Hey, everybody. My guest today is my friend, Captain Dean Wilson, who is executive director of the Atchiflaya

basin keeper in Louisiana. He's American born, believe it or not, when you hear his accent,

but he grew up in Spain and then he came to Louisiana in 1984 and rooted the Amazon where he was

going to live after living in the basin's deep swamps for four months with only a spear,

a few hooks and a bow and arrow. Dean fell in love with the swamps, flakes, and bayous and rivers

of the Atchiflaya basin. Dean chose to stay in the basin and working as a commercial fishman

before forming basin keeper in 2004. He is a proud member of the Waterkeeper Alliance. Dean's

passion in the basin is known to all of whom know him when he is not out patrolling or educating

communities about the basin and as many threats and treasures he works with his family owned and

operated swamp door business called last wilderness swamp doors. I have fortunate enough to spend a

lot of time in the basin with Dean. My son lived with him for a summer and worked before he went

to college, had a really exciting business summer and living in the middle of the swamp with Dean

in a whole arsenal of weaponry which my son was kind of surprised about but at that time Dean was

targeted by the cypress industry and there were a lot of people interested in the silence in him

but Dean, you're one of my great heroes and I'm really glad that we got to have you on the podcast

today. Thank you, Bob, you want to mind? Thanks. So tell us about the Atchiflaya basin.

Well, the Atchiflaya basin is the largest forested wetland in North America. It is larger than

the Everglades. We have over 800,000 acres of forested wetlands and over half a million acres of

Mars. It is the basin of the Atchiflaya River. We used to be the first distributory of the

Mississippi River. The Mississippi River used to have a lot of distributaries spreading the water

and the sediments for the coastal Louisiana. The first one was the Atchiflaya River,

so it's the basin of the river. So this was before the levees were created. The Mississippi River

...