DeSmog Oct 10, 2019 @ 21:39 “It is a crime against nature,” Jody Meche, president of the Louisiana Crawfish Producers Association-West, said while scanning the Bayou Bridge pipeline right-of-way on the west side of the Atchafalaya Basin, the country’s largest river swamp in a designated National Heritage Area. His voice trembled with rage as he told me that he was speaking for all the animals living in the basin that can’t speak for themselves. “The Bayou Bridge pipeline has left a dam across the Atchafalaya Basin affecting the fisheries, the birds, the otters, minks, raccoons, and nutria,” Meche said. On September 27, I joined Meche and Dean Wilson, executive director of the conservation group Atchafalaya Basinkeeper, on a monitoring trip to the west side of the pipeline. It was their first trip along the pipeline’s construction path, which only recently became visible after unusually high water levels in the basin receded.