The vanishing island - Isle de Jean-Charles

The vanishing island - Isle de Jean-Charles

As part of my series about climate, I’ll address a small island off the coast of Louisiana. It was a flourishing island, just like any other, with crop fields, flora and fauna, a thriving population. Then the effects of global warming took the island and its inhabitants by storm. And, the result of decades of exploiting fossil fuels left the helpless inhabitants of the island with this:





This section of the Louisiana coast resembles a lace doily, with its narrow filigrees of marshland disappearing into the seawater. The state’s outline wasn’t always so frail and delicate, but its coastal threads are scattering as you read this blog post. The Bayou State loses approximately a football field’s worth of land caused by hydraulic erosion about every hour and a half. Since the year 1955, the Isle de Jean Charles, a section of island 80 miles southwest of New Orleans, has shrunk by 98 per cent, all because of mechanical weathering. A quarter-mile across by two miles long is all that’s left and the isle continues to slip into the Gulf of Mexico, making life for the inhabitants quite challenging. 

The majority of the residents belong to the Isle de Jean Charles (IDJC) Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. In the 1830s, the grimly titled Indian Removal Act forced American Indians to move west of the Mississippi, relocated the entire tribe into the isle from Louisiana’s mainland. At its prime, there were 300 families that called Isle de Jean Charles home, but only about 26 still remain.

Erosion with a mix of global warming and accelerated land subsidence caused by the fossil fuel industry is forcing them to leave once more.After years of imploring the state to migrate the tribe onto higher, drier land, the Louisiana Office of Community Development (OCD) won a grant in 2016 with $48 million reserved for the tribe’s resettlement. The people of Isle de Jean Charles are now Louisiana’s very first ‘climate refugees’, but the research proves that they will certainly not be the last.

The state’s climate forecast predicts sea levels rising between 1.41 and 2.72 feet by 2067, which would place more than 1.2 million people at risk of coastal flooding. The damage and frequency of hurricanes are also foreseen to grow drastically in the coming decades. 

This is all because of the effects of the exploitation of fossil fuels and the extensive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for a very long time. This island is one of many island sectors in many coastlines in the world that are suffering the same fate.

The rest of the world isn’t safe forever, and unless we work collectively towards making a change then climate change’s effects will unsuspectingly hit you harder than expected. 

Next article: Permafrost: Thawing in polar regions causes a devastating release of greenhouse gases.