Southeastern NEWS

                                                       Southeastern Louisiana University
                                           Public Information  Office
                                           publicinfor@selu.edu
                                           SLU 10880, Hammond, LA 70402
                                           504/549-2341/fax 504-549-2061
    Date: 2/28/00
      Contact:                           Carol Dotson or Christina Chapple  12

SPRING BREAK STUDENTS JOIN IN CYPRESS REFORESTATION
PROJECT
     HAMMOND -- College students will once again spend their spring break in the swamp
when four universities come to Southeastern Louisiana University to help reforest 180 acres of
cypress wetlands at Pass Manchac.
     Through the "Alternative Spring Break" program, students from Eastern Michigan
University, Rice University, Providence (Rhode Island) College, and the University of Miami
will each spend a week with Michael Greene, director of the Southeastern College of Arts and
Sciences' Connections program, planting cypress seedlings on Jones Island, located just east of
Interstate 55 in St. John the Baptist Parish.
     The Alternative Spring Break program gives students the opportunity to do community
service while their colleges are closed between semesters. Southeastern is a member of "Break
Away," a national non-profit organization that matches college or high school students with
community service projects.
     The visiting college students will join in a cypress planting project that began last
December and will continue through March.
     So far, thousands of cypress seedlings have been planted on 60 acres by Greene and his
staff of student workers and volunteers, including groups from Covington, Sacred Heart and
Holy Cross high schools and William Pitcher Junior High in Covington. Greene hopes to plant at
least 100 more acres with the spring break students.
     Between 1890 and the mid 1950s, Manchac Swamp, once thick with thousand-year-old
cypress trees, was clear cut by lumber companies. Today, the swamp is slowly dying and
coastline disappearing. Southeastern biologists have launched a major campaign to reforest the
swamp in the hope of slowing coastal erosion. 

                              -more-

Alternative Spring Break 2000/ADD ONE

     The planting project is being financed through funds received when Southeastern-owned
wetlands were designated a mitigation site. The federal Clean Water Act mandates that any
developer who impacts a parcel of wetlands must mitigate -- compensate -- for the loss of the
wetlands' functions and values by restoring or creating another wetlands area. Southeastern
signed a contract with Williams Energy Company, which is mitigating 360 wetland acres at a
cost of $900,000 in return for building a pipeline on wetlands between Sorrento and Gonzales.
Southeastern and a private mitigation site on the Blind River  are splitting Williams' mitigation
money and acreage.
     Greene said Southeastern is using approximately $350,000 of its mitigation payment to
plant 36,000 young cypress trees on Jones Island, which was donated to the university in 1996.
Greene said the remaining $100,000 of the mitigation funds will be used to establish an
endowment that will support research, faculty development grants, service-learning activities and
other environmental activities around the Lake Pontchartrain Basin.
     
                             -SLU-
     This press release is available on the World Wide Web:
      www.selu.edu/NewsEvents/PublicInfoOffice/newsp00.htm