at his doorstep at least once a year-and where he still lives with two dogs, two parrots, three horses, a pet snake, and a terrarium full of frogs, skinks, anoles, and newts.

Spending day after day in the swamp, Wilson began to notice a sudden surge in cypress logging about eight years ago. The practice devastates the Atchafalaya because cypress are the godfathers of the swamp, providing a fertile, protective sanctuary for wildlife. Without them, invasive plants quickly overrun indigenous species and strangle the ecosystem. "I realized that nobody was doing anything to protect the Atchafalaya," he says. "I got fed up with it and started to do swamp tours to raise awareness." One group that hired his Last Wilderness Tours told him about the Waterkeeper Alliance, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s grassroots nonprofit aimed at preserving waterways and wetlands. He sent in a proposal and in 2004 became the organization's Atchafalaya Basinkeeper. "He is the eyes and ears of the Atchafalaya," says Kennedy. "He's also the voice and fist."

Full Story: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/
louisianas-mulch-madness.html