Elizabeth Colbert talks about climate change chaos in Louisiana

D.He said New Orleans Lakefront Airport is located on an artificially elevated platform in Pontchartrain Lake. The terminal, an Art Deco building, was considered modern when built in 1934. Today you can rent it for weddings. The runway is used for small aircraft, which is why I came here as a four-seater Piper Warrior passenger a few months after the Corp Festival. The owner and pilot of the plane was a somewhat retired lawyer who did not use to fly for any reason. As he told me, he often volunteered when carrying rescued animals. Without saying it openly, he revealed that dogs are his favorite travelers.

Piper sailed north, flew across the lake, and then returned to New Orleans. We reached Mississippi at the English turn, where the river makes an almost 180 degree turn. Then we followed the winding river to Blackmines Parish. The county is at the southeastern tip of Louisiana, where the wide funnel of the Mississippi Faculty shrinks into a narrow outlet and Chicago’s ballast and debris are eventually washed into the ocean. In the maps, Parish looks like an elongated thick, muscular arm in the Gulf of Mexico and flows like a vein in the middle of the river. Seen from the air, the parish looks completely different. If you compare it with one hand, it is very thin and has a nerve almost its entire length – a good 100 km -. The existing small land river consists of two thin strips. When we flew at an altitude of about 600 meters in this area, we could see houses, farms and refineries, but not the people who live and work there. Beyond that lay open water and swamps. In many places canals were built to cross the swamp and, at a time when the land was still solid, to receive the oil below. In some places, I was able to create the exteriors of old fields that now appear as rectangular lakes. Large white clouds flying over the plane were reflected in the black pools below.

A blow like Jello

Plaquemines Parish has a reputation for being one of the fastest sinking sites on earth – at best doubt. Everyone who lives there – and fewer and fewer people – can point to a place in the water where a house or hunting lodge was. This is also true for young people. A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially removed 31 place names in Blackmine Parish because those places no longer exist. What is happening in the Blackmin is happening all over the beach. Every hour and a half, Louisiana loses more land than the size of a football field. The surface of a tennis court goes down every few minutes. In maps, the shape of the state may still resemble a start. In fact, however, the bottom part of this boot was torn: it was only one, but not a large part of the heel and instep.