Group items tagged

The things that you don’t want to miss are found in your family, with your community and friends. It’s shared meals and laughter and hugs and a baby’s first word or first step. It’s real life. It’s being present for someone in the real world, to comfort them or help them in a moment of need.

And those things you don’t want to miss in real life are all rooted in Love.

Yes, it’s important to be informed. But at the end of your life, I suspect you won’t be glad for all the hours you spent scrolling through Twitter or the New York Times app. No one, on their deathbed, says, “I’m so glad for the time I wasted on Twitter scrolling through half-baked ideas, bad jokes, conspiracy, and hate speech.”

According to a 2016 study by the nonprofit Greater New Orleans, this fledgling water workforce will grow by more than 20 percent over the next 10 years, creating more than 13,600 snazzy new titles like conservation technician, civil engineer and environmental scientist that pay an average of $69,277, well above the national average salary. “Louisiana is one of the first to turn the issue of climate change from an environmental one to an existential and economic one … through the cutting-edge jobs of the future,” claims Greater New Orleans’ executive vice president and chief operating officer Robin Barnes. Which is the city’s way of putting up a NOW HIRING billboard.

Meanwhile, troubled coastal cities around the world are taking note, says Bren Haase, head of planning for the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. With a playbook in place, Louisiana already boasts a 50-year, $50 billion plan to rebuild the state’s coasts, one that’s grounded in decades of data and science; it’s also being translated into several languages, including Vietnamese, Spanish and French, for other countries to reference. Flush with billions of dollars from the settlement in the catastrophic BP oil spill, the Coastal Master Plan could hold key clues for other places facing a similar fate in the future, says Haase, including flood-risk areas like New York, London, Singapore and Kiribati. Moreover, Louisiana’s coastal restoration sector is fueling high-tech projects like artificial oyster reef creation, advanced hydrologic modeling and geosynthetics, which will help shore up the state’s defenses against behemoth hurricanes and oil spills.