The Gulf Between

Great swaths of Southeastern Louisiana are drowning, land giving way to water at an alarming rate. Since the 1920s, Louisiana has lost more than 1,800 square miles of wetlands to open water, an area about the size of the state of Delaware. In the same amount of time it takes to watch an episode of Breaking Bad, our state loses the equivalent of a football field’s-worth of solid ground to the rising seas. My thesis is the first part of an accessible creative nonfiction book that tells the story of what’s happening in my home state. To what extent is it feasible to engineer ourselves out of harm’s way? What communities get relocated, and on whose terms? Most centrally, how will we address the troubling gulf between what we know to be true about our changing climate and what we are willing to do about it