The Atlantic Ocean, in its infinite wisdom and total lack of patience for human pretension, has decided that the city of Saint-Louis has overstayed its welcome. According to the latest cheerful dispatches from the climate front, this former capital of Senegal—a place the 'experts' at UNESCO have seen fit to label a World Heritage site—is on track to lose 70 percent of its landmass to the rising tide by the year 2100. It is a slow-motion drowning that serves as a perfect metaphor for our collective species: we are standing on the shore, watching our shoes get wet, and debating whether the water is actually there or just a liberal conspiracy to sell more umbrellas.

Let’s appreciate the irony of Saint-Louis for a moment. It was the colonial crown jewel of French West Africa, a monument to the European desire to build pretty things in places they didn’t belong. Now, the Atlantic is reclaiming the territory with the cold, unfeeling efficiency of a landlord clearing out a tenant who hasn’t paid rent since the 19th century. UNESCO, that global arbiter of things we’d like to keep but won’t bother to save, has slapped its prestigious sticker on the city. In the world of international bureaucracy, a 'World Heritage' designation is essentially the intellectual equivalent of 'thoughts and prayers.' It provides a lovely framework for historians to document exactly what color the paint was on the colonial villas before they became artificial reefs for the local grouper population.

The human element is, as always, a comedy of errors. Thousands of fishermen have already been 'relocated.' In the lexicon of government efficiency, 'relocation' is a sanitized term for taking people who have lived by the sea for generations and dumping them into inland purgatories where their skills are as useless as a solar-powered flashlight. These are people whose entire existence is tied to the water that is now eating their front porches. The response from the global community? A series of glossy reports and the occasional documentary crew capturing the 'resilience' of the poor. If there is one word I despise more than 'synergy,' it is 'resilience.' It is a word the comfortable use to describe the desperate when they don't intend to help them. 'Look at how resilient those people are as they swim to work!' No, they aren't resilient; they are drowning because you like your SUVs and your cheap plastic nonsense.

And then we have the 2100 timeline. Ah, 2100—the favorite date of every politician who wants to look concerned without actually doing a damn thing. It is the perfect deadline. It is far enough away that everyone currently in power will be safely ensconced in their mahogany coffins, indifferent to the fact that Saint-Louis has become the new Atlantis. By 2100, the bureaucrats who signed the current climate accords will be nothing more than dust and ego, leaving the actual bill to be paid by people who haven't been born yet. It’s the ultimate generational grift. We get the carbon-heavy luxury; they get the scuba gear.

The Left will tell you this is a moral failing of the West, as they tweet their outrage from iPhones built with minerals mined in places they couldn’t find on a map. They’ll demand 'climate justice' while refusing to give up their two-day shipping or their climate-controlled apartments. The Right, meanwhile, will look at the encroaching waves in Senegal and suggest that perhaps the ocean is just thirsty, or that the real problem is that the Senegalese haven't invested enough in bootstraps to pull themselves out of the rising tide. Both sides are equally moronic, locked in a perpetual dance of performative concern and willful ignorance while the physical reality of the planet continues to simplify the map.

Saint-Louis is not just a city; it is a preview. It is the trailer for the upcoming blockbuster: 'The Great Erasure.' We are watching a UNESCO site dissolve because we are a species that values the 'economy'—a fictional construct we made up—more than the biosphere that actually allows us to breathe. We’ve built a world where the preservation of a colonial facade is more important than the survival of the people inside it, right up until the point where the facade falls into the drink. So, here’s to Saint-Louis. It had a good run. It survived colonialism, revolutions, and the indignity of being a tourist destination. But it won't survive the simple physics of thermal expansion. The ocean doesn’t care about your heritage, your politics, or your 'resilience.' It just wants the space back. And frankly, given what we’ve done with the place, I can’t say I blame it.