Sinking Louisiana

As the coast continues to wash away and people move north, to higher ground, traditions are being lost: gumbo recipes, traditional basket weaving, French songs and stories. Now the state is trying to do something to preserve them.

All month long, WWNO is teaming up with Louisiana Public Broadcasting to bring you a special series called Sinking Louisiana. This week, WWNO’s Tegan Wendland talks with Maida Owens, director of the Louisiana Folklife Program.

If you live in a city it’s easy to think of Louisiana’s coastal land loss problem as out-of-sight, out-of-mind. But every day the coast is creeping closer and closer to New Orleans, and as sea level rise, more extreme storms and a deteriorating coast bring more flooding, some city-dwellers are trying to adapt to the changes.

Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan is the state’s guide for restoring its disappearing coastline and defending cities from rising seas. It includes things like levees and rebuilding marshes. But how does the state decide where to build projects? How does it decide what kind of project to build? And how is climate change considered?

All month long, WWNO is teaming up with Louisiana Public Broadcasting to bring you a special series called Sinking Louisiana. This week, WWNO’s Travis Lux talks talks with Bren Haase, Executive Director of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA), about how the state makes big decisions that impact lots of people. They spoke at the CPRA headquarters in Baton Rouge.

We hear a lot about how the Louisiana coast is disappearing. The state has lost about 2,000 square miles of coastal marsh since the 1930s. One of the biggest reasons: subsidence. What is subsidence? Why does it happen and what can we do to stop it?