How residents of a changing co astline reconcile sense of place with the
Gulf's encroachment What is it like to lose your front porch to the
ocean? To watch saltwater destroy your favorite fishing holes? To see
playgrounds and churches subside and succumb to brackish and rising
water? The residents of coastal Louisiana know. For them hurricanes are
but exclamation points in an incessant loss of coastal land now
estimated to occur at a rate of at least twenty-four square miles per
year. In Losing Ground, coastal Louisianans communicate the significance
of place and environment. During interviews taken just before the 2005
hurricanes, they send out a plea to alleviate the damage. They speak
with an urgency that exemplifies a fear of losing not just property and
familiar surroundings, but their identity as well. People along
Louisiana's southeastern coast hold a deep attachment to place, and this
shows in the urgency of the narratives David M. Burley collects here.
The meanings that residents attribute to coastal land loss reflect a
tenuous and uprooted sense of self. The process of coastal land loss and
all of its social components, from the familial to the political,
impacts these residents' concepts of history and the future. Burley
updates many of his subjects' narratives to reveal what has happened in
the wake of the back-to-back disasters of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
