Louisiana Loses Its Boot

LINK to article

It's a long read, but a good one. They did take some liberties in their portrayal, and I don't necessarily agree with all of their points. But I still think it's important to bring awareness of what is happening to our state.

Here are some excerpts and a couple of pictures:

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The boot-shaped state isn’t shaped like a boot anymore. That’s why we revised its iconic outline to reflect the truth about a sinking, disappearing place.

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What would the map look like if wetlands appeared as water and only solid, “walkable” ground appeared as 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:

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On our map, the real map, the boot appears as if it came out on the wrong side of a battle with a lawnmower’s blades. It loses a painful chunk off its heel in Cameron and Vermilion parishes. A gash cutting off the bird’s-foot delta, where the Mississippi empties into the Gulf of Mexico, from the center of the state is reason to consider amputation. Barataria Bay has joined forces with Bay Dosgris to take over Lake Salvador. Golden Meadow, Galliano, Montegut: They’re barely there, clinging to strands of earth as flimsy as dental floss. Lakes Maurepas, Pontchartrain, and Borgne form a contiguous mass flowing into the gulf.

Some people might criticize us for taking out the wetlands entirely, and there are places that do exist in real life—like Isle de Jean Charles—that aren’t on our boot (although they are visible, if barely, on the map we used to create the boot). Maps are approximate, as this story has made clear, even the big ones with lots of detail; symbols like the boot are even more so. Where ours errs, at least it errs on the side of the truth.

So, stop and compare the existing boot with ours. The two images are so significantly different that anyone who encountered the new map would have to squint and ask, What is going on here? Answer: a lot.

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There are also some cool maps of the Mississippi River paths over the years in the article. Here is one of them: