This is a BBC podcast.

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at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. Hello I'm James Fletcher and I'm on the southern coast of Louisiana.

The wetlands here are eroding, vanishing at what some say is the fastest rate of any place on earth.

Communities are disappearing and the unique culture of the people who live here is under threat. For assignment this week I've come to an area called Bayou Lafouche to explore that

culture and to get to know one community facing the reality of losing their

past and their future. Oh you my man let's just get some fish pretty much we just gonna hook you up with a

shrimp a live shrimp underneath a cork cast it out there pop it every 30 seconds to a minute until it goes under.

You make it sound so simple?

Yeah, I've had a lot of practice.

Kyle Pleasant grew up on Bayou Lafouche.

Bayou is what the locals call the slow moving waterways

of the Mississippi Delta, where America's greatest river finally flows into the sea in the

Gulf of Mexico. And if you grow up in a place like Bailofush, you grow up fishing.

There you go. Real, real, real. There you go.

Bring them in the boat. You swing them in.

Nice job.

That's a nice job, man.

It's an idyllic way to spend an afternoon.

Fishing in the sunshine and motoring through waterways

fringed by dense, low marsh grass and mangroves

which seem to stretch all the way to the horizon.

...