Isle de Jean Charles – America’s first climate refugees to evacuate
America’s first climate change refugees are preparing to leave an island that will disappear under the sea in the next few years, Business Insider David Usborne, The Independent, 1 April 18
- In March, Louisiana state officials announced that everyone living on Isle de Jean Charles will have to leave.
- Where there were 22,000 acres in 1955 there are only 320 acres today.
- They are one hurricane away from obliteration.
- The evacuation is a test-run for countless coastal communities in Louisiana, who must all move as the seas take over the land.
- ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, Louisiana — America comes to an end here. Connected to the marshes and moss-laced bayous of southern Louisiana by two miles of narrow causeway, waters lapping high on each side, Isle de Jean Charles takes you as far into the Gulf of Mexico as you can go without falling in. But the dolour in the salt air is not just about loneliness and separation. It’s about impending demise.
Don’t call it a death sentence – the intention is the opposite – but state officials in late March made the announcement that had been a long time coming. Some on the island, nearly all members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indian tribe, met it with relief; others with hostility.
Marking the kick-off of what will be the first climate resettlement of its kind in the entire United States, land had been chosen an hour’s drive to the north for a whole new town to be thrown up. No one will force them exactly, but the intention is clear: to evacuate those still living on the island to the new site, where at present nothing but sugar cane stands, before it is too late.
When that will be depends on whom you ask. But no one disputes that the island is sinking, thanks to a combination of subsidence and rising sea levels.
…… The vanishing of Isle de Jean Charles into the waves of the gulf might take another decade or even five. On the other hand, one more big storm could finally end its viability for human occupation for good, flooding homes beyond repair or cutting through the connecting road.
- …….“It’s really a test run,” Mr Forbes, executive director of the Louisiana Office of Community Development,concedes in an interview from his Baton Rouge office. While Americans may have been displaced by environmental change before, notably in Alaska, no single community has been relocated lock, stock and barrel like this. “We are trying to keep the community intact and ensure that it’s economically and socially vibrant and viable. To our knowledge, it’s unique. There are places around the world who are looking at a similar type of thing but nobody in the US has done this.”Which makes residents on Isle de Jean Charles canaries in the mineshaft……..http://www.businessinsider.com/isle-de-jean-charles-climate-change-refugees-2018-4/?r=AU&IR=T
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April 2, 2018 -
Posted by Christina Macpherson |
climate change, USA
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America’s first climate change refugees are preparing to leave an island that will disappear under the sea in the next few years, Business Insider David Usborne, The Independent, 1 April 18 
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