Why is louisiana shaped like a boot

Do you think the state's iconic boot-shaped map is a relic of the past that denies the coastal erosion crisis? Or, do you think that the state is still essentially boot-shaped and so we should retain our map as is? This led me to become even more keenly interested in the myriad factors contributing to Louisiana's shrinkage - and to further investigate the science, history and art of map-making. A journalist I knew got a job as editor-and-chief of Matter.

He laughed neither at my idea nor my lack of credentials as a reporter on the environment. Late last year, the assignment was made. I road-tripped along Louisiana's fringe, exploring its land-water interface. I flew to California to learn about Geographic Information Systems and other digital tools that are making maps all the more effective at communicating complex information. I went to New Jersey , which has land loss issues aplenty.

The boot depicts land that is no longer there when it could shed light on the most urgent crisis facing our state: its disappearing coast. Matter's design team, with the help of Andrea Galinski, a coastal resources scientist with the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, created an alternative boot.

The new boot isn't perfect, but neither is the existing one. As I wrote in the story, where our new boot errs, "at least it errs on the side of the truth. As everyone who lives in the coastal zone knows — or should know — the answer is: A lot. In fact, it's inaccurate, more so every hour, because roughly a football field of land is lost from the sole of the boot every 60 minutes, according to the US Geological Survey.

Brett Anderson is a critic and reporter for the Times-Picayune. Basically, Brett wants to redraw that map. Brett, welcome to On the Media. But what does it really mean? And, over the decades, we've lost equal to the state of Delaware.

It never went out of my mind. And that was sort of part of a point I was trying to make, that those roadmaps that show the image of states from that sort of wide angle, we might see a square mile at most, when we look into our phone, and particularly where states are basically changing size, we lose that sort of wide angle lens.

BRETT ANDERSON : Well, the visual power of an iconic image like Louisiana presents us with a very powerful tool, an opportunity to communicate the crisis here and that if we change the boot to have it more accurately reflect the true cost that land loss has taken on the coast of Louisiana, you would have people across the country asking the question, what happened here?

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