It’s 2016 in Livingston Parish. Floods from the Mississippi River completely destroy the town. The only unflooded place is a Catholic Church, which becomes a center for those displaced, serving over 100,000 meals. 
This is one of the many stories that you can hear about in Coastal Voices, a humanities initiative committed to understand the cultural impact of environment changes to Louisiana’s landscape.
Costal Voices is about telling stories and listening to the stories of those who call the coast home and, through their stories, trying to understand how people in the past lived. The goal is to use this knowledge to plan sustainable ways of living on a coast that’s constantly changing.
College of Humanities and Social Sciences Associate Professor of Religious Studies and History Michael Pasquier has been working on this project with students for a few years now, collecting about 150 stories.
“Listening to stories and telling stories are acts of resilience. It is not a tangible impact, but it is one ingredient in the way in which people can live in the world and try, just for a moment, to encounter another person they would not have otherwise encountered,” Pasquier said.
According to Pasquier, people are often driven to action by seeing themselves in others. He said that by hearing these stories, people are realizing how much the coast affects living situations. 
“The larger story that we are trying to tell is the story of the coast is the story of the river and the system of rivers and bayous that connect people to water,” Pasquier said, “even up to Baton Rouge, on this Mississippi River that has been incredibly altered by human engineering.”
Pasquier hopes that Coastal Voices helps people understand the true impact of flooding. 
“It is [actually] this long view of people recovering from flooding that goes beyond just fixing a house,” Pasquier said. “It is the emotional, mental and social cost that comes with people who lose so much and have to pick up the pieces, not just physically and tangibly but internally and emotionally.”