Losing Ground: Identity and Land Loss in Coastal Louisiana

6. Saving Place: Residents and Their Environment

110 6 sAvingPLACe Residents and Their Environment Why should alleviating Louisiana’s coastal residents’ anxiety and fragility be a concern or goal? This might sound like a rhetorical question except for the fact that many would proclaim that this anxiety and sense of fragility is an unfortunate outcome of any significant change. Their refrain would be “change is hard,” and they would liken the stress to growing pains that will recede as people and society adjust and account for these changes. In her eloquent foreword, Sara Crosby referred to this in her fellow Grand Islanders’ reluctance to ask for assistance due to the retort “Why don’t you just move?” and all that that question implies about being a victim. Nonetheless, as we seek our reflection in increasing democratic principles, a first answer to this question seems to be a certain inalienable right to live with a modicum of trust in the capacity of the immediate environment to support a certain quality of life. Second, and more practically, but related to this expectation, coastal Louisianians’ anxiety and fragility leads to conflict with agencies charged with coastal restoration. Further, and an extension of this conflict, there is opposition to coastal restoration policies before they ever get to the implementation phase. The onset of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is unlikely to change this conflictual relationship. It may even exacerbate it. If disasters cause a heightened awareness of place attachment and 111 Saving Place: Residents and Their Environment these residents were already in a relatively heightened state of awareness, then Katrina and Rita gave credence to their raised levels of place possessiveness. Place and identity are viewed as further threatened by storms such as these, whose damage, they perceive, in part, as a result of the ongoing disaster of slow-onset coastal land loss. Some blame for the storms’ destruction has been laid at the feet of those agencies which coastal residents believe have taken little action to alleviate the loss of land. Thus, it is unlikely that they will blindly accept new or additional proposals from agencies they deem untrustworthy and threatening to their place attachment constructs. By no means does this suggest that residents are holding back the restoration of their ecosystem. On the contrary, their opposition is, at least in part, a result of the dismissal of their localized expert knowledge by the institutionalized expertise of scientific knowledge. A third answer to the above question is that alleviating residents’ anxiety and fragility is coastal restoration . The people are part of the ecosystem and have been in an exchange relationship with that ecosystem for hundreds of years. Yet they feel cut off from the possible recovery of their home. Ironically, perhaps, residents may be treated as just another species in the ecosystem and consulted as much as would be the birds, fish, or flora species about the restoration process. Nonetheless , quelling the anxiety and fragility of residents is an integral part not just of Louisiana’s restoration but of similar small- and large-scale ecological restoration processes that will certainly take place in the future and that we are now faced with. Again, addressing the concerns of communities is part of restoration. The in-depth, active involvement of residents in coastal restoration I am proposing in this chapter appears more imperative now, in the post-Katrina era. However, since the process of coastal restoration is something residents feel is bureaucratized and authoritative, and this appears to be increasing in the post-Katrina era, then it seems that the only way that residents can gain meaningful involvement is to demand that they be inserted into the process. It is likely that without community involvement Louisiana’s coastal restoration is in grave danger because of its unsustainable nature due to bureaucracy and physical reliance on mechanized restoration, not to mention the lack of long-term political commitment. Furthermore, the degree of community involvement holds implications not only for academic and mere policy recommendations but for how we actually live in places and for what those places are like. 112 Saving Place: Residents and Their Environment alienaTion, aTTaChmenT, and reSToraTion Southeastern Louisiana’s coastal residents conveyed a damaged sense of self. They expressed a vulnerable identity, thus their anxiety and alienation. Residents ’ alienation stemmed from feeling “cut off” from the restoration process . Because residents felt distanced from a process that acted on an object with which they identified, their anxiety increased. The...