The physical stakes are still stark. Southern Louisiana is facing a convergence of rising seas, wetland erosion, stronger storms and land subsidence, much of it worsened by decades of oil and gas canals cut through the coast. The state contains what theIPCC has identified as the world’s most exposed coastal zone, where the shoreline is projected to move more than 30 miles inland of New Orleans.
By comparing today’s warming trajectory with the last interglacial period roughly 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were similar and seas were much higher, the new study estimates that the region could eventually face three to seven meters of sea-level rise and lose as much as three-quarters of its remaining coastal wetlands.
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“Outmigration is often framed as tragedy or failure, but in some cases it signals agency,” said Brianna Castro, a co-author of the paper, who highlights that this is a chance to plan around choices people are already making.
Well yes but it only takes watching some videos of civilians near the frontlines in the Ukraine War to be reminded that many older people are deeply connected to the land around them at a foundational psychological level. Their identity is as much an architecture of a life spent in conversation with a context as it is a product of the internal peculiarities of their body and mind.
The amount of times I have seen Ukrainian soldiers talk in interviews about being mystified their fellow citizens won’t move to somewhere safer where they can begin to build a normal life again in videos and interviews…
We must understand forced mass displacement as a form of death even if the humans are all able to survive and move, something vital and fundamental to the life of the people dies without the land they lived in the context of.
This tendency to grip the tiny slice of something you have only becomes supercharged by poverty and suffering, something that is rampant in Louisiana/Republican Run Government Handout States.
The agency to leave is not so easily gained as everyone always assumes until they are in that kind of position themselves, it requires realistic hope and trust in the society moving them, it requires material agency and it requires a societally imbued sense of agency in people that they are worth the effort which unfortunately Republican run shitholes are fanatically obsessed with teaching the opposite lesson that people are worthless until proven otherwise.