A tense airboat chase opens this excellent feature from Carlyle Calhoun, with photos from James Collier, about how climate change is complicating public access to waterways in southern Louisiana. Sea-level rise is sending more and more privately owned land under water, at a rate too fast to accurately map. Oil and gas companies, fearful of losing access to mineral rights should their submerged lands become public property, have zealously fought to keep their grip on sunken land, making it increasingly difficult for people to enter their rising waters.
Daryl Carpenter is a quick-witted, blue-eyed fisherman with a background in law enforcement who until he retired this year ran a guiding service out of Grand Isle, Louisiana. In 2016, after a landowner complaint, he received a warning from the police that he’d be arrested if he was found on disputed water. Carpenter filed his own lawsuit and settled out of court with an oil company—receiving just enough, he says, for his pro bono lawyer to recoup costs. But the experience made him rethink a place sometimes called “America’s Wetlands.” Only around 20 percent belongs to the public. “The rest of it, quote unquote, belongs to somebody else,” he says. “If you don’t have his permission to be there, you may have some drunk pulling a gun on you or a Sheriff’s deputy kicking your door in. So is it America’s wetlands?”
More picks about land and access
The Desert Safety Net
“Every winter, tens of thousands of Americans migrate to public lands in the Arizona desert. For a growing number, it’s not a vacation—it’s the only housing they can afford.”
No Entry
“In America, whether we can swim — and whether we have access to water at all — is closely tied to race.”
Land Ownership Makes No Sense
“The earth is a shared inheritance, and profiting off a common resource is just wrong.”
