When King Solomon was faced with two women claiming the same baby, he offered to cut the baby in half so that each claimant could have part of the child. The real mother, of course, was willing to give up the baby rather than see it die.
What if there had been a thousand claimants, and none of them had been willing to preserve the baby over their own interests?
Obviously, that motherless baby would have died — just like southeastern Louisiana’s coastal region. My (fairly long) post on this, here.