What is it like to lose your front porch to the ocean? To watch
saltwater destroy your favorite fishing holes? To see playgrounds
and churches subside and succumb to brackish and rising water? The
residents of coastal Louisiana know. For them hurricanes are but
exclamation points in an incessant loss of coastal land now
estimated to occur at a rate of at least twenty-four square miles
per year.
In "Losing Ground," coastal Louisianans communicate the
significance of place and environment. During interviews taken just
before the 2005 hurricanes, they send out a plea to alleviate the
damage. They speak with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of
losing not just property and familiar surroundings, but their
identity as well.
People along Louisiana's southeastern coast hold a deep
attachment to place, and this shows in the urgency of the
narratives David M. Burley collects here. The meanings that
residents attribute to coastal land loss reflect a tenuous and
uprooted sense of self. The process of coastal land loss and all of
its social components, from the familial to the political, impacts
these residents' concepts of history and the future. Burley updates
many of his subjects' narratives to reveal what has happened in the
wake of the back-to-back disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita.
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