Louisiana Is An Omen of the Future of Our Coasts

The coast os Lousiana is disappearing. It's not just because of sea-level rise, although that's a contributing factor. Decades of attempts to control the course of the Mississippi river have disrupted the natural cycle of flooding and sediment deposits that built the original river delta. Without that sediment the land eventually disappears.

This long article in the New Yorker describes what it's like to live in a part of the world that's fighting a losing battle against the ocean.

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on Earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it. This is true even of teen-agers. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place-names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.

And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. Since the days of Huey Long, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.

It's a compelling article (it reminded me of John McPhee at his peak), fascinating for both the technical details and the human predicament. But in the end, what's most sobering, although not explicitly stated, is the thought that the effort going into saving this one small part of the coastline will have to be multiplied by a thousand as sea levels continue to rise.