Chesapeake islands on borrowed time?
This rising tide of evidence predicts rising tides for all.
Tangier Island is returning to the sea, and those with opinions are free to assign blame to whatever mechanism they so choose, be it the ways of the world or the laws of nature or what journalists and scientists and researchers call “climate change.”
Debating the name or cause doesn’t seem the least bit important when the next storm combines with the high tide and there are suddenly puddles of salt water in the living room. But that’s what we tend to do – gape and point and argue among ourselves about wording.
A recent story showed Tangier Island could need to be abandoned in 50 years. According to the article, the islanders could be the first “climate change refugees” in the continental United States.
When world leaders gathered in France recently to wrangle and deal and compromise their way to reductions in emissions, it seemed important and beneficial but far-flung and abstract.
But on Tangier Island, and Smith Island, its out-of-state sister, and in low-lying coastal areas between the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, it is all near and real, this rising tide of evidence that predicts rising tides for all.
Call it what you’d like (except for those who exclaim it to be “global warming,” because apparently they should be shouted down and mocked like Christopher Columbus when the great captain deemed the world round, and not flat.)
What we’d really like to see is more talk about a plan to handle the rising tide – along with the plan to stem the belching of byproducts from smokestacks and tailpipes.
How does that happen? Through hard discussions.
The island could be saved for a time with the construction of breakwaters that would cost as much as $40 million and would add 50 years to Tangier Island’s lifespan.
It that worth the cost? Some who envy and respect the unique lifestyle and history there might feel that the government has spent much more on projects that made much less of an impact.
Clearly not much of an effort has begun. By the calculation of researchers, only about a third of the island’s land mass remains from that in 1850, the article showed.
Until a plan to save Tangier specifically and other coastal areas generally, with every hurricane and nor’easter and unusually high tide, we will all hope and wonder whether our friends on the island fared well.
It is certainly hard to imagine them being forced to leave.