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Republican politicians are much better at responding to environmental disasters than trying to prevent them
WHEN Roosevelt Falgout was a boy, the brackish water that now laps within a few feet of his three-room cabin at Isle de Jean Charles was miles off. "There were only trees all around, far as you could see," recalls the 81-year-old former oyster fisherman, at home on the Isle, a sliver of land in the vast marsh that covers much of southern Louisiana. He and his village's other men and boys, who are members of the French-speaking Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, used to hunt and trap muskrat and mink in those oak and hackberry forests.
But salty water, seeping northward from the Gulf of Mexico, killed the trees off long ago; just a few blackened stumps remain, protruding from the open water that now surrounds the Isle. With even a modest storm liable to flood the island and the narrow causeway that connects it to higher ground, the village has become almost uninhabitable. Mr Falgout's 81-year-old wife, Rita, says she lies awake at night worrying that her husband, who has cancer among other ailments, will have a medical emergency during a flood. "It's become too frightening here," she says of her ancestral home, sitting amid a clutter of family photographs, Native American beadwork and Catholic saints. The Isle's 60 residents are due to be resettled further inland, in a $48m programme approved by the state government last year, and Mrs Falgout says she cannot wait to go.
The briny intrusion that has put paid to the Choctaw village is devastating southern Louisiana. Between 1932 and 2010 the state lost more than 1,800 square miles (470,000 hectares) of land to the sea, representing about 80% of America's coastal erosion over the period. Recent losses have been especially severe because of an increase in big storms raging in from the Gulf of Mexico--such as Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, which led to the inundation of New Orleans and 1,836 deaths. Between 2004 and 2008 alone, Louisiana shrank by more than 300 square miles.
This is one of America's biggest environmental crises. Louisiana contains some of the world's most extensive wetlands, home to a fifth of North America's waterfowl. It is an economic and human...