Elizabeth Kolbert on the climate change dilemma in Louisiana

Dhe New Orleans Lakefront Airport is located on an artificially raised headland in Lake Pontchartrain. The terminal, an Art Deco building, was considered ultra-modern when it was built in 1934. Today you can rent it for weddings. The runway is used for small planes, and that’s why I came here a few months after the Carp Festival, as a passenger in a four-seater Piper Warrior. The plane’s owner and pilot was a partially retired attorney who was happy to use any excuse to fly. As he told me, he often volunteered when rescued animals needed to be transported. Without explicitly saying it, he let it be known that dogs were his favorite passengers.

The Piper took off north, flew across the lake, then looped back to New Orleans. We reached the Mississippi at English Turn, the bend where this river almost makes a 180-degree turn. Then we followed the winding river to Plaquemines Parish. The county is at the extreme southeastern end of Louisiana, where the wide funnel of the Mississippi Estuary narrows to a narrow outlet and Chicago’s ballast and debris eventually wash into the sea. On maps, the Parish looks like a thick, muscular arm that protrudes into the Gulf of Mexico and that the river runs through like a vein in the middle. Seen from the air, the Parish looks completely different. If you compare it with an arm, it is terribly emaciated and consists almost entirely of the vein over almost its entire length – a good 100 kilometers -. The little land that exists lines the river in two thin strips. When we flew over this area at a height of about 600 meters, I could see houses, farms and refineries on the strip of land, but not the people who live and work there. Beyond that lay open bodies of water and marshland. In many places canals crisscrossed the marshland, presumably at a time when the land was even more solid, built to get to the oil underneath. In some places I was able to make out the outlines of former fields, which now appear as rectangular lakes. Large white clouds billowing over the plane were reflected in the black pools below.

A bottom like jello

Plaquemines Parish has a – at best dubious – reputation of being one of the fastest sinking places on earth. Everyone who lives there – and there are fewer and fewer people – can point out a spot in the water where a house or a hunting lodge used to be. This is true even for teenagers. A few years ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially deleted 31 place names in Plaquemines Parish because those places simply no longer existed. What happens in Plaquemines happens all over the coast. Every hour and a half, Louisiana loses more land the size of a football field. Every few minutes the surface of a tennis court goes under. The shape of the state may still resemble a boot on maps. In reality, however, the lower part of this boot is torn: it lacks not only the sole, but also the heel and a large part of the instep.

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