Ecotourism in Louisiana - Good Boy Gone Good

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Outside Magazine August 2003

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The Water Issue: Heroes
Good Boy Gone Good
He grew up poaching alligators, he sells Cadillacs, and his friends run oil companies. But saving the bayous of Louisiana's Atchafalaya Basin is Harold Schoeffler's number-one deal.

By Peter Heller


	With God (and the facts) on his side: Schoeffler at his car dealership in Lafayette, Louisiana (Jake Chessum)

AT THE ANNUAL WILD GAME DINNER FOR MEN ONLY, outside the Family Life Christian Fellowship, a non-denominational church in Lafayette, Louisiana, Harold Schoeffler, the area's leading Cadillac dealer, finished his plate of duck gumbo and joined 200 other sportsmen as they crossed the lawn and mounted the wide steps of the white chapel. "Looks like we gonna get a sermon with our bread," he said to me and his friend Mike Francis, former chairman of the Louisiana Republican party and a prominent success in the state's oil industry. We sat down in a pew, and I looked around.

The men in attendance ranged from field hands in camo to CEOs in Ralph Lauren; there were Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians. Schoeffler himself is a devout Catholic who never misses Sunday mass. But what brings them all together each year is a passion for Christ, the outdoors, and the nearby Atchafalaya Basin—at more than 1.1 million acres the largest river-basin swamp in North America, and one of the most biologically productive and diverse areas anywhere in the world. In southern Louisiana, a fierce love of place cuts across lines of class and religion. On the church dais, flanked by a shotgun and a fishing rod, Jim Darnell, a sixtyish itinerant preacher from Texas who also writes spiritual hunting-and-fishing stories, cleared his throat and began by telling on himself—how as a boy he snuck over the top of a levee and blasted away at a flock of blue-winged teal drifting on the river. The birds refused to die, or even fly, because they turned out to be another hunter's decoys. Then Darnell got serious and talked about the decoys the devil sets in our path.

He preached for another 20 minutes. You could've heard a twig snap. He concluded by saying that among

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the true and good values in life, like family and a day hunting with friends, one of the foremost was preserving the God-given earth. "Because it's y'all that are really doing it, the hunters and fishermen. It's not the pita eaters!"

Schoeffler blew out his breath. "Oh, man," he murmured, rolling his eyes. Clad in loafers, khakis, and a short-sleeved button-down shirt, the tan, five-foot-eleven Schoeffler, 63, fit right in with the crowd of men gathered here today. But the pita eaters are Harold's friends, too. Schoeffler can make you a great deal on a new Seville, in a state where Cadillac is still king, but he's got another, surprising side. He's chairman of the local chapter of the Sierra Club and one of the most dogged environmentalists in Louisiana. Schoeffler hosts a gloves-off local television show called Eco-Logic, which deals with everything from industrial toxic waste to marshland water levels, and across Louisiana he's known for repeatedly challenging Big Oil and other industries in fights to protect the basin and the coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. For close to a century the Atchafalaya has been a battleground for competing interests—timber, oil, fishing, hunting, water-flow manipulation—which have threatened its survival. Among the champions of the swamp, Schoeffler is a legend.

"He's a contradiction," says Bruce Schultz, the Acadian Bureau Chief for the Baton Rouge Advocate. "On some issues he's the only person who'll speak out. One day he might be critical of the oil business, and the next day he might invite some of the same people to go duck hunting, or have them over to his house to eat."

Dailey Berard, president and CEO of Unifab International, a large fabricator of heavy marine oil-drilling equipment, has been battling Schoeffler for three decades. "Tell everyone I love Harold," he says. "It's his stupidity and ignorance that drive me crazy!"

Bruce Hamilton, national conservation director for the Sierra Club, puts it succinctly: "Harold's one of my heroes." That's high praise for a man who occasionally raised pocket money while attending the University of Louisiana by poaching alligators in the Audubon Wildlife Reserve.

After dinner and the sermon, Schoeffler and I climbed into his GMC Yukon—he hauls too many boat trailers and too much fish bait to drive a Caddie—and headed out to Lake Fausse Pointe to check his string of crawfish traps. En route, on an arrow-straight road that cut through cane fields and dropped into oak bottom, I asked him how he felt about the "pita eater" comment. Schoeffler laughed. He pointed to a flock of ibis shearing down over the trees.

"I kinda chuckle," he said, "when I hear the compliment that the hook-and-bullet guys have made a critical contribution to conservation issues. When I look at the major battles that have impacted habitat, endangered species, water quality—it wasn't them." I glanced at the three loose shotgun shells on the front seat and the flat-hulled, fatigue-green johnboat on the trailer behind us and thought, This is going to be an interesting week.

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Contributing editor PETER HELLER wrote about the first descent of Tibet's Tsangpo Gorge in July 2002 and is at work on a book about the expedition.

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