Semester of Graduation

Summer 2025

Department

Environmental Sciences

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

This thesis investigates the intersecting environmental, economic, and cultural forces shaping climate resilience in five coastal bayou communities of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Drawing on community-based fieldwork and qualitative analysis, it reveals how escalating insurance costs, infrastructural decline, intensified climate impacts, and out-migration patterns are experienced not only as material pressures but as disruptions to place, identity, and generational continuity. Rather than viewing resilience through technical or policy-driven lenses, the study highlights how residents understand it as rooted in social bonds, cultural traditions, and everyday care practices that sustain community life. Centering the voices of fishers, storeowners, clergy, elders, and local leaders, insurance emerges as an instrument of displacement. Out-migration is framed not merely as demographic change, but as the erosion of cultural and relational life. The decline of community infrastructure—roads, schools, churches, stores—mirrors the erosion of shared spaces vital to collective memory and belonging. Such voices pinpoint a widespread skepticism toward top-down policy interventions that fail to incorporate local knowledge or address community-defined needs. They underscore the necessity for participatory, place-based governance rooted in reciprocity and local advocacy. Methodologically, the thesis affirms the value of community-engaged research in capturing the complexity of rural climate vulnerability. Ultimately, the study argues for adaptation models that engage deeply with lived experience, revealing how the challenges of Terrebonne Parish reflect broader tensions in the climate era—between permanence and displacement, expertise and community, memory and survival.

Date

7-29-2025

Committee Chair

Dr. Linda M. Hooper-Bùi

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Available for download on Wednesday, July 28, 2032

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