Members of the Nicholls Mass Communication department, including four students, who are a part of the Nancy Matherne Global Institute, traveled to the United Kingdom to discuss the global coastal erosion and land loss crisis.
Coastal erosion is one of the biggest problems facing Louisiana, with roughly 25 square miles of land loss off the coast each year. While in the U.S. the coastal erosion of Louisiana is widely known, the global crisis of land loss is not discussed nearly as much.
The four students (Kate Clement, Emily Gramajo, Cahil Picou and Sydney Hubbard) visited multiple sites in Scotland and Newcastle, England, alongside faculty members Dr. James Stewart and Professor Laure Kasovich.
Kate Clement, said that she was surprised to learn just how similar the situation in Louisiana is to the problems in the United Kingdom.
“In England, students are working on research to see how the higher global temperatures affects oxygen and how oxygen then affects the seagrasses and habitation,” Clement said.
The main goal of the institute this year was to educate high school students on the land loss problem faced around the world, according to Clement.
The group achieved this by going beyond simply throwing numbers out and instead creating videos that show towns before and after hurricanes and coastal land loss.
Dr. James Stewart, one of two faculty members who attended the trip said, numbers have a limited value as some people may not care to hear them.
“What I do care about is when this fellow that still lives in Leeville said, when he was a kid they had fields of different sugar cane and oranges and all that’s gone now.”
The students specifically worked on template videos with before and after footage of hurricanes and land loss on Leeville and Grand Isle, the goal of this is to work with the high school students to allow them to make similar videos with different communities that are facing similar problems.
Beyond educating high school students, the program allows Nicholls students to improve their media skills on a global stage; through travel and interactions with people from around the world.
Dr. Stewart said the main goal of the trip is to “give students the opportunities to travel, meet people from other cultures, and to work on projects that involve environmental communication.”
“We believe there are a lot of opportunities for people who are able to take scientific information. In this case, environmental science and make that understandable to a broader community.”
A lot of people’s first response to coastal erosion is to “just go green” however, that is much easier said than done. Like Louisiana, many other areas around the globe run on the oil and gas industry, less oil and gas being produced means people losing their jobs. That is a major issue to address, according to Clement.
“When we were in Aberdeen, Scotland, we were able to talk to a worker at a desert restaurant that told us he came to the UK from the Middle East to pursue his degree, and his wife was in the oil and gas industry. He told us that his wife has since lost her job because of the go green efforts, and it has hurt their family,” Clement said.
“This made me understand that while we are trying to solve coastal problems, there are drawbacks at every angle, and we must be careful in our efforts.”
A solution that is best for everyone will take a collective effort to achieve. The most important thing is networking and sharing stories, when people are informed on just how much is lost – not just how many football fields but how many memories – it is more likely to incite a want for change. This joint effort to a beneficial and impactful way of handling these issues is the purpose of this institute and ones similar to it.
“We can tell the story of environmental issues by doing exactly what we have been doing,” Clement said. “By touring these places and allowing them to visit us, we are connecting our stories.”
Dr. Stewart explained that one of the main goals in spreading awareness surrounding coastal restoration is making people understand the domino-like effect of land loss that eventually impacts everyone.
“When someone who is not from Louisiana and may be wondering why they should care, well you should care because X amount of petroleum products that are in North America come through Louisiana plus fisheries and other things. So when we lose communities, it’s going to impact you too,” he said.
While going “fully green” may not be the final answer to coastal erosion, the efforts made by members of the Nancy Matherne Global Institute prove that we can all do things to slow the contributions to coastal erosion, paving the way for a better future not just for ourselves, but for communities around the world.
