Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Heroes
Good Old Boy Gone Good (Cont.)


	Swamp thing: Schoeffler gets in touch with his paddlin' self on Lake Martin, a few miles northeast of Lafayette. (Jake Chessum)

SCHOEFFLER IS NOTHING if not connected. His first cousin married one of Louisiana's U.S. senators, Democrat John Breaux. It amuses him that his wife, Sarah, and Louisiana governor Mike Foster, a Republican, share royalties from oil wells on adjacent properties that their fathers owned. He can communicate just as easily with crawfishermen and oil executives, bridging communities normally thought of as unbridgeable. Some of his victories have changed the way entire industries operate in Louisiana. In the 1980s he helped launch a series of lawsuits against a century-old shell-dredging industry that was devastating the shell-bottom habitats of the Gulf Coast in order to provide the signature crunch of driveways from Texas to Florida. Employing ingenious legal tactics to sue the state of Louisiana over the issuing of permits to the dredgers, Schoeffler led a fight that eventually shut down the four big dredging companies and the last shell dredger in the gulf. In 1987, he petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to have the Louisiana black bear placed on the endangered species list. This set in motion a series of events that led him into a controversial 1991 lawsuit (with backing from Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, which is now called Earthjustice) against Fish and Wildlife to have the bear listed as a threatened species.

"Hell, man," Schoeffler told me, his voice rising with astonishment at the prevailing dumbassedness of the time, "there were at best guess less than 300 bears left in the whole state. The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries was issuing tens of thousands of big-game permits. What you gonna do, sit around and debate protection strategies while the last bear is turned into a rug?" (In the 1987-1988 hunting season, the department issued 178,479 big-game hunting permits.)

The case was settled, which resulted in the Louisiana black bear being listed as threatened, and even critics of Schoeffler's approach concede that most of the positive conservation gains for the bear that are in place today, including establishment of the 9,028-acre Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge, are a result of his tenacity. Schoeffler was also an enthusiastic supporter of a series of successful Clean Water Act lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club against dischargers of "produced water" in Texas and Louisiana. This toxic benzene- and salt-loaded waste was traditionally being dumped from oil wells directly into wetlands. But as a result of these suits, since the mid-1990s, in the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 6 (which includes all of Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico), the practice has been replaced by pumping produced water "down-hole"—back into an old well deep underground.

All the fights Schoeffler has taken on over the past quarter-century have had one basic aim: to preserve Louisiana's swamps and marshes and coastline for future generations to enjoy the way he and his four brothers and three sisters did growing up. Currently, he's involved in several regional battles that may affect public access and the amount of pollution allowed in waterways across the nation. Last year, the Sierra Club's statewide Louisiana Delta Chapter—of which he is conservation chair—scored a major victory against EPA Region 6 that requires a ten-year cleanup of most of Louisiana's waterways. Schoeffler is now a key player in meetings with the counsel of the EPA to work out timetables and water-quality parameters.

And, collaborating with local pro bono lawyers, he was the named plaintiff in a complex suit filed in 2001 in St. Martin Parish District Court. Joined by Cajun crawfishermen, Schoeffler is demanding clear legal boundaries in the Atchafalaya Basin. Much of the land in dispute is underwater most of the year and may be subject to a tangle of laws regulating commerce on navigable waterways and public use of riverbanks. According to Schoeffler, huge private landowners are trying to chain the fishermen out of bayous their families have fished for generations, with access given only if they buy expensive permits. In late May, the district court judge ruled against Schoeffler, but, as always, he remains undeterred.

"We're very optimistic," he says exuberantly. "It's put the landowners in an awful tight spot—if they refuse to give us a boundary, then where are they in terms of arresting anyone for trespassing?" He plans to appeal the case and remains convinced that this fight will shake up how fishery, mineral, and even oil revenues are apportioned in a swampland larger than Rhode Island, and may serve as a model for similar disputes nationwide.

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