Louisiana’s Coast Is Sinking - Business Insider
▻https://medium.com/matter/louisiana-loses-its-boot-b55b3bd52d1e
It’s becoming harder and harder to communicate the most urgent crisis facing Louisiana.
According to the U.S.G.S., the state lost just under 1,900 square miles of land between 1932 and 2000. This is the rough equivalent of the entire state of Delaware dropping into the Gulf of Mexico
In Southeast Louisiana, the theory you often hear is that the best way to keep sinking land from disappearing is to make it economically indispensable. Significant barriers — bureaucratic, political, and economic — make any “official” alterations of the boot appear as difficult as actually restoring the land.
Believing a truer image of the state could be powerful enough to overcome those obstacles, Matter pushed forward with creating our own alternative boot. Andrea Galinski, a coastal resources scientist with the C.P.R.A., provided us with a map that answered this question.
We started with a map of Louisiana that includes non-walkable and non-inhabitable land.
Using publicly available data, Galinski created a map on which areas that commonly appear as land on government issued maps—woody wetlands, emergent herbaceous wetlands, and barren land — were re-categorized to appear as water:
From that map, we created a boot whose southern borders are drawn where terra firma meets water:
Compare the existing boot with ours:
