NEW ORLEANS, U.S. — On a cold Saturday in late January, a parade floats rolls down Royal Street painted with the image of the Louisiana coastline, eroding away. The next float displays Lady Liberty gagged and locked behind a chain-link fence. This is Krewe du Vieux, the raunchy, mule-drawn satirical parade that has rolled through New Orleans’ French Quarter for 40 years, making political jokes few others dare to make in public. Its 2026 theme is “Save the Wet Glands,” a play on “save the wetlands.” This year’s Krewe du Vieux Queen is Franziska Trautmann, the pink-haired co-founder and CEO of Glass Half Full, a nonprofit that takes the city’s glass bottles and turns them into sand used to rebuild Louisiana’s dwindling coast. Growing up here, the coastal erosion crisis is “like the boogeyman,” Trautmann told me outside the Glass Half Full facility in Arabi, Louisiana. “It’s this overwhelming thing looming in the distance.” Krewe du Vieux is a satirical parade that has rolled through New Orleans for 40 years. Its 2026 theme is “Save the Wet Glands,” a play on “save the wetlands.”  Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay. A Krewe du Vieux float depicts Louisiana’s eroding coastline and current Louisiana governor during their February 2026 parade. Photo by Liz Kimbrough for Mongabay. Most locals have heard the statistics: roughly a football field of Louisiana is lost to the sea every hour. Large areas of grassy marshes and tree-laden swamps that once knit the coast together have succumbed to…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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