No Place Like Home

How We Survive

Marketplace

Business, News

5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You’ve raised your house up on stilts and your town has added higher seawalls and pumping stations, but sea level rise is relentless. Eventually, you may have to consider the ultimate solution: Leaving your home, giving the land back to nature and starting over somewhere else. There’s a jargony sounding name for this solution: Managed Retreat.

In our season finale, we head to a small island community off the coast of Louisiana that has lost 98% of its land to rising seas and sinking land. Now residents have to decide if they’re ready to leave the place most have called home their whole lives, or be swallowed up with it. Later in the episode, we unpack what managed retreat might mean for the rest of us, even those of us who don’t think we’re at any risk.

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, so we're about to turn off on Island Road. About two hours drive south of New Orleans in the Mississippi River Delta, there's an island.
0:10.0	Eel de Jean Charles. On the map, it looks like we're driving on water because it's so skinny.
0:16.1	My producer, Haley and I are driving down the only road that connects the island to the rest of Louisiana.
0:23.2	And if you look on the map, it's just,
0:26.7	you know, little specks of land, but mostly blue.
0:30.2	It's the end of July.
0:31.9	Wow, this is so pretty.
0:33.0	And it's beautiful out here.
0:35.0	Tall grass, trees.
0:38.0	So lush.
0:39.0	Marshy grassland,
0:41.0	surrounded by blue water and sky for miles. But as we enter the
0:46.4	island there's also something a bit unsettling about the place. A lot of the
0:51.5	homes look abandoned and beat up from storm damage. There's a sense of
0:56.4	isolation like everyone who used to be here just disappeared. We pass a
1:02.3	dilapidated building with a sign out front for the
1:05.4	Il de Jean Charles Social Club. On first glance, it looks deserted. Oh, is that
1:10.8	somebody? Yeah, should we get out and try to talk to him?
1:14.0	Maybe, yeah.
1:16.0	I can't see anybody. He walked away.
1:18.0	He disappeared.
1:20.0	It's too bad because it's such a cute little place. I want to learn about it.
	...

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