Sea level rise is this big, scary reality. We’re always hearing predictions from scientists that the oceans will swallow islands, flood major cities, and wipe out huge stretches of coastline. The longer we burn fossil fuels, the bigger the surge. It sounds apocalyptic on this huge, global scale.
But also totally abstract – it’s hard to picture. What will it mean for the sea to rise two feet… 4 feet…even 7 feet by the end of the century?
Turns out, it depends where you look.
In this episode, we’re going to drop in on communities on each of America’s three coasts, each coming up with their own set of solutions to the water that is slowly consuming their edges.
Want to know more about the growing problem of failing septic systems? Sure you do! Check out more of Katherine's reporting here and read this article about how the failure of septic systems due to climate change is impacting public health.
Look no further for more information about San Francisco's Waterfront Flood Study.
This episode was hosted and co-reported by Halle Parker. The episode was reported in collaboration with Ezra David Romero of KQED in San Francisco and Katherine Hafner of WHRO in Norfolk, Virginia. Editing by Jack Rodolico with additional editing help from Carlyle Calhoun and Eve Abrams. Carlyle Calhoun is our managing producer. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski and our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX. To help others find our podcast, please hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
You can reach the Sea Change team at seachange@wwno.org.
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TRANSCRIPT
Episode Title: From Sea to Rising Sea
HALLE: Sea level rise is this big, scary reality. We’re always hearing predictions from scientists that the oceans will swallow islands, flood major cities, and wipe out huge stretches of coastline. The longer we burn fossil fuels, the bigger the surge. It sounds apocalyptic on this huge, global scale.
But also totally abstract – it’s hard to picture. What will it mean for the sea to rise two feet… 4 feet… even 7 feet by the end of the century?
Turns out, it depends where you look.
I’m Halle Parker and you’re listening to Sea Change.
In this episode, we’re gonna drop in on communities on each of America’s three coasts, each coming up with their own set of solutions to the water that is slowly consuming their edges.
After the break, we head first to the East Coast.
PART I: VIRGINIA
Halle: We start …in Virginia’s middle peninsula. It’s a rural area spread-out along the Chesapeake Bay. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, known as NOAA, predicts sea levels could rise more than 2 feet here in 50 years. And people there are dealing with a growing issue caused by sea level rise: their number one problem is Number 2. I’m talking about poop.
Backyard septic systems are flooding, forcing sewage into people's homes and swamping their yards.
It’s such a big problem locally that people who know about this kind of thing call southeastern Virginia “the septic repair capital of the East Coast.” Quite a thing to be known for.
Katherine Hafner, a reporter with WHRO, shows us how they’re trying to fix this poopy problem.
PART I: VIRGINIA
Katherine Hafner:
Jamie Miller is who you call when sewage backs up into your home and overflows your toilet or your lawn. He’s a septic guy.
I spent a day riding along with Jamie, to see him in action. And how he thinks about his job kind of surprised me...
Jamie Miller: Like, Dr. Phil is not the best doctor, but he's known as the expert because he went out and helped so many people. I have an interest in doing that.
Jamie serves customers all across what’s called the Middle Peninsula… It’s a roughly 60-mile-long piece of land that juts into the Chesapeake Bay about halfway up Virginia’s coast.
The Middle Peninsula is beautiful, lush and green and surrounded by water. As the ocean rises, it’s pushing up groundwater, too. So the soil here is wet…and getting wetter.
Southeastern Virginia is seeing one of the highest rates of sea level rise on the East Coast - in part because the land is sinking. That makes places like the Middle Peninsula particularly vulnerable.
And that all means Jamie is very busy. All day long, his phone kept ringing…
Jamie Miller: Hello? Yes. I'm good, how are you?
..and ringing…
then some customers don't even, they don't even read the, uh, hello. Hey.
And ringing…
Hello.
Here's what Jamie is seeing more and more of…
A homeowner calls. Jamie drives to their house and digs into the ground to get at an old septic tank. But… it's like he’s digging in sand at the beach: Water oozes into the hole from the sides.
Jamie says he doesn't know much about climate change. But this experience over and over, is all the proof he needs to know that groundwater is rising.
Jamie Miller: How did these systems get installed years ago? Because right now, if you dig, it's, it's, if you dig a hole, it's a pool of water. How do you install this in that? Which tells me that the water level had to be lower.
At least one in five Americans, typically in rural areas, rely on their own backyard septic systems, instead of public sewers. Here’s how they work.
All the pipes in your house flow into a septic tank underground in your yard. A holding tank. The tank slowly releases liquid into an underground drainfield. It’s the soil that really does the dirty work. Bacteria in the soil naturally filter pollutants and break down the sewage.
But when your yard is too wet—when the whole system is underwater—your poop becomes everyone’s problem.
Sewage flows into waterways, like the Chesapeake Bay, which the government has long been working to restore. It can lead to toxic algae blooms, kill fish and force beaches to close.
And this isn’t just a Virginia problem. Scientists say we don’t have a handle on the scale yet, let alone how to fix it. But we DO know that more than a THIRD of homes across the Southeast rely on septic systems – and many are already failing.
The bottom line is …if you’re one of Jamie Miller’s unlucky customers, then you’re likely about to get a massive bill. Jamie says people often have to shell out 50 or 60 grand to install a new system that WILL actually work in these wetter conditions.
Jamie Miller: I know a family right now that's in Williamsburg, James city County that needs a direct discharge. They're going to have to spend 50, 60, 000 to do it. They've already paid us a lot of money to try to repair what they have. It's failing. And They don't have the money They need to sell their house, and she wants to move in with her mom or something like that But they can't sell their house because you know if you don't have a working septic system.
Jamie takes me to a client's house. It's a single-family home a stone's throw from the water. It's peaceful, with wind gently ruffling marsh grasses in the backyard.
Then Jamie spots something on the front lawn that shows me just how much the water is intruding.
Jamie Miller: There's a fiddler crab in the yard. Right there. You don't see that.
Fiddler crabs like to live right in the marsh and burrow into wet mud around the tides. If they’re on your lawn, that’s a bad sign.
It’s crazy to think… but overflowing toilets are becoming an existential climate threat to the people of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. If people can’t flush their toilets, they won’t be able to stay in their homes.
Lewie Lawrence: It's a really hard cultural thing to extract people out of an area that they've been living in for hundreds and hundreds of years.
That's Lewie Lawrence. He grew up here. And now he’s head of this thing called the Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission.
I interviewed him because he’s the guy trying to turn this poop problem into some sort of boon for the community.
The goal is to become a resilience hub, inviting companies to come to the Middle Peninsula and test new ways to live with the rising water, to adapt to climate change.
I met up with Lewie at a nondescript brick house right along a creek. This house is now a testbed for new septic technology.
Lewie Lawrence: This one is a very commonplace house that you'll find all over the U. S. It's a single family residential structure, uh, three bedrooms. Uh, and so that the scale of it, the level of sewage that would go through it is commensurate with the the millions of homes that are suffering from this exact same problem.
They’re testing new poop technology here and I wanted to see it in action.
There’s this big coalition of local universities, nonprofits, and government groups funding this brick-house lab. They even pay a guy to live in this house, so he can keep the water flowing from the toilets, showers and sinks.
Triangle Environmental, is the North Carolina company that’s piloting its septic tech here… Research and development manager Aaron Forbis-Stokes shows me how it works.
Aaron Forbis-Stokes (Triangle): We'll do the, the lower flush volume as this might just key. And so that goes into a, a pipe directly below the toilet...
Just like any other backyard septic system, everything in this house flows first to a septic tank in the yard, underground.
But with this new system the wastewater is then pumped up ABOVE ground. Into something that looks kind of like a refrigerator or utility closet on a raised platform.
This above-ground tank is where the cleaning action happens. The company wants to clean the water to high standards – so clean it could go right into a local river or be reused inside the home. Not to drink, but still do things like wash dishes or shower.
Jamie Miller, my septic guy, helped install this pilot project, and explains the before and after wastewater samples that we’re looking at.
Jamie Miller: I would say that the comparison looks like the difference between ginger ale and bottled water today.
It all sounds promising.
But it’s still unclear whether this solution will be deployed anytime soon. The state of Virginia hasn't approved the new tech.
And then there’s the price tag.
I asked Triangle Environmental how much their system will cost. They hope less than the 50 to 60-thousand dollar range of the best options on the market – but couldn’t tell me how much less.
In the meantime, Jamie Miller is piecing together solutions for his customers – patching up old systems, replacing others that have totally failed.
And he does something else that's not really in his job description: comforting clients.
He tells me about this one client. She bought a brand new house, and with it a brand new septic system. Now her yard is full of sewage.
Jamie Miller: When I went and met her the first time, she got to crying and she said, you know, I grew up in upstate new york. My favorite thing to do as a kid was to go out in the back in my backyard and just run around in my bare feet and play. And she said, I've lived here for five years and my kids cannot do that.
Jamie says he promised to get her system up and running as quickly and affordably as possible. Dr. Septic is doing what he can.
PART II: SAN FRANCISCO.
Halle: So that’s one kind of problem created by sea level rise… people who can’t flush their toilets.
Here’s another problem on a much bigger scale: entire cities forced to reimagine the city itself like xx xx xx. Let’s leave the Atlantic and fly 2,500 miles west to San Francisco, the city by the bay. A bay that’s destined to get larger. Without action, California could see more than 6 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Ezra David Romero is a reporter for KQED, and he takes us to his city.
EZRA
Tourists flock to the Embarcadero to see sea lions, eat clam chowder and to hop on sail boats to sail under the Golden Gate Bridge.
AMBI: ambi of bongo drums comes in under this section. Layer on top of the waves ambi.
On a recent trip to the city’s bayside waterfront, a guy jammed on bongos near Fisherman’s Wharf.
My first memories of San Francisco are of this very touristy area.
I remember riding in old cable cars and eating mini donuts at Pier 39 with my dad and brothers.
These days, I don't come this area much,
But I’m here for this story because San Francisco's iconic waterfront is the area that is most at risk due to flooding from sea level rise.
I brought my buddy Nick Altieri [Awl-tee-air-ee] with me
Ezra Romero: Do you ever come down here?
Nick Altieri: Um, only when people visit.
Ezra Romero: Yeah.
Nick and I are acting like tourists in our own city.
We even track down the donuts that I ate with my dad when I was a kid.
Oh my god. They're so good, right? Oh, wow.
Along the crowded Embarcadero, we see the ferry take people to tour Alcatraz.
Ezra and Nick: It's kind of depressing. Well, you're going to a jail.
And we see something that neither of us have ever seen in San Francisco, the iconic wild flock of green parrots that live down here.
AMBI: keep the parrot sound in the clear for a few seconds before fading under the tracks below
There’s so much down here in view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Cycle rickshaws and historic trains taking people from around the world to science museums, to Fisherman’s Wharf, ball games and waterfront restaurants.
//And much of this area could be underwater by the end of the century.
Ezra Romero: I forget how beautiful San Francisco is.
Nick Altieri: Really? Yeah. I don't know, every time I go outside I feel like we get really lucky to live here.
But actually, it won't be the first time parts of San Francisco will be underwater. A big portion of this area used to be a cove called Yerba Buena. It was a sheltered area where ships anchored. But more than a century and a half ago, San Francisco was hungry for new land. So, it filled the cove in and built part of the city over it. And the city constructed a seawall across the mouth of that cove.
And now my friend Nick and I are walking directly on top of that sea wall. This entire touristy part of the city that used to be water…could be reclaimed by the ocean.
Kristina Hill: It is kind of an unusually fragile seawall for a city of this size.
UC Berkeley professor Kristina Hill is one of the Bay Area's top sea level rise scientists. She calls the seawall a joke. Because not only is it barely tall enough to keep water at bay now… before major sea rise… it’s also poorly built. She says parts of the seawall are made of rubble.
Kristina Hill: It was made so quickly during the gold rush era. It's really a berm made of rock, like a pile of rocks with big posts stuck into it to support, concrete facing that makes it into a wall. And there are even ships that were scuttled in it, under and part of the what we think of as the seawall.
Ezra Romero: Kind of reminds me of something I might build as a kid, like in a sandbox.
Kristina Hill: In a hurry.
In the worst-case scenario the rising ocean could overwhelm the existing seawall and flood the city's tourist center and downtown.
San Francisco is developing a plan to build a better line of defense. It’s called the San Francisco Waterfront Flood Study, and it’s a joint effort between the city and the federal government’s Army Corp of Engineers. This plan is massive. The big idea is to reinvent the majority of the infrastructure along San Francisco Bay.
And, Brad Benson, the Port of San Francisco’s waterfront resilience program director and the guy spearheading this plan, says this will be no simple undertaking.
Brad Benson: It's going to take. Careful design and coordination amongst multiple agencies and port tenants. So, you know, a project like this doesn't, is not going to start construction anytime soon.
We’re talking about reinforcing underground train stations, skyscrapers, industrial areas, public parks, apartment buildings… even sites contaminated with toxic waste. All along a full seven-and-a-half miles of the bayshore.
It’s a logistical jigsaw puzzle. It even wraps in how to better prepare this waterfront for earthquakes
Brad Benson: By 2050, under the high rate of sea level rise, we could have more than 500 assets, and structures at risk of flooding.
Let me repeat that fact: if the city does nothing, then 500 structures could be underwater just 25 years from now.
Brad Benson: Essentially what happens in a no action scenario is that all of the area that was filled gets reclaimed by the bay. And that goes as far in as Salesforce Tower.
Salesforce is the tallest building in San Francisco. It's six blocks from the water.
Ezra Romero: Wow, so the ocean really just wants to take it back in some way.
Brad Benson: Yes, yes.
Brad and I talked about what it would take to save just one of these 500 structures: The iconic Ferry Building.
It's a historic concrete building around the length of a city block with a 245-foot-tall clock tower above its main entrance.
Today, the Ferry Building houses merchants who sell the best of San Francisco.
Elaine Forbes is here too she’s Brad’s boss.
Elaine Forbes: It was built before the bridges were in, and it was the place that people came to San Francisco. It was the front gate, front building door, because everyone was coming by water. And so this building was built to be iconic and welcoming.
Brad Benson: It's mostly over water.
Brad Benson: And it's supported on 5,000 timber piles that are driven into the mud.
Ezra Romero: 5,000?
Brad Benson: 5,000 timber piles.
Ezra Romero: Wow.
Brad Benson: That are driven into the mud.
Brad says engineers will likely raise the Ferry Building by seven feet.
Brad Benson: They'd install a series of jacks underneath the whole building that are controlled by computer where the whole building can be lifted at the same time to a new elevation.
San Francisco is not guaranteed to implement this huge plan. The city can’t do it alone, it’ll require Congress to approve it. The city projects the plan will cost 13.5 billion dollars, and if Congress signs on then the feds will pick up more than half the tab.
If that all happens quickly, the city says the plan could be completed in the 2040s.
That means for two decades San Franciscans are going to have to deal with a lot of construction and congestion as the shoreline is reimagined.
Kristina Hill: It's an artificial landscape that used to be a cove. And it's as if the ghosts of water past are all coming back and that cove is coming back.
UC Berkeley professor Kristina Hill. Kristina doesn't disagree with city, she thinks a new sea wall is needed. But after reviewing the plan, she noticed what she calls a glaring flaw: the study doesn’t thoroughly consider groundwater
As sea levels rise, the groundwater along the bay— which is freshwater under land—will match that rise, inch for inch, foot for foot.
Kristina Hill: And if we build a firmer edge, a more contemporary type of engineering for the seawall, we'll have to assume that the land behind it is still going to get wet.
The city’s plan says groundwater emergence is likely to happen in the future, but to fully understand how much, field tests are needed. Kristina says a new sea wall won't stop groundwater from rising into the city. She pictures water bubbling up in the city's streets.
Kristina Hill: So we'll start to see groundwater come up through storm drains and we'll start to see low parts of individual blocks become flooded with water, which we actually did see this past winter.
Kristina wishes the port's plan was a bit more imaginative, just like San Francisco is famous for around the world. She thinks city leaders could take a lesson from the Dutch who are leading the way on how to live with water instead of creating barriers to keep it out.
Kristina Hill: I don't know of any city outside of the Netherlands that really is ready for rising groundwater.
Kristina has a fantasy where select streets in San Francisco are given back to the bay and turned into canals for groundwater to drain into.
Kristina Hill: Imagine you combined the hills of San Francisco with the canals of Amsterdam. That would be like taking two incredible urban landscapes and having them be meshed together.
It’s a lovely idea ... giving parts of the city back to the bay is not the city's plan. The city wants to save everything it can but its main focus is rebuilding its century-old seawall.
Kristina Hill: The peril is that we build this very expensive wall. And then we think, okay, we're safe. We've done it.
Kristina says out-of-the-box thinking is imperative if SF is going to withstand the wetter future it will inherit because of the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.
Reimaging and rebuilding a huge city is of course a massive challenge. But, SF has done it before after all. The 1906 earthquake and fires demolished this city.
It took innovation and a lot of work to bring it back. And that’s what's needed again today.
PART III: LOUISIANA
HALLE: So far, you’ve heard two stories about physical infrastructure. Septic systems in Virginia and San Francisco’s entire waterfront. But there’s even more to it… sea level rise threatens people’s heritage, their identity.
So we’re gonna end this sea level rise tour on the Gulf Coast. In a Louisiana community that is steadily sinking into the rising sea.
That’s coming up.
BREAK
I drove south of New Orleans for an hour and a half to see a place where land and marsh are now open water.
DEVON: We used to have much more land down here in Louisiana. Forested wetlands. You used to be able to drive a horse and buggy over to a barrier island. Now you obviously cannot. There's a whole bunch of water in the way.
Devon Parfait leads a tribe called the Dulac Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw. They call themselves the Dulac for short, and that’s the name of their community too. About half the people who live here identify as Native.
It’s about 10 miles from The Gulf, which is already rising at one of the fastest rates in the world. By the end of the century, the water could be up to 9. Feet. Higher. As the area loses land to the sea, Dulac will have little to no buffer against hurricanes. and floodwaters.
Devon is threading an impossibly small needle: he’s searching for a way to keep his tribe safe without losing their connection to the land. And… their connection to each other.
<<ambi - birds chirping, outside cemetery>>
HALLE: So we're walking up to the cemetery.
DEVON: So we are. You can see how unkept it is because you're seeing you're seeing it's very overgrown.
We stand next to one of the tribe’s cemeteries. Look to your left and you see the bayou. To the right is marsh, just beyond the treeline. Multiple generations are buried here in large stone vaults above ground. The coffins are engulfed in high grass. The tribe doesn’t own the cemetery, hence the weeds. But the grass is just the start of the problem.
DEVON: This spot right here with the empty space. One of our tribal members used to be buried here, but they're no longer there because they floated away during a storm. Now, we were able to recover most of the coffins and put them back, but we're never able, we're never able to find this one. And so she may be out in the marsh somewhere, but she was never recovered.
DEVON: You come here to pay your respects, and to visit your family member. But when your family member physically isn't here, it's hard to do that.
This runaway coffin represents an acute example of what living with more flooding is like so close to the Gulf of Mexico.
Over the next 50 years, the land will continue to disappear until Dulac is reduced to a sliver. So the community is facing a big question: stay or go?
But Devon rejects this binary. His solution is to do both.
DEVON: Our ideal would be to have a community to resettle to someplace that's further up north, but also keeping our community here and rebuilding it to be as resilient as possible to work with the water // and to be able to adapt to our changing climate.
Here’s a few things you should know about Devon and his tribe.
The Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw didn’t choose to live in such a risky area. They were forced here – by decades of racist government policies. A lot of the tribe’s history has been lost through colonization, but Devon’s tribe believes they were originally formed when the U.S. government pushed a few groups onto land together.
DEVON: Even back then, what people had considered unlivable lands.
One tribe was marched from the east on the Trail of Tears then migrated south where it met others. The groups were forced farther and farther south, down Louisiana’s bayous to the edge of the Gulf.
So the Dulac spent generations learning to live with water. They adapted. That’s what Devon was born into. But it didn’t last for him.
DEVON: My story is a story of displacement.
In 2005, when Devon was a kid, Hurricane Rita flooded more than 10,000 homes in Louisiana, including his own.
DEVON: Whenever I ended up going back home, I remember walking through the house with the mask on and everything was just caked in mold.
And there was one thing that stuck in his mind.
DEVON: I still remember to this day is going to my room and seeing my collection of zoo books. It was these magazines that you could order and get in the mail, and they had different animals and cool pictures and illustrations, and all of that was moldy when we came back. A lot of what we had at the house, we had to leave behind.
After the storm, his family moved three times before settling outside of New Orleans. In fact, Devon, along with his parents and grandparents, still live there. An hour and a half drive from his tribal home.
And despite all that… he still managed to become chief. At a really young age.
Here’s how it happened. Devon says as a kid he would visit his tribe in Dulac. And he found himself in long conversations with their chief at the time.
DEVON: I was always bouncing, it was hard for me to focus as a kid, but when I was talking to Chief Shirell about the tribe, at least the way my mom describes it, I was laser focused, always intent on listening and understanding.
One of those conversations lasted for hours. Devon was 12 at the time, and asking one question after the other. Finally, he asked a key question: How could I help?
DEVON: And she describes that in that moment, she felt like the ancestors were with her and that she thought that I could be the next chief, that I was this young man who came to her and just wanted to be in service of the community.
He wasn’t even a teenager, and his tribe named him future chief. Two years ago, he finally took on that role. At 26, he’s now the chief, and his life embodies this struggle between staying and leaving — and how it is possible do both. I mean, he’s a chief who does not live in his community.
Sea level rise isn’t the only factor shaping the Dulac’s future. They’re dealing with other big issues.
DEVON: If you look out all right here, it almost looks like we're in a third world country.
Devon and I head to a new housing development in the community.
DEVON: If you look out all right here, it almost looks like we're in a third world country. There are dilapidated houses, some houses that have never been repaired because of a hurricane, abandoned houses
We drive by shotgun homes and trailers, some raised in the air, others close to the ground. A few houses have blue tarps on their roofs - a classic sign of storm damage. Abandoned shrimp boats tilt in the bayou. Most of the tribe lives on the poverty line.
But then, Devon takes a right turn off the main road. It leads to a newer neighborhood, secluded from the rest of the Dulac. We go through an open gate -- and we pass a sign that says… “…Southern Comfort, Catch a little heaven.”
HALLE: I don't think I've ever seen a gated community on the bayou. DEVON: No. This is not something typical.
We drive by dozens of new, expensive houses. All lifted high off the ground. Most with a fancy-looking dock extending into a canal. There's a rainbow of colorful, pristine roofs. When I was back in New Orleans, I went online to a real estate site, and saw that this community is sold as, quote, “paradise” to buyers.
DEVON: One of our tribal members used to own all of this land. And at one point she had a home that was impacted by a hurricane. And she had a choice to make. She either had to incur a whole bunch of fines because her home was not up to code, or she could sell her home to some property developers who were looking to buy the land for pennies on a dollar.
Without money to rebuild to code, she had to sell. This was land that had been owned by one family for generations. Now it’s carved up into pieces and sold off to the highest bidders. Devon feels like money is flowing in the wrong direction.
DEVON: We're basically out on our own. // It just sucks to see so much wealth concentrated in such a small area, when there are community members who need places to live, and have been living on this coast for generations.
Devon says if his tribe had money, they could stay in place, build resilient homes and be protected like Southern Comfort is — at least for a while.
But… there’s no big private investor swooping in. The tribe can’t access federal money because they’re not recognized as a tribe by the federal government. And the state of Louisiana isn’t sending money their way either. A quarter of the tribe has already left.
DEVON: At this point, we're tired of it. We're tired of having to move.
Devon wants to preserve as much of his tribe and its culture as he can. And he wants to give his community something they’ve been stripped of in the past: a choice. The choice to stay where they are, or if they have to be displaced then to at least somehow stay connected.
DEVON: When I was smaller back in the day, houses used to be a lot closer. I lived in almost like a conglomeration of houses together. We had like a little community, but now that doesn't exist anymore.
There's this climate change term – created by engineers – called "managed retreat." It’s kind of what it sounds like: the idea is to strategically relocate entire communities away from the coast before the sea swallows them up.
In theory, “managed retreat” is what Dulac needs to do. And they are willing to resettle. But, Devon says that phrase is loaded.
DEVON: That's a red flag word for community leaders. Because, what does it mean? You know, managed by who?
Given the Dulac’s history of forced relocation, Devon says, if the tribe has to move again, they want to manage that move themselves. A community-driven relocation, as he calls it.
That could mean all kinds of things. Like including bus trips to get people back down here regularly for a day of fishing. Or receiving money to fortify the marsh so that there is still land here to return to.
DEVON: It's not about retreating or running away. It's about standing our ground and making sure that our communities are as protected as possible, as well as preserving that culture and that knowledge that has been built up over generations that we don't want to lose.
Devon wants people to be able to stay in Dulac as long as they choose to - and as long as they can. So he’s trying to provide some very basic infrastructure to protect them from storms. They’ve started work on a new community center, elevated of course. It’ll be a multipurpose space: maybe classes and events, but also a command center for hurricane recovery.
He’s also working with Purdue University to get federal funding for a community disaster shelter. A place for people stay after the storm passes but when homes are still unlivable.
DEVON: There needs to be a place here. Down the bayou where people can go and be protected from these hurricanes.
So that's two buildings Devon’s asking for. Those are the resources the tribe needs for people who don’t want to move. Two buildings. It’s not a lot.. But it’s been a huge challenge for Devon. He spends a lot of time – reaching out to universities, other tribes, anyone who will listen, … trying to funnel money and attention down to the Gulf Coast.
Each time we talk, I’m reminded how much Devon is juggling at such a young age. Remember, he’s 26 years old. In just over two decades, he’s watched the world change dramatically. And, despite all his confidence and energy, he knows he’s leading his tribe into an incredibly uncertain future.
DEVON: I think thats the big question I'm grappling now is, what's it all for? What are we working towards? // There is a lot of energy in the country, either way you look at it, to try and fight for a better future. I think right now we're all a little confused to what that future looks like.
His question is a big one: What are we working towards? Our coasts will look drastically different in 100 years. Change and loss is inevitable, but people experiencing that loss, people like Devon, need to able to shape what comes next.
CREDITS
HALLE: Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This episode was hosted and co-reported by me, Halle Parker. It was reported in collaboration between Ezra David Romero of KQED and Katherine Hafner of WHRO. A big thank you to both of their stations for partnering with us. Carlyle Calhoun is the managing producer of Sea Change. The episode was edited by Jack Rodolico with help from Carlyle and Eve Abrams. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. And our theme music is by Jon Batiste.For more information about sea level rise, check out our show notes or go to our website, wwno.org slash podcast slash sea dash change. You can find more Sea Change episodes wherever you get your podcasts, from Apple Podcasts to Spotify. If you want to support us, share this episode with a friend and remember to subscribe.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
We’ll be back in two weeks.
