Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
In southernmost Louisiana, the known world ends. Here where the cypress trees loom like apparitions half-submerged in swampland and the Mississippi River empties itself into the Gulf of Mexico, the water devours the land. Entire roads disappear for seasons at a time, peninsulas become islands, the whole of the coast slowly sinking. Cartography, the language of place, becomes ineffectual, because cartography requires stillness, and every inch of southern Louisiana is moving, thrashing against the rising saltwater. Drowning.
Toward the end of my decade-long career as a journalist for a Canadian newspaper, I travelled to Louisiana in the fall of 2014 to write about what is likely the worst ongoing climate disaster in America. For months, I’d been pleading with my editor to let me...