Courtesy of Rachel Nederveld
Most people wouldn’t draw connections between the extreme ski-mountaineer Kit DesLauriers and Louisianans living on disappearing ground. But after working as a producer on Beyond the Summit—the documentary about how DesLauriers used her unique skillsets to fight for the protection of the mountains she cared about—Rachel Nederveld noticed a thread she followed all the way home.
"Community is how we’re going to solve the issues that are facing us down here, especially when it comes to the environment. It’s going to take everyone." —Rachel Nederveld
“It got me thinking about how much ingenuity is found in Louisiana,” she said. “And how those specific skills are being used to adapt to where we are, and how we’re living as we face the challenges of our changing environment.”
Inspired, Nederveld set out to document, through the medium of oral storytelling, examples of individuals creatively paving the way to a sustainable future in Louisiana. The result is the five-episode podcast, No Matter the Water, which Nederveld created with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, South Arts, Acadiana Center for the Arts, the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Lafayette Economic Development Authority, the State of Louisiana, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and ArtSpark.
1 of 3
Images courtesy of Rachel Nederveld.
The home of “Buddy,” who is the subject of Episode 3 of No Matter the Water. In response to regular floods where Buddy lives north of the Morganza Spillway, he decided to build a house that can float with the regular rises and falls of the water.
2 of 3
Image courtesy of Rachel Nederveld
Reverend Harris has pastored Evergreen Baptist Church for over 20 years, and is currently fostering a ministry of disaster preparedness.
3 of 3
Image courtesy of Rachel Nederveld
Summer, featured in Episode 1 of No Matter the Water, is a principal at a school in Chauvin, Louisiana. She has played a role in using education to help students process the realities of their changing environment.
Over the course of the series, Nederveld travels across the state to meet with a teacher helping her students contemplate the realities of land loss in Terrebonne Parish, a Baptist reverend in DeQuincy whose ministry focuses on disaster preparedness, a man who built a floating home north of the Morganza Spillway, a native gardener in Duson, and an artist from Saint Bernard Parish who is preparing an inland place of retreat for her community.
“What I really took away from these conversations,” said Nederveld, “was that community is how we’re going to solve the issues that are facing us down here, especially when it comes to the environment. It’s going to take everyone. How are we all together using our skills, our specialties, to figure out how we are going to continue to live here and protect our cultures and remain in places that are important to us, as much as we can?”
Louisiana is changing, she went on. It will never be the same as it once was. “We’ve said goodbye to a lot, and we’ll continue to say goodbye,” she said. “But we still have so much, and we’ll have a lot more if we work together.”
You can listen to No Matter the Water on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music.
