A few hundred yards from the shoreline – where the Gulf of Mexico meets the small town of Cameron in south-west Louisiana – my feet are crunching over four-year-old detritus.
I am standing among the battered pews of a Baptist church, on shards of glass and wood that are strewn across the floor, gazing at its partly collapsed roof. The relics of the back-to-back hurricanes that pummelled this community in 2020 are still scattered here and throughout much of Cameron. Residents have long referred to this distant part of the US as “the end of the world” – but the adage feels more prescient now than ever. The population has dwindled from nearly 2,000 to a few hundred since the storms; empty foundations mark the locations of many homes that were swept away in tidal surges; and a gargantuan gas export terminal looms on the horizon.
