Through a wide range of demographic, economic, social, and environmental data, A Louisiana Coastal Atlas shows cartographically how the inherent resilience of coastal communities manifests itself over time. By illustrating the adaptability of residents to their environment and economy, this resource shows how historical processes can inform planners to more effectively respond to and recover form future ecological events.
This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book takes an in-depth look at Louisiana as a state which is ahead of the curve in terms of extreme weather events, both in frequency and magnitude, and in its responses to these challenges including recovery and enhancement of resiliency. Louisiana faced a major tropical catastrophe in the 21st century, and experiences the fastest rising sea level. Weather specialists, including those concentrating on sea level rise acknowledge that what the state of Louisiana experiences is likely to happen to many more, and not necessarily restricted to coastal states. This book asks and attempts to answer what Louisiana public officials, scientists/engineers, and those from outside of the state who have been called in to help, have done to achieve resilient recovery. How well have these efforts fared to achieve their goals? What might these efforts offer as lessons for those states that will be likely to experience enhanced extreme weather? Can the challenges of inequality be truly addressed in recovery and resilience? How can the study of the Louisiana response as a case be blended with findings from later disasters such as New York/New Jersey (Hurricane Sandy) and more recent ones to improve understanding as well as best adaptation applications – federal, state and local?
In French on Shifting Ground: Cultural and Coastal Erosion in South Louisiana, Nathalie Dajko introduces readers to the lower Lafourche Basin, Louisiana, where the land, a language, and a way of life are at risk due to climate change, environmental disaster, and coastal erosion. Louisiana French is endangered all around the state, but in the lower Lafourche Basin the shift to English is accompanied by the equally rapid disappearance of the land on which its speakers live. French on Shifting Ground allows both scholars and the general public to get an overview of how rich and diverse the French language in Louisiana is, and serves as a key reminder that Louisiana serves as a prime repository for Native and heritage languages, ranking among the strongest preservation regions in the southern and eastern US. Nathalie Dajko outlines the development of French in the region, highlighting the features that make it unique in the world and including the first published comparison of the way it is spoken by the local American Indian and Cajun populations. She then weaves together evidence from multiple lines of linguistic research, years of extensive participant observation, and personal narratives from the residents themselves to illustrate the ways in which language—in this case French—is as fundamental to the creation of place as is the physical landscape. It is a story at once scholarly and personal: the loss of the land and the concomitant loss of the language have implications for the academic community as well as for the people whose cultures—and identities—are literally at stake.
Alan Lomax's prolific sixty-four-year career as a folklorist and musicologist began with a trip across the South and into the heart of Louisiana's Cajun country during the height of the Great Depression. In 1934, his father John, then curator of the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Song, took an eighteen-year-old Alan and a 300-pound aluminum disk recorder into the rice fields of Jennings, along the waterways of New Iberia, and behind the gates of Angola State Penitentiary to collect vestiges of African American and Acadian musical tradition. These recordings now serve as the foundational document of indigenous Louisiana music. Although widely recognized by scholars as a key artifact in the understanding of American vernacular music, most of the recordings by John and Alan Lomax during their expedition across the central-southern fringe of Louisiana were never transcribed or translated, much less studied in depth. This volume presents, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of the 1934 corpus and unveils a multifaceted story of traditional song in one of the country's most culturally dynamic regions. Through his textual and comparative study of the songs contained in the Lomax collection, Joshua Clegg Caffery provides a musical history of Louisiana that extends beyond Cajun music and zydeco to the rural blues, Irish and English folk songs, play-party songs, slave spirituals, and traditional French folk songs that thrived at the time of these recordings. Intimate in its presentation of Louisiana folklife and broad in its historical scope, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana honors the legacy of John and Alan Lomax by retrieving these musical relics from obscurity and ensuring their understanding and appreciation for generations to come. Includes: Complete transcriptions of the 1934 Lomax field recordings in southwestern Louisiana Side-by-side translations from French to English Photographs from the 1934 field trip and biographical details about the performers
State of Disaster: A Historical Geography of Louisiana’s Land Loss Crisis explores Louisiana’s protracted efforts to restore and protect its coastal marshes, nearly always with minimal regard for the people displaced by those efforts. As Craig E. Colten shows, the state’s coastal restoration plan seeks to protect cities and industry but sacrifices the coastal dwellers who have maintained their presence in this perilous place for centuries. This historical geography examines in turn the adaptive capacity of those living through repeated waves of calamity; the numerous disjointed environmental management regimes that contributed to the current crisis; the cartographic visualizations of land loss used to activate public coastal policy; and the phases of public input that nevertheless failed to give voice to the citizens most impacted by various environmental management strategies. In closing, Colten situates Louisiana’s experience within broader discussions of climate change and recovery from repeated crises.
Winner of the 2018 Louisiana Literary Award given by the Louisiana Library Association For centuries, outlanders have openly denigrated Louisiana's coastal wetlands residents and their stubborn refusal to abandon the region's fragile prairies tremblants despite repeated natural and, more recently, man-made disasters. Yet, the cumulative environmental knowledge these wetlands survivors have gained through painful experiences over the course of two centuries holds invaluable keys to the successful adaptation of modern coastal communities throughout the globe. As Hurricane Sandy recently demonstrated, coastal peoples everywhere face rising sea levels, disastrous coastal erosion, and, inevitably, difficult lifestyle choices. Along the Bayou State's coast the most insidious challenges are man-made. Since channelization of the Mississippi River in the wake of the 1927 flood, which diverted sediments and nutrients from the wetlands, coastal Louisiana has lost to erosion, subsidence, and rising sea levels a land mass roughly twice the size of Connecticut. State and national policymakers were unable to reverse this environmental catastrophe until Hurricane Katrina focused a harsh spotlight on the human consequences of eight decades of neglect. Yet, even today, the welfare of Louisiana's coastal plain residents remains, at best, an afterthought in state and national policy discussions. For coastal families, the Gulf water lapping at the doorstep makes this morass by no means a scholarly debate over abstract problems. Ain't There No More renders an easily read history filled with new insights and possibilities. Rare, previously unpublished images documenting a disappearing way of life accompany the narrative. The authors bring nearly a century of combined experience to distilling research and telling this story in a way invaluable to Louisianans, to policymakers, and to all those concerned with rising sea levels and seeking a long-term solution.
Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone is an ethnography of the lived experience of rapid environmental change in coastal Louisiana, USA. Writing from a political ecology perspective, Maldonado explores the effects of changes to localized climate and ecology on the Isle de Jean Charles, Grand Caillou/Dulac, and Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribes. Focusing in particular on wide-ranging displacement effects, she argues that changes to climate and ecology should not be viewed in isolation as only physical processes but as part of wider socio-political and historical contexts. The book is valuable reading for students and scholars in the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies and disaster studies as well as public policy and planning.
