In trying to assess what 2025 has taught us about the struggles to save Louisiana’s coastal zone from the Gulf of Mexico and remove the state from the list of the nation’s most polluted, one word comes to mind: complicit.

It means being actively involved in a wrongful act.

That adjective must be worn by Gov. Jeff Landry, the Republican members of our congressional delegation and — saddest of all — every Louisianan who voted to put them in office.

This verdict has nothing to do with traditional conservative values: small government, fiscal responsibility and a strong national defense. Nor even the cultural battle flags today’s GOP has raised: immigration, transgender, gay and minority rights, liberal leaning universities and being considerate of others — often termed “woke.”

It has to do with two of President Donald Trump’s top priorities.

The first is his drive to stop all renewable energy programs while ramping up the nation’s production and use of fossil fuels.

This is a dagger at the heart of the state’s Master Plan for a Sustainable Coast because emissions from fossil fuels are driving the record acceleration of sea level rise. Research shows that if emissions are not dramatically reduced over the next two decades, 80% of our sinking, sediment-starved delta landscapes could be under water in the next 25 years.

So, at the same time the state is searching for billions to keep some of what is left south of I-10 above sea level and prevent what could be the largest forced migration of communities in America, Trump has decided to increase the chances that disaster will happen.

And the reaction from our governor and GOP members of Congress representing those communities in dire peril?

Either enthusiastic support or cowardly silence.

The second of Trump’s top priorities threatens not just our quality of life, but our very lives.

This is his rollback or elimination of more than 100 environmental regulations that have helped clean the poisons from of our air, water and land since the 1970s. Not surprisingly, many of those rollbacks are aimed at making petrochemical industries more profitable through lighter restrictions on the toxins they release that wind up in the air you and your children breathe, the water you drink and foods you eat.

And the response from Landry and your GOP congressional delegation?

More enthusiastic support, or sheepish silence.

They have been complicit in Trump’s ruinous assaults on Louisiana.

Now, it’s the fashion these days to say, “Well, they know if they cross Trump, he’ll support an opponent against them.”

The response to that from Louisiana voters should have been: “So what? They are there to represent our best interests, not Trump.”

And this is where the tag “complicit” is earned by the state’s GOP voters, because they keep electing these people.

This isn’t a plea for Republicans to become Democrats. It’s a call for them to open their eyes to the damage being done to their lives now and to future generations.

In the nearly 50 years I’ve covered our coastal crisis, people have frequently asked, “What is the most important thing I can do to help?”

For the last 20 years, one of my answers has been “Join the Republican Party and change it.”

That often drew laughs, but it wasn’t meant as a joke.

This has always been a conservative state, so the traditional GOP tenets are where most Louisianians feel comfortable. But there is nothing conservative about supporting policies that make much of the state below I-10 uninhabitable in 30 years or pumping more poisons into the nation’s most polluted state.

Time is running out for Louisiana conservatives to find pro-science, pro-environment candidates who serve the state first, not a president.

Otherwise, when their grandchildren ask them what they did when the coast was drowning and people were moving to other states, they can only answer: “I was complicit.”

Bob Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Louisiana environmental journalist, can be reached at bmarshallenviro@gmail.com, and followed on Twitter @BMarshallEnviro.