Louisiana Refugee Crisis Unfolding
Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. The French speaking residents here live on a sliver of land that is only 2% of what it was in 1955. The residents will be the first climate change refugees.
Rising waters from global warming have residents of the outer edges of Louisiana bayou country facing abandonment of their ancestral homelands. Some communities there are largely Native Americans who have hunted and fished here for untold generations. Others are Native Americans whose ancestors escaped the flood of Europeans who arrived in the 1800s in Gulf coast states and are now facing another life-threatening flood. The history of their lives and heritage is about to slip below the waterline. These first global warming refugees speak French and live on a sliver of land that is only 2% of what it was in 1955. That sliver of land on the Louisiana Bayou is about 50 miles south of New Orleans and they are the Isle de Jean Charles Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians.
Governments around the globe are facing similar displacements of citizens. Between 50 million and 200 million people - mostly subsistence farmers and fishermen - could be displaced by 2050, according to the United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security and the International Organization for Migration.
Canadian Interior Secretary Sally Jewel said, “We will have climate change refugees.”
Residents of Isle de Jean Charles are being resettled as part of a $48 million federal grant. It is the first allocation to move an entire community confronting the effects of global warming.
South Louisiana bayou country has been weakened by channels dug for decades by logging and oil companies that cut up the ancient delta land and ecosystem. Flood control dam building over the last half century has reduced the amount of land building silt deposited by the Mississippi River into thousands of acres.
Rising sea level combined with larger and more frequent storm surges caused by global warming have increased the rate of land loss in low-lying coastal regions. One of the most unique remaining cultures based on fishing and hunting in the United States is facing its demise from one of humanity’s most uniquely difficult and once avoidable crisis.
These circumstances are not restricted to the Louisiana coast. Populations in Alaska are also currently threatened. As sea levels rise the number of people facing refugee status is expected to increase. Unlike the primitive tribal migrations to a better place, these contemporary migrations will likely include larger numbers of people with fewer options.
See 2010 documentary video, Can’t Stop the Water, on Isle de Jean Charles flooding at fishermensvoice.com E-Edition Extras.