Living in a Doomed Paradise Where the Sea Consumes Cottages, Cliffs, and the A&W Drive-Thru

The Magdalen Islands are at the heart of climate change. As the shoreline drops into the sea, the advice is to retreat, but Taras Grescoe discovers stubbornness amongst the islanders.

“The joke we tell around here,” says Serge Bourgeois, the planning director for the municipality of the Magdalen Islands, “is that if we keep on retreating from the coast, pretty soon we’ll fall off the other edge into the sea.”