Let's say you've acquired a fiery passion about something. Maybe it's knitting or ethical treatment of animals or volunteering or being a parent or English literature or cars, but whatever it is, that is what drives you. It is what you want to fill all of your time with, and slowly it becomes hard to see a life without this hobby or project. Slowly, it becomes a major part of your world and how other people exist outside of this knowledge you have is baffling. You have to remind yourself that not everyone knows what this particular thing sounds like, or what that smells like. You have become a part of this thing, and it has become a part of you. It's maybe it's a passion project, maybe it's a career, or maybe it's a lifestyle.
For me, the coast feels like my passion project. If you have grown up in Louisiana or even spent more than a couple weeks here, you probably know that trendy but accurate statistic: every hour the Louisiana coast line looses a football field size piece of land. That's staggering land loss, and with it we loose so many other things. We loose habitats for migratory birds and aquatic life. We loose people and entire cultures. It's hard not to mourn that, and want to do something about it. It's hard not to get angry that our federal government pays our coast little to no attention when it provides so much for our nation. It's hard to imagine that if the entire state of Delaware disappeared or half of Connecticut was gone, the government would be rushing to help. However the state of Louisiana has lost a Delaware sized piece of land, and our nation could not care any less.
In our current political climate, our state cannot afford apathy of our citizens. We need to think about those hard things, and let them make us angry and make us raise our voices. We need to make this a national political issue. State organizations like the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority are doing fantastic work, but so many of the solutions to our problems lie outside of their purview.
My hope is to raise awareness and bring the issue to the forefront of national conversation. I want the science to be funded, and the engineering to be worked out. I want an vital part of our economy to remain stable. I want to see the lifeblood of Louisiana, the mighty Mississippi, to continue to support her people.
I want my children and my children's children and my children's children's children to know the same Louisiana that I know. I want to preserve a piece of who I am, and where I have come from. If the coast dies, all of its culture and its people do too. If the coast dies then all of us who have felt that connection to Louisiana, whether or not if it's our home, will fall apart a little too.
You may not know that muddy smell of air right off the Mississippi River or the sound of waves lapping at the sinking marsh, but you know what it is like to feel so deeply about something. So that's my passion project. What's yours?
