Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

As I wandered past empty homes plastered with No Trespassing signs, I could see the economic logic of the island’s “planned deconstruction.” At the same time, the injustice was pretty glaring. The Biloxi and the Choctaw had come to Louisiana after they’d been dispossessed of ancestral lands, farther east. The Isle de Jean Charles Band had been able to live peacefully on the island only because it was too isolated and commercially irrelevant for anyone else to take an interest in. The band had had no say in the dredging of the oil channels or in the layout of the Morganza to the Gulf project. They’d been excluded from the efforts to control the Mississippi, and now that new forms of control were being imposed to counter the effects of the old, they were being excluded from those, too. “It’s kind of hard to imagine that no one’s going to be living here,” Billiot told me. “But I’ve watched it erode away.”