Last year, Isle de Jean Charles became the first U.S. town to get government money to move because of global warming. Eighteen months later, what started as a model in a small coastal Louisiana village has become a warning, Bloomberg reports.
Even as the federal government rewrites climate policy, the greatest challenge to the project may nonetheless be the people it’s meant to help. A few dozen residents had gathered Saturday in the home of The Rev. Roch Naquin, who lives in Isle de Jean Charles, a town slipping into the sea and the site of a radical federal policy experiment. They were there to hear state officials describe three locations for the new community, and to choose their favorite.
“Open our hearts and our minds—to hear, to understand and to respond,” Naquin prayed at the start of the meeting. It took about 30 minutes for the shouting to start.
“Why is it going to take so long to buy the land?” demanded one woman. “Will you pull the money?” asked another. “Crooks!” one man said, to nobody in particular.
Former President Barack Obama’s administration awarded Louisiana $48 million to move fewer than 40 families, most of them members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe, The state says it wants to generate “a radical rethinking of the nation’s coastal land use and development patterns.”
But President Donald Trump has begun reversing Obama’s efforts to curb emissions, including leaving the Paris climate accord. His administration has told agencies to stop factoring climate change into decisions and targeted a program to help Indian tribes adapt to extreme weather.
Those shifts reflect the administration’s refusal to acknowledge scientific consensus. Trump’s head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, told coal executives last week that he would start a “red team-blue team” exercise to challenge the very notion that greenhouse gases are warming the planet.
Trump’s actions are likely to increase pressure on coastal communities to consider whether, and how, to pull back from the water.
“This is the fate of cities throughout the U.S., as well as the world, and we’ve got to figure it out,” says Robin Bronen, a University of Alaska researcher who has worked with native communities seeking similar government-funded relocations.
