04/29/2017

"I interviewed Dawn DeDeaux in 2016. The exhibit at MassMOCA she describes here is about to open. The signs of the climate crisis that propels her art are becoming more apparent. Sea level rise on the east coast is producing sunny day, tidal flooding in cities from Miami to Boston.

The great south Louisiana floods of August 2016 were the product of warming water in the Gulf of Mexico and warming air temperatures which fed each other in a vicious cycle for about 72 hours that flooded tens of thousands of homes and businesses, only some of which have recovered from that impact. Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico this year are already high.

The artist Dawn DeDeaux on the Island Road in Terrebonne Parish, 2016.
DeDeaux's art is informed by an observation from Steven Hawking that he believed humans had about 100 years left to figure out how to prevent the climate here from becoming hostile to our survival.

DeDeaux's Mothership series is about leaving here, destination unknown.

The Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum has a current set of exhibits that loosely and directly provide a perspective of art created in the wake of disasters. A recent panel discussion there in connection with those exhibits focused on how disasters displace people and how the impact of those displacements found expression in the art of the affected people. DeDeaux says her art was changed by the post Katrina flooding of New Orleans. Her art since then could be characterized as art in the face of the disaster that is coming.

Climate change is what would drive us out. A recent article published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies captured in a single phrase the nature of climate change and the reason why it is so hard to mobilize communities, states, nations to address it.

That term is ""creeping catastrophe.""

It is the slow, steady, relentless nature of climate change that makes it so difficult for us to address. It tends to fade into the background of the daily drama of news reports that focus on attacks, wars, shootings, political crisis, etc., that erupt onto our screens in a flash, then fade or are pushed into the background by some newer, more urgent crisis.

Meanwhile, in the background, temperatures are rising. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Land is sinking. Daily. 24/7/365. While your awake and while you sleep.

The Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority recently approved the 2017 version of its Coastal Master Plan. The purpose of the plan is to serve as a blue print for saving south Louisiana from the impact of the creeping catastrophe of climate change — the very thing inspiring DeDeaux's work. Yet, in public testimony over the past two weeks, CPRA leaders have been very frank about not having the money to pay for even the low-ball estimated cost of the plan which is officially $50 billion over the next 50 years.

That is the same price tag attached to the 2012 plan, which Mark Davis of the Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy says was low by about $40 billion then. Davis says that between the lack of funding and the costs not included in the plan, Louisiana is about $70 billion short to accomplish the task that was at hand then. Things have changed so rapidly since 2012 that the best case scenario in the 2012 Master Plan is considered the worst case scenario in the 2017 version.

Johnny Bradberry who runs the CPRA told legislators that the state can only count on about $19 billion to implement the plan. Other sources are not known at this time, although there is some hope that the federal government might help with the effort. The Edwards administration is joining Coastal Zone parishes in law suits to bring the oil and gas industry to the table to pay for their contribution to the destruction of our wetlands — something state political leaders have acknowledged as fact for at least 40 years.

The prospects of Louisiana developing the discipline and commitment to meet the threat that most of our business and political class still deny exists are not good. After all, we're still building houses on at-grad slabs in what everyone knows are flood plains here (the August 2016 floods rendered the FEMA flood plain maps irrelevant).

Failing that, a lot of people are going to have to move. At some point between now and then, the people who are going to have to move are going to recognize the true cost of climate change denial, of refusing to hold the oil and gas industry accountable for their damage to our wetlands, of basing our economic development strategy over the past eight years on a game of climate change chicken by targeting greenhouse gas spewing industries.

But, unless there's a Mothership around, we're likely to be too busy packing and lamenting our fate to think about those issues.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserApril 29, 2017Comment

04/18/2017

How much is that Octopus in the parking garage?

The more important question is what will persistent exposure to tidal water do to the parking garage and the buildings around it. The octopus can probably fend for itself.

Albert Slap is a former law professor who co-founded Coastal Risk Consultants to help people understand the impact that climate change will have on where they live and work and how they live their lives.

While it is a business, it is also a compelling way to make the somewhat abstract concept of climate change very real to people who live in those areas that are likely to be affected. Slap's company is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida — just up US 1 from Miami Beach where the octopus tried its tentacles at valet parking.

In our discussion, Slap says cities on Florida's Atlantic coast have decided that they must act on their own in response to rising seas and tides where they are. Miami Beach is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise roads. New commercial construction along the shore are essentially waterproofing their bottom floors to enable them to continue operation in times of tidal flooding.

Slap's company uses laser measured elevation technology to map parcels down to nine square foot squares that give a level of accuracy and granularity far greater than available through FEMA floodplain maps. As Slap explains, FEMA floodplain maps are inherently backward looking, they cannot project what might happen.

Using the laser elevation maps and connecting that data with the latest climate, sea level rise, and geographic data, Coastal Risk Consultants can provide home and business owners much more accurate climate risk assessments than are available through trying to wade through the information being produced primarily for national, state and regional uses.

""We don't have to agree on the sources of what is driving climate change in order to recognize that it is changing and that we must figure out how to respond,"" Slap says. ""We give people actionable information on what climate change will mean for them, their homes and their businesses.""

Slap believes that private insurers will look at getting involved in the flood insurance market, even though in some areas it is not a matter of risk so much as a matter of certainty.

In the current rollout of the CPRA's 2017 Coastal Master Plan, the most encouraging development has been the recent decision to convene community conversations about climate change impact in those parishes in Louisiana that will be most affected by it. Getting those discussions down from the abstract — ""the coast"" — to the specific — your parish, your town, your street — could be the way to break the paralysis that is a byproduct of the ideological war over whether climate change is, in fact, real.

Climate change is real. It's here now. Reality is not particularly interested in whether you believe it or not.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserApril 18, 2017Comment

04/11/2017

"Harold Schoeffler is a Louisiana treasure. He has more first-hand knowledge of the Atchafalaya Basin, the river that feeds it and the coast than any other single person around today.

He has skillfully used the courts to enforce laws and change Louisiana for the better on issues ranging from shell dredging (as it scraping away protective barrier islands to be used for driveways) to protecting the Black Bear.

Schoeffler continues to be a force to be reckoned with on environmental issues in Louisiana based on his instinctual sense of right and wrong which he has used time and again to convince lawyers of the righteousness of his causes who have in turn convinced judges of the righteousness of Harold’s convictions.

Schoeffler is old enough to remember the Basin before oil & gas and flood control pushed the natural characteristics of America’s last great swamp into the background to serve what were argued to be higher interests. He remembers catching tarpon in the Basin above Morgan City. He understands that slow moving, meandering bayous are orders of magnitude better for protecting our wetlands than are box-type canals favored by oil and gas interests.

All of this has been discounted by ‘experts’ in industry who have come to own our state government.

Yet, as we have come to know early in the 21st Century, the Basin is the driver of our ecological wellbeing in south central Louisiana, just as surely as the coast itself is the driver of Louisiana’s wellbeing from Texas to Mississippi.

He has heard the fancy language and seen the pretty pictures painted by those who have no interest other than exploiting the Basin and the coast, no matter the cost. He’s gone through his life with his eyes wide open. He’s seen water quality projects used to wreck bayous and streams. He’s seen hazardous waste dumped in ditches by companies who hid behind the law to justify it. He’s watched as state government leaders have pushed restoration plans that will primarily benefit contractors while turning the Basin and the coast into artificial remnants of their greater selves.

Harold Schoeffler knows that we have spent more than half a century destroying our wetlands and the Atchafalaya Basin in a quest to save it. He knows that time is running out; that the forces that we have unleashed endanger the Basin now as never before.

With three successive governors having the state to spending $50 billion to try to preserve some of our coast, Harold Schoeffler wants those planning the effort to look a little closer at how we got here. Maybe, he figures, if they did that, they wouldn’t make things worse while they try to make things better.

Harold Schoeffler on the Atchafalaya Basin and the bogus process that wants to give Lafayette what it does not want – an elevated roadway through the heart of the city.

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Thanks to Matt Roberts, AOC's Community Production Manager for help locating the music used in this segment.

Guest UserApril 11, 2017Comment