CARL ISLAND, LOUISIANA
There is only one road separating the island that is no longer there from the rest of the world. A single road, often submerged, traverses this narrow strip of land between the bayous, the swamps of the southern coast of the United States. It leads to a ghost island that suddenly seems deserted: a billion mosquitoes, many seagulls, a few pelicans and a few houses – on meter-high stilts – in ruins. Jean Charles Island, a two-hour drive from New Orleans, Louisiana, literally sinks into the Gulf of Mexico. Disappear or run away, that was the choice the families living there had to make. The residents were descendants of Native Americans who took refuge here in the 19th century. At the time of maximum development, 400 people lived in Jean Charles, and there were about eighty houses. Then, in the late 1920s, they found gas and oil along the coast.
Here the first climate refugees from the USA
Natural channels were cut, changing the circulation and salinity of the swamps. Artificial levees and embankments along the Mississippi impeded the natural flow of water and compromised natural protection from erosion and storm surges. The increasingly frequent hurricanes did the rest. An island of 90 square kilometers has thus been reduced to less than one and a half, and scientists predict that it will be completely submerged within 50 years. The Mississippi Delta is now the fastest disappearing country in the world. Compared to the global average, sea level in the coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico has risen by 15 centimeters over the past century. Every hour – through subsidence, erosion, sea rise, hurricanes and human activity – a piece of land the size of a football field is swallowed up by the ocean. In 2016, the US government funded a Jean Charles Native Relocation Program. Just a few weeks ago, the first climate refugees from the USA moved into their new home around 60 miles inland.
I try not to lose the sense of community
“To fund this project — explains Pat Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana State Office for Community Development — we were granted a portion of the federal aid against natural disasters: $48 million.” About twenty families already have their homes here. Another eight will move within a month. And until March 37 (out of 40) families of Jean Charles will be here. “The interesting and unique thing about this project – he points out – is that it is relocating an entire community: if you save people but leave them scattered, you lose that sense of community and culture that has been built up over 150 years of living together. So our goal was not only to find a new and safe place for these people to live, but to create the possibility for this community to be preserved and actually grow again.
Homes designed to withstand hurricanes
“The new homes — according to Forbes — are designed to withstand hurricanes and be habitable again in days instead of weeks, months or years.” In fact, they can withstand 150 mph winds: windows, doors, roofs, everything is done to prevent water ingress, which does the most damage. The roofs are double-sealed, screwed on with special screws, and the entire construction is anchored down to the foundations with iron girders that penetrate the ground up to a meter deep. The new settlement was renamed “The New Isle” by its residents. Chris Brunet of the Choctaw tribe has been confined to a wheelchair for a long time with cerebral palsy. His family has lived in Jean Charles for five generations. He just moved.
It’s easy to say that “climate change isn’t real”
I meet him on the porch of his new home and tell him that the day before I recognized his old house by a conspicuous yellow sign: “Climate change sucks”. “The island is not dead – he says pugnaciously – it is not lost. you were there yesterday The children still go fishing there. People still live there. And they don’t want to leave their homes.” I ask him why. “Indigenous people have always been suspicious of the federal government since they decided twenty years ago to take us out of the hurricane protection system because the cost-benefit ratio wasn’t good,” he explains. “I don’t know if I would call myself a survivor,” he says, “I feel like a person who had to make a decision because the environment around them changed. Everything that has been done for climate change so far is not a solution, but an adaptation”. I ask you what you think of the environmentalists and the deniers. He thinks about it in silence for a while. “Unless your environment, what surrounds you, is not so involved that you have to make a decision like mine… climate change is always something that happens elsewhere. You might protest because it’s for a good cause, but at the end of the day you come back to your house, you don’t have to worry about it. In short, it is very easy to say “climate change is not real”.
A fate that affects not only Louisiana
deepening
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The fate of Jean Charles Island may seem like a distant problem to us. But it’s not like that. According to climate researchers, what is happening here in Louisiana will happen in other coastal areas of the world within a few decades. “Louisiana is 10, 20, 30 years ahead of other regions. But they are starting to see the same effects elsewhere as well,” Professor Alex Kolker, a climate scientist at Tulane University and ecosystem authority in the Mississippi Delta, tells us from his home in New Orleans. “People live in coastal areas around the world. Many of the world’s largest cities are on the coasts: Tokyo, London, St. Petersburg, the megacities of India… Rebuilding ecosystems and strengthening protection works, but it depends in part on what we do to fight climate change . If sea level rise remains moderate, these plans have a good chance of succeeding. But if sea levels continue to rise and storms get stronger, like we’ve seen in the Gulf of Mexico, then those plans will be much more difficult to implement, and many more people will be involved.” By the year 2100, experts say, could 13 million Americans are homeless, 70% of them in states like this one. Not to mention those affected by other extreme climatic phenomena such as fires. It’s not inevitable, says the professor. But the path to saving the planet is getting narrower and narrower. “And we should have started decades ago.”