announcer: on this episode of "earth focus," lessons learned during hurricane katrina are being put to the test along the coast of louisiana. some predict new orleans willge be submerd by the end of this century. the region's survival depends on its ability to adapt to clihange. if successful, louisiana may errovide a blueprint for o around the world. around the world.

tucker: there were fa here. there were kids in the street playingootball, right? there were neighbors. this house was the candy lady. as kids, we would come down and spendur quarters and sit here on this porch and eat it and just enjoy the atmosphere of the community, right, andnt heat weway just overnight. it just got wasaway. [helicopter whirring] man: we are seeing scenes like this one throughout e city. lieberman: do you remember if you told them that the levees had broken? brown: i don't recallit specifically, buas that new orleans is flooding.

walters: no. sit. stocked over them plants on their porch lnight, huh? miss is some upset with you.th a couple of mago, we had a rain storm, just a ordinary rainstorm in southeast louisiana. it was one of thosdays that we thought, "hey, just a little rain," but low and behol the city flooded. the drainage system was tucker: we loved hurricanes as kids. i remember when the calm came, we would play the water. it was just another day off from school, right, but now it's terrifying. it's terrifying.

walters: this isot a hoax. this is real. climate change is real, so how do we live with it i think in this section of wwn, we're starting to understand thater and inlimate change goes hand hand. johnson: new orleans in thes last 5 to 7 yes really taken on a great adaptation of lclimate resilience andate change. elevation is one of the major adaptations that you sometimes see, is that the houses are raised higher. his is the center for the sustainable engagement and development. we have rain gardens here. we help communities how to build rain gardens. walso have a orchard. you see over here, we e lemons. get us one off here. after katrina, you had all these toxins from the water, so that went into the soil, and that's all over the lower ninth

ward and probably lot in louisiana. evidently, the process of going through the trees to bear fruit, it doesn't come into the fruit. also, we recommend above-bed gardens where you can put fresh soil to give you crops that arnot tainted with that poi. what we've ied to do is help with the community to first educate them because they get confused about, you know, is wimate change a political issue. is it reajust try to give them the facts. then we try show how they can be advocates for how we adapt that climate. tucker: if we don't do something, all this beauty of new orleans that everybody loves, tourists come down to see, they'll king at just water. that's it.

williams: the plan we've relied on believes that we can fight water, and if you've ever been to a beach when there's a riptide and you tink you can fight water, you will learn that you will lose that battle. waggoner: with a climate adaptation plaou have a wet system and a dry system, so when you need to lift wer out, you can do that, but when you need to let the water in, you can let the ter in through that system into these canals and circulate it around the city. iams: i mean, some people might walk past here and think, "oh, yeah. it's just overgrown area that has certain vegetation in it that is the perfgetation when you want water to absorb and be able to dissipate at a more l rate. i mean, it doesn't look like a lot of natural fcience, but there's a lot it.

waggoner: costs less to have green infrastructure because this is low-maintenance. this is a model of a part of the city as the main drainage basin. you have an underground system, the white lines under the earth. the idea was tget the water into these pipes, to get that water to these pumps and push it out. that was the method. williams: truth of the matter is, there is no way to solve our water issues with just our s umps and turbines. it't enough. it will never be enough. waggoner: you know, decades of doing the wrong ing usually kill you. we got our death warning in 2005. williams: if there was a political will to make sure c that thy sees another 300 years, it would mean having very beautiful, very aesthetic bluays along with greenways throughout the city, us living

with water, so that when that next storm comes, because it's going to come--that's a fact-- that water has a place to go t.her than your cars and your homes and the str [film advance clicks] reed: at some point after hurrine katrina, people started to get really serious about coastal issues, and they started to think about risk p reductiotecting people from flooding, together with restoration aone thing that needs to be addressed, and so we came up with this coastal master plan which is a list o projects that have been scientifically vetted, and so we have projects that dredge material from one place and put it in another place to actually build new marshes where there's open water at the moment. on the risk-reduction side, we s ve extensive series of levees and floodgaound some critical coastal

communities. these are projes that we think will work, notw, work ut work into the future. man: this is skylane 5478 november. kolker: state's coastal master plan is a $50 billion, 50-year pl. i consider myself an oceanographer and a coastal geologist, so i look at issues like why we sink in louisiana, and i also look at issues like how we rebuild coastal landscape. the barrier islands are one of the first of defense against a storm, right,o notice how this is now pretty much continuous. there's no channels in theiddle of it. this is an example of a restored barrier island. all right. then you can see new orleans, so that's one of the major post-katrina levee improvements, so the idea was to

basically to wall off this areao revent a storm surge from getting to the lower ninth ward. levees are sometimes built with earth, and sometimes they're built wi concrete, but the core point is that they are all a wall that protects an area from waves and rising waters from a storm. the biggest variable in this is sea level rise. if the seal level rise rates are at the low end of the spectrum of what people predict, then you could rebuild large areas of the landscape and provide flood protection for a lot of people. if rates are at the high end, then i think a lot of areas will be lost, even with the state's best efforts.

all right. well, welcome to cocodrie. the master plan needs a lot of input, and so the kind of work that i do fds into the parameters that the state needs as part of its master plan. so, you know, just wanted to give you a view of what the salt marshes around here look like. you can see that there's marsh for miles in at direction. fershes provide a lot of b from storm energy, so they're a buffer between our human civilization and the sea, so the restoration involves pumping sediment into a marsh like this to raise the elevation to allow it to better keep pace with seav rise and to fill in areas that have eroded. so this is the bubba dove structure, which is one of the major flooates in the morganza to the gulf levee system. with a levee, one

question that you have is who's i and who is outside the levee system. by drawing this wall in the marsh, you're changing the environment, but you're also setting down a series of principles of who lives where and the kinds of choices that these communities face in the years ahead, some of which are going to be very, very tough choices. albert p. naquin: this area used to be lover's lane because there was trees er the place. you could get in here and

go hide back there, so we'd listen to music and hang out with your girlfriend. y'alld don't m i say that, huh? all right. i was born and raised right here, in the tall grass right here. i guess it represent where all ancestors was born and raised d ad, and a lot is buried over here, as well, so to me, it means a whole bunch. comardelle: the land is important to us because it's where our ancestors settled. that's where are families are. that's where the heart of who we are is. it's a space that we come one with. albert p. naquin: the indians were in the way of the white man, so they all signed treaties for more land and more land, and that's how we goto over here. the governmentus

chaseso we settled over here and was happy, and now mother nature is getting us away. brunet: this is my grandparent' on my mother' side, my grandmother and my grandfather right there. i was raised here my whole life. yes. isle de jean charles has always been a erful place to live. the island didn't actually open up about the early fifties when oub road wlt. it the morning and see armadillo in the yard or opossum or au raccoon, yow, crossing the yard or whatever, whatnot. all that has changed because, with a lot of it just being water now, the trees have died offwhat

you're seeing is actually just a skeleton of what it used to be, you know? albert p. naquin: to me, it means almost, i guess you can say, like a family member having cancer, you know? it's being eaten away, you know, where it's just a little bit by little bitheetting destroyed. now, t only thing is, the piece of land is lasting longer than the human body can.

the one right here is an oil' field canal. th's one that passes here. there's one that passes a bit further, the back, so you're looking at water or saltwater intrusion g from the pipeline canals, and they destroyed the vegetation that we used to have... but, you know, most of the people work for the oil compani that's putting food and paying the rent andtgages and stuff like that, so, as much as you hate them, you have to like them. dupre: isle de jean charles is-e what'sommon saying?--the canary in the mine field. we're seeing--over here, we call it relative sea level rise. u have the global sea level rise, which is slight, but 80%ev

of the sea rise here is because of subsidence, so wesi both sng and you have the global sea level rise at the same time, so we are sinking by, i think it's 3 millimeters a year. it doesn'd like much, but you go into 40 years, 50 years, and you start to noticeifferences when you're already only slightly above the water like isle de jean charles.ni brunet: in the beg, it was a slow process. it was really not really noticeable, but then whenever the water started got to be more rapid because they had more water coming in and the land didn't stand a chance, so many people on their own did make the decision to go because of the water.

dena naquin: my dad moved off the island, i want to say, right fore i was born because he wasn't able to get to work with the road flooding and he needed to work, but i am from the biloxi-chitimacha-choctaw band of isle de jean charles, and that's my heritage, that is my daughter's heritage. you know, that'r family legacy. albert p. naquin: yaah! [laughter] get all the people who will be named. hurry up, farmer boy. a child was born, everybody went and visit and brought a gift. now it's not happening. thank you for today's sunrise. aiden, you want a indian name? yes. your name is little fox.

the displacement really, real made a change in our culture. now we kind of live-- ha ha ha!--like there are noi ians, ok? dupre: the only way these coastal communities will rvive into the later 21st century is to protect ourselves from the gulf of mexico. i realize in 300 years, this will probably be all open war. i mean, the sea will take us all over. what i'm trying to do with the levee system, what i'm trying to do,y ourselves two or 3 generations. it's just about impossible to include them into a levee system. it would cost probably $30 million, and it would

nearly impossible because the salt conditions are so bad. you know, to build a flood-protection project, you have to have more benefits than cost. one thing that's not factored in the cost, they only look at the cost of the homes,th cost of the businesses, the infrastructure, but, you know, i don't know you put a price on it, but they do not consider the cost of a whole culture. [film advance clicks] [tom-tom playin comardelle: as displacement keepening and we just further separate our community, it'll just get lost. [men chting]

man: turn to the left. comardelle: we learned about a national disaster resilience plan competition, swe submitted our plans. we worked to fit witthe state's master plan, and they presented it, and it got funded. sanders: right now, the way relocations typically happen in the united states, we rely on an individuaout model, and so, in other words, someone receives some compensation , to go live somewhere elt in doing so, we do lose that cultural fabric, so we don't really know if we can move people collectively as a group eaper and more efficient than individuals.

comardelle: there's veryli le positive in the form of resettlement of people. youts know, governmust don't do it well. we presented a different model, community-designed, community-driven. i think thatn was, hud lookedat and said, "let's try it. let's try a pilot program, see we can figure out how to do this on a smaller ale so we can change it for--" we have so many communities in the u.s. and abroad that's facing these se climate issues, and i think that's whso many people are watching, because it's like, "ok. can we reallyri get thit?" because we know how important it is for the future of the world to get it right. brunehe there's a reality that i don't like, but it's cemething that i have to p to because, you see, i had to go there and make a decision toa leavace that's always been

home for 7 or 8 generations, and that wasn't easy to let go of, and, in fact, in spite ofio answering that quea few times, it still doesn't make it easy. [film advance clicks] comardelle: so this is the new prerred site for the island this is where our community is gonna move to. it's a beautiful place. to me, this is new new birth, a suainable place. this is a healthy space. sanders: now, we do understand that this is a historically tribal community, and we also understand that populaons have left this particular location over a period of time,f and thoks who are successful in this project will have an opportunity to

reconstitute in the new location, but our primary set of beneficiies are the people living on the island. we want to pick up the people that are liing in this dire scenar and ensure that they live somewhere that is safe now and into the future. comardelle: i hope that the tribe would own the land, a actually, we sort of like a mixed ownership. you know, the folks would have full rights to their land, but at the same time, if they were to go and want to move off of it, it would revert back to the tribe so that way, that land will be forever sacredor the tribe to have. sanders: we've got to walk a pretty fine li by which we're developing something that makes sense for this community but also could be applicable to a much wider array of communities that may be in a similar situation. we simply don't have yet. cyardelle: i find this v empowering. it's allowing us to break down some of those cultural barriers, some of those grief barriers that'sea

been in place from past. you didn't even realize it. if every other hurricane season, you're havingo replace cars or furniture, you don't have a chancave savings, and you don't have a chance to allow your kids to have a better nextn step in life. staout in this piece of property, they can have a home and a way to progress into t future. if i was to portray it on an endangered species list, this is our rebirth where we can d art our new population to get off that endangeecies list.

announcer: "earth focus" i possible in part by the orange county community foundation and thearvue foundation.

chuck leavell: on the next episode of america's forests with me, chuck leavell, i travel to colorado. here you feel the powerful connection between the natural world and daily life. from the fesests high in the rockihat provide healthy drinking water to millions of people, to the innovative ople are using beetle-kill wood, to the gift of peace that comes from fly fishing for mountain t with military veterans. chuck leavell: hi, i'm chuck leavell. you know, in addition to my beautiful family, there's two things in my life that i have a special interest in and love for: music and trees. my wife, roselane and i own and manage our own forest land right here in georgia, charlane plantation. we grow southern yellow pine, as well as oer species here. and you know, as i get to travel the world with the rolling stones or some of the other artists