Renée Lefort Only Says "Was"

This interview takes place in 2031, in a classroom that doesn't exist yet, with a teacher who hasn't been born into her role. Everything in it is invented. Almost nothing in it is made up.

Terrebonne Parish Consolidated High School sits fourteen miles closer to the Gulf than the parish's previous high school. The previous school's foundation is visible at extreme low tide, if you know where to look. The consolidated campus serves students from seven former school districts. Room 204 belongs to Renée Lefort, who teaches a course listed in the catalog as "Regional History and Ecology" and known among students as Ghost Class.

Her classroom features a wall-sized coastal survey map from 2019, annotated so extensively in red dry-erase marker that whole sections of the coastline appear to be bleeding. A laminated poster near the door reads: "THE WORD IS 'WAS,' NOT 'USED TO BE.' — MANAGEMENT." She is 38, trained as a marine biologist, and speaks with the clipped patience of someone who has explained the same thing many times and will explain it again tomorrow.

We spoke on a Tuesday in October, during her planning period, while the building's backup generator cycled through its afternoon test.

You teach a class about things that no longer exist. How do you describe it to people?

Renée: I teach Louisiana coastal ecology and community history from roughly 1900 to present. It's a survey course. The fact that most of the survey area is now open water is the pedagogical challenge, not the course description. A parent at back-to-school night called it a "grief class" and I corrected her. It's a science and history class. The grief is extracurricular.

What does a typical unit look like?

Renée: So right now we're in the middle of the Barataria-Terrebonne unit, which covers roughly 930 square miles of wetland loss since 1932.¹ I start with the basin as a living system: marsh types, salinity gradients, species interdependence. Then I teach what happened to it. We spend a week on the freshwater marshes, which had the highest wildlife density and the fastest rate of conversion.² Then intermediate marshes, critical alligator and wading bird habitat. Then we get into communities.

The Isle de Jean Charles module takes three days. Day one is the island at 22,000 acres. Day two is the island at 320 acres. Day three is The New Isle, the relocation site, which by the time I'm teaching it has been under the South Central Planning Commission for six years.³

I show them the road. The one Chief Naquin watched get built, then shelled, then blacktopped, then raised four feet, then flooded permanently.⁴ The road is the whole course in miniature. Someone built it, improved it, raised it, and lost it. One lifetime.

Your students were born around 2015, 2016. What's their baseline?

Renée: Their baseline is — okay, this is the thing. They don't think the coast is degraded. They think it's the coast. They've never seen a marsh that wasn't fragmented. They have no concept of continuous wetland. I showed satellite imagery from 1984 last week and a kid asked if it was photoshopped. He wasn't being a smartass. He genuinely could not reconcile the amount of green with the place he lives.

Daniel Pauly coined "shifting baseline syndrome" in '95 to describe how each generation accepts a degraded environment as normal because they never saw what came before.⁵ The follow-on research calls it "generational amnesia." One generation fails to pass ecological knowledge to the next, and the new generation's concept of "pristine" degrades without anyone noticing.⁶

My job is to interrupt that. I am professionally interrupting amnesia. Which sounds dramatic, but it's Tuesday. I have a lesson plan. It's second period.

You take students on field trips to sites that are now open water.

Renée: We charter a flat-bottom out of Cocodrie. I have GPS coordinates for twelve sites: former communities, former marsh islands, a cemetery, the foundation of a school that closed in the 2020s when the parish lost population.⁷ We motor out and I stop the boat and I say, "This is where Pointe-aux-Chenes Elementary was. Below us." And they look at the water. And I let them look for a while.

The cemetery is the one that gets them. Lefort Cemetery in Leeville slipped below Bayou Lafourche years ago.⁸ I share a last name with it, which I didn't plan as a pedagogical tool, but it works. They remember it. A student last year wrote in her reflection that she'd never thought about the dead needing land too. That's not a bad insight for a sixteen-year-old.

Does it bother you? The name.

Renée: Next question.

Fair enough. The course has been running for four years now. Has the content changed?

Renée: Every semester I have to update the map. I know how that sounds, but it's literally true. I redline sections that have converted to open water since the last term. The students watch me do it on the first day. It's become a ritual. A kid last year called it "the bleeding." I didn't love that, but I didn't stop him either, because he was paying attention.

The species module keeps getting shorter. I cut the section on Lake Borgne oyster beds because there's nothing left to teach. No oysters have grown there in over a decade.⁹ East Timbalier Island, which was a brown pelican nesting site significant enough that Theodore Roosevelt made it a federal refuge, is now a module about oil infrastructure visible above the waterline where an island was.¹⁰ I teach it as a sequence: birds, then oil wells, then nothing. Three slides.

The school board called the course "disproportionately negative." What happened?

Renée: I invited the board member to come on the field trip. She didn't come. I also pointed out that 47 percent of previously recorded archaeological sites along the Mississippi River Delta shoreline are partially or completely submerged,¹¹ and that the federal government retired 35 geographic place names in 2011 alone for features that no longer exist,¹² and I asked her which of those facts she'd like me to make more proportionate. She didn't answer that either.

Look. I don't teach this course to make anyone feel bad. I teach it because the alternative is that these kids grow up fourteen miles from the Gulf of Mexico with no idea what was here before them. The research literature has a term for that: "social extinction." It's when a species disappears from collective memory before or alongside its biological disappearance.¹³

What do you want your students to walk away with?

Renée: I want them to know the word "was." Not "used to be," which is soft, which lets you off the hook. Oh, it used to be different, how interesting. "Was." Continuous wetland was here. A community was here. A cemetery with my name on it was here.

And what does teaching this do to you?

Renée: (long pause) I'm a good teacher. I'm organized, I'm precise, I update my materials. I'm fine.

That's not what I asked.

Renée: (another pause) I know.

Ms. Lefort's planning period ended. The generator finished its cycle. Through the classroom window, the sky was the color it gets in October now, a white haze that could be clouds or could be the prescribed burns drifting east. She stood to erase something from the whiteboard, then stopped, looked at it, and left it.

Footnotes

1. Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program, citing Couvillion et al. 2017. https://btnep.org ↩

2. The Nature Conservancy, "Louisiana Gulf Coast Prairies and Marshes." https://www.nature.org ↩

3. Louisiana Office of Community Development, Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project. https://isledejeancharles.la.gov ↩

4. NOLA.com/Times-Picayune, "Washing Away" series, 2002. https://www.nola.com ↩

5. Pauly, D. (1995). "Anecdotes and the shifting baseline syndrome of fisheries." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 10(10). ↩

6. Soga, M. and Gaston, K.J. (2018). "Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications." Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 16(4): 222–230. ↩

7. Salon/Grist, "As Louisiana's Coast Disappears, Its Historic Communities Are Disappearing Too," February 2023. https://grist.org ↩

8. Al Jazeera, "As Louisiana's Coast Washes Away, the Dead Are the First to Go," August 2023. https://www.aljazeera.com ↩

9. Civil Eats, "As Louisiana's Wetlands Erode, A Fishing Culture Fights to Survive," March 2026. https://civileats.com ↩

10. Historic New Orleans Collection, "From the Sky, There's No Denying Louisiana's Disappearing Coastline," March 2025. https://www.hnoc.org ↩

11. Society for American Archaeology, citing Cloy and Ostahowski 2015. https://www.saa.org ↩

12. NOLA.com/Times-Picayune, coastal reporting. https://www.nola.com ↩

13. MDPI Sustainability, "The Drifting Baseline Syndrome: A Novel Concept of Perceived Biodiversity Change," May 2025. https://www.mdpi.com ↩