Should We Abandon Louisiana? In Some Ways, We Already Have

      This article, written by Zack Kopplin, describes the attitude of the media and how they only handle the things that their audience might find enticing or entertaining. After reading, I agree with this article. I think that people should pay more attention to more obscure things, and just because some major incident is insignificant to some people, it doesn't mean that it is insignificant to everyone. A huge number of people lost their lives and their homes during the flood, and there are people who are not even aware of the incident altogether. The people who do know the incident wishes Louisiana to be bulldozed over, because it will be underwater anyways. Now, this is what I want to tell them: "Would you be able to say that if this was your home?" The people of Louisiana are not leaving because they dislike Louisiana: they are leaving because they have no choice. They lost everything in the flood, and they do not need casual insults thrown at them, on top of everything else that has happened to them. I think that we are to blame, because we are the ones that demand "interesting" and "entertaining" topics on the news, instead of ones that are actually important.
      The issue is, Louisiana is very prone to coastal erosion. It is stated that one football field of land is eroded every hour, and everything we are doing is only accelerating the rate of erosion. Because of this, it is very expensive to try and stop the coastal erosion from continuing, and it is also very hard to replace the property of all those who are damaged by flooding incidents like this. And because a chance of flood in Louisiana is very low according to historical models, it is hard to predict and prevent these types of flooding. Therefore, whenever a flood hits Louisiana, it takes a lot of resources and effort to rebuild what has been damaged. Because of that, the government is unwilling to try and rebuild. Many people are forced to leave Louisiana, not because they are scared of incidents like these, but because they are unable to rebuild, due to the lack of support the government shows.
      I think that we are at fault for these issues, because the problem behind these incidents are all due to global warming. The main cause of coastal erosion is the rising of sea levels. Nowadays, we see on the news that the polar ice caps are melting due to global warming spreading across the world. And who is responsible for global warming? We are. We are the ones that overuse Earth's resources, and we are the ones that release harmful gas into the atmosphere, damaging the ozone layer. Use of fossil fuels also frees up cavities underneath the ocean and causes it to collapse, resulting in the intrusion of saltwater. If we want to stop the problem of flooding in Louisiana, we should try to prevent the cause of it, instead of trying to repair. Also, the government would be better off spending their money trying to prevent the disaster instead of using it on things like relocation, because it would mean that we would not have to lose our homes. Like I said earlier: We are not leaving Louisiana because we do not like it; it is because we do not have a choice, and we would much rather be able to preserve our home, rather than abandon it.