My senior project at UCLA was on sea level rise in Southern Louisiana. It’s a particularly susceptible region with daunting figures and future projections. At its peak, Southern Louisiana was losing a football field’s worth of coastal wetlands every 17 minutes due to sea level rise. These traditionally act as a natural shock absorber from incoming hurricanes, and this, combined with generally higher water levels spells out danger for the inhabitants.
I did a lot of research on this small, lost pocket of the US. But I think science does a great disservice to humanity by seeing data rather than people. So I swung through Southern Louisiana on my road-trip through the South last year a few days after Hurricane Delta obliterated the small town Cameron, and it’s neighboring city Lake Charles. I met so many characters, from these first pictured migrant workers from Guatemala, to the police officer that let me camp in his driveway, to Red, a drunk fisherman who lives on a fishing boat. When I asked him about what he did when the hurricane hit, he laughed and said “I finished the bottle, laid on the ground, and cried for my momma. But then after I walked over to where the Dollar General used to be and found a whole bunch of goodies!”
Thus follows some of my photographs from the three days in region.
