nouncer: 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 will be submerged by the f this century. thregion's survival depends on its ability to adapt to climate change. if successful, louisiana may provide a bluepri for others around the world.ad [filnce clicking]

tucker: there here. there were kids in the street playing football, right? there were neighbors. this house was the candy lady. as kids,uld come down and spend our quarters and sit here on this porch and eatus it andenjoy the atmosphere of the community, right, and that went away just overnight. it ju got washed away. [helicopter whirring] man: we are seeing scenes like this one throughout the city. lieberman: do you remember if you told them that the levees had broken? brown: i don't recall specifically, but it was that new orleans is flooding.

walters: no. sit. knocked over them plants on their porch last night, huh? miss is some upset with you. a couple of months ago, we had a rain storm, just ordinary rainstorm in southeast louisiana. it was one of those days that we thoht, "hey, just a little rain," but low and behold, the city flooded. the drainage system wa not upr. tucker: we loved hurricanes as kids. i remember when e calm came, we would play out in the water. it was just another day off from school, right, but nowg it's terrif it's terrifying.

walters: this is not a hoax. this is real. climate change is real, so how do we live with it? i think in this section of town, we're starting to understand that water and climate change es hand in hand. johnson: new orleans in the last 5o 7 years has really taken on a great adaptation of climate resilience and climate change. elevation is one of the major adaptations that you sometimes see, is that the houses are raised higher.te this is the cfor the sustainable engagement and development. we have rain gardens here. we help communiti to build rain gardens. we also have a orchard. you see ovehere, we have lemons. get us one off here. after katrina, you had all these toxins fe water, so that went into the soil, and that's er the lower ninth

ward and probably a lot in louisiana. evidently, thep cess of going through the trees to bear fruit, it doesn't come into the fruit. also, we end above-bed gardens where you can put fresh soil to give you crops that are not tainted with that point. what we've tried to do is hp with the community to first educate them because they get confused about, you know, is climate change a political issue. iit real? we just try to give them the facts. then we try to show how they c be advocates for how we adapt to th climate. tucker: if we don't do something, all this beauty of new orleans that everybody loves, tourists come down to see, they'll be looking at just water. that's it.

williams: the plan we've relied on believes that we can fight water, and if you've ever beenhe to a beach when's a riptide and you think you can fight water, you will learn that you will lose that battle. waggoner: with a climate adaptaon plan, you have a we system and a dry system, so when you need to lift waterou you can do that, but when you need to let the water in, you can let the water in through that system into these canals and circulate it around the city. williams: i mean, some people might walk past here and think, "oh, yeah. it's just overgrown grass." no. it's a low-lying area that has certain vegetation in it that is the perfect vegetation whe want water to absorb and be able to dissipate at a more, gradual rate. i me doesn't look like a lot of natural science, but there's a lot of natural science that goes into 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 to get the water into these pipes, to get that water to these pumps and push it out. that was the method. willia: truth of the matter is, there is no way to solve our water issues with just our pumps and turbines. it's not enough. it will never be enough. waggoner: you know, decades of doing the wrong thing usually kill you. we got our death warning in 2005. williams: if there was a political will to make sure erhat this city sees anot00 years, it would mean having very beautiful, very athetic blueways along with greenways throughout the city,s 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 other than your cars and your homes andhe street. [film advance clicks] me reed: at oint after hurricane katrina, people started to get really serious bout coastal issues, and they started to think about risk from flooding, together with restoration as one thing that needs to be addressed, and so we came up with this coasl master plan which is a list of projects that have been scientifically vetted, and so we have projects that dredge it in another place to actually build new marshes where there's open water at the moment. onth risk-reduction side, we have extensive series of levees and floodgates around some critical coaal

communities. these are projects that we think will work, not hework now, but work into future. man: this is skylane 5478 novem kolker: state's coastal master plan is a $50 billion, 50-year plan. i consider mysf 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 lasdscape. the barrier isla are one of thfirst lines of defense against a storm, right, so notice how this is now pretty much continuous. there's no channels in the middle of it. this is an example of a restored barrier island. see new orleans, so that's one of the major post-katrina levee, improvemeo the idea was to

basically to wall off this areas to prevent a stoge from getting to the lower ninth ward. levees are sometimes built with eart and sometimes they' built with concrete, but t core point is that they are all al 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, ou could rebuild large areas of the landscape and provide flood protection for a lot of people. if rateshi are at th 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 feeds into the parameters that the state needs as part of its master plan. so, you know, i just wanted t give you a view of what the salt marshes around here look like. you can see that t's marsh for miles in that direction. marshes provide a lot of buffer from storm energy, so th're a buffer between our human civilization and the sea, so the restoration involves pumping sediment into a marsh like this to the elevation to allow it to better keep pace with sea level rise and to fill in areas that have eroded.a so this is the ve structure, which is one of the major floodgates in the morganza to the gulf levee system. with a levee, one question that you have is

who's inside and who is outside thee 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, verc touices. albert p. naquin: this areaed to be lover's lane because there was trees all over the place. you could get in here and

hide back there, so we'd listen to music and hang out with your girlfriend. y'all don'u't mind if i say that, all right. i was born and raised right here, in the tall grass ight here. i guess it represent wre all of my ancestors was born and raised and died, and a lot is buried here, as well, so to me, it means a whole bunch. comardelle: the land is important to us cause it's where our ancestors settled. that's where are families are.th 's where the heart of who we are is. it's a space that we become one wi albert p. naquin: the indians were in the way of the white man, so they all signed treaties for more nd and more land, and that's how we got to over here. the government

chased us, so we settled over here anhappy, and now mother nature is getting us away. brunet: this is my grandparents on my ther's side, my grandmother and my grandfather right there. i was raised here my whole life. yes. isle de jean charles has always been a l wonderful place e. the island didn't actually open upe to rld fully, not until about the early fifties when our road was built. it was very easy to wake up in the morning and see armadlo in the yard or opossum or a rathoon, you know, crossin yard or whatever, whatnot. all that has changed because, with a lot of it just being water now, the trees have died off. what 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 bit getting destroyed. now, the only thing is, the piece of land is lasting longer than the human body can. on

thright here is an oil field canal. there's one that passes here. there's one that passes a bit further, and there's one that passes in the back, you're looking at water or saltwater intrusionel coming from the pe canals, and they destroyed the vegetation that we used to ve... but, you know, most of the people work for the oil companies. they're e one that's putting food and paying the rent and mortgages and stuff like that, so, as much as you hate them, you have to like them. dus-re: isle de jean charles what's the common saying?--the canary ithe mine field. we' seeing--over here, we call it relative sea level rise. you have the global sea level rise, which is slight, but about 80%

of the sea level rise here is because of subsidence, so we both subsiding 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 don't sound like much, but you go into 40 years, 50 years, and you start to notice differences when you're already only slightly above the water like isle de jean charles. brunet: in the beginning, it was a slow process. it was really not really noticeable, but then whenever the water startedin cominven more with it, it 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 before 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's our family legacy. albert p. naquin: yaah!gh [lauter] get all the people who will be named. hurry up, farmer boy. a child was born, everybody went and visitd rought 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, really made a change in our culture. now we kind of live-- ha ha ha!--like there are no indians, ok? dupre: the only way these coastal communities will survive into ter 21st century is to protect ourselves from the gulf of mexico. i realize in 300 years, this will probably be all open water. i mean, the sea will take us all over. 'm trying to do with the levee system, what i'm tryinto do, is buy ourselves two or 3 generations. it's just about impossible to include them into a levee systewould cost probably $300 million, and iwould be

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

man: turn to the left. comardelle: we learned about a national disaster resilience plan competition, so we submitted our plans. we worked to fit with the state's ster 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 individual buy-out model,w and so, in otheds, someone receives some compensation to go live someere else, but in doing so, we do lose that cultural fabric, so we don't really know if we can move people collectively as a group cheaper and more eiciently than individuals.

comardelle: there's very little positive in the form of resettlement of people. you know,t overnments just don' it well. we presented a different model, community-designed, was, hud looked on that and said, "let's try it. let's try a pilot program, see if we can figure out how to do this on a smaller scale so we can change it for--" we have so m communities in the u.s. and abroad that's facing these same climate issues, and i think that's why so many it's like, "ok. can we really kt this right?" because w how important it is for the future of the world to get it right. brunet: there's a reality there that i don't like, but it's something that i have to face up to because, you see, i had to go there and make a decision to leave a place that'lways been

home for 7 or 8 generations, and that wasn't easy to let go of, and, in fact, in spite of answering that question a few times, it ill doesn't make it easy. [film advance clicks] comardelle: so this is the new preferred site for thisland. this is where our community is gonna move to. it's a beautiful place. to , this is new life, new birth, a sustainable place. ts is a healthy space. sanders: now, we do understand that this is a historically tribal community, and we also understand that populations have left this particular location over a period of time, d those folks who are successful in this project will have an opportunity to n reconstitute in t

location, but our primary set of beneficiaries are the peop living on the island. we want to pick up the people that are living in this direscenario and ensure that they live somewhere that is safe now and into the future. comardelle: i hope that the tribe would own the land, and actually, we sort of like aow mixership. 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 b the tribe so that way, that land will be forever sacred for the tribe to ve. sanders: we've got to walk a pretty fine line by which we're developing something that makes sense for this community but also could be applicable to a much wider array of communities thamay be in a similar situation. we simply don't have a good answer to that question yet. comardelle: i find this very empowering. it's allowing us to break down some of those cultural barriers, some of those grief barriers that's

been in ple from years past. you didn't even realize it. if every other hurricane season, you're having to replace cars or furniture, you don't have chance to have savings, and you don't hava chance to allow your kids to have a better next step in le. starting out in this piece of property, they can have a home and a way to progress into the future. if i was to portray it on an endangered species list, this is our rebirth where we can start our new population to get off thatndangered species list.

announcer: "earth focus" is made possible i by the orange county community foundation and the farvue foundation.

chuck leavell: onthe next episoe of america's forests with me, chuck leavell, i travel to colorado. here you can feel the powerful connection between the natural world and daily life. from the forests high in the rockies that provide healthy drinking water to millions of people, to the inng ative way people are usetle-kill wood, he gift of peace that comes from fly fishing for mountain trout 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 havecial 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 other species here. you know, as i get to travel the world with the rolling stones or some of the other artists