Tangier Island: Doomed by Climate Change But Loving Trump

The rapidly disappearing Tangier Island where climate change and sea level rise are denied.

In the Chesapeake Bay region of Virginia, many of us are acutely aware of climate change and rising sea levels.  The cities of Norfolk and Hampton have severe issues ahead of them as "repetitive flooding" - the term Virginia Republicans love to use rather than utter the phrases climate change or rising sea level - impacts growing areas.  The Poquoson area of York County faces even worse problems and will be the first area to be completely inundated.  Most threatened of all is Tangier Island which sits out in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.   I would argue that a majority of residents of the region believe climate change is real and want government action to address the problem which nowadays by definition means that one most support Democrats.  Yet Tangier Island - and Poquoson - embrace Trump, an individual who claims climate change is a "Chinese hoax" and who is pushing an agenda that will increase greenhouse gases and accelerate sea level rise.  Personally, I view these people as either idiots or so swayed by appeals to racism and/or religious extremism that they have their heads in the sand (actually, I think they have their heads somewhere else, but am being polite on a Sunday morning).  A lengthy piece in Politico looks at the idiocy of Tangier Islanders who seemingly are on a path to suicide for their island (like much of rural/backward areas of Virginia, the Tangier Islanders want the rest of the state to pay to fix their bad decisions/embrace of ignorance).  Here are excerpts:

As the summer of 2016 enters its final weeks, the upcoming presidential election looms ever larger on Virginia’s Tangier Island. Tourists travel a harbor channel lined with TRUMP FOR PRESIDENT signs, then step off the boats into a gauntlet of them. Golf carts display Trump bumper stickers at bow and stern. One café and cart-rental business is so adorned with Make America Great Again placards and Trump flags that it looks more like a campaign headquarters.

The election even snakes its way into church. “Now, I’m going to get political on you for just a minute,” Pastor John Flood announces . . . Soon enough, he gets to a but. “There is one party that believes that there should be same-sex marriage,” he says. “How can a Christian vote for that? How can a Christian vote for anything goes?” Many heads nod. “Who would have ever thought that there would be a party pushing the point that you could go in any bathroom that you want to?”

Such talk comes as little surprise on deeply religious Tangier, where faith intersects with virtually every aspect of daily life. Mapped by John Smith in 1608, settled during the Revolution, the island has never been an easy place: This whisper of marsh and mud in the Chesapeake Bay’s middle, 12 miles from the nearest mainland port, is among the most isolated communities in the East. Its primary industry is chasing the prized blue crab, which Tangiermen fish up, weather be damned, in shallow-draft boats that toss like carnival rides. The nearest doctor is 30 minutes away by helicopter. Prayer matters here.

Now more than ever, for the very water that has long sustained the place is poised to erase it. Tangier has lost two-thirds of its land mass to the bay’s erosive force since 1850. Acres more are carved from its shores each year.

The onslaught is projected to worsen in the coming few years, as the bay rises along with the planet’s seas, and the island—like much of the Mid-Atlantic coast—subsides.

This one-two punch makes relative sea-level rise in the lower Chesapeake among the highest on Earth. And of all the towns around the bay, none is so wide open to the whims of weather, so vulnerable to the effects of climate change, as Tangier.

Except that most of the island’s 460 residents don’t see it that way. Distrustful of scientists (with whom they’ve often disagreed on matters of bay ecology), staunchly patriotic (Tangier contributed more of its young men to fight in World War II, per capita, than any other town in Virginia), and biblically literalist (man is too puny to so affect the works of God), old-school Tangiermen see their dilemma not as a product of man-induced rising seas, but wind-driven waves that have smacked into its flanks since the Creation.

The solution is as simple as the problem, they figure. They want the federal and state governments to build a protective wall around its perimeter. The response has been tepid. . . . the islanders’ impatience peaked in 2016, when more than 87 percent of them voted for Donald Trump—a man who’d labeled climate change a hoax.

What we focus on is erosion,” he said. “Sea-level rise is at such a slow pace that erosion will get us long before sea-level rise does . . . ” This is an article of faith on Tangier. Islanders tend to consider erosion as separate and distinct from sea-level rise, while scientists point out they’re interlinked—the higher the water, the more destructive the incoming waves. . . . . “It causes people to hold back from investing here,” Ooker said. “You find yourself thinking, ‘Should I invest here, when it might not even be here?’ ”

“Yeah, build us a wall,” Ooker said, as Cook chuckled off-camera. “They talk about a wall—we’ll take a wall. We’d like to have a wall all the way around Tangier.”  The subject turned to the island’s affinity for the president. Ooker said he liked the man’s willingness to slice through red tape: “He’s gonna cut down on the time it takes to study something. We’ve been studied to death. We just need something done.” He did not stop there. “I love Trump,” Ooker declared without the hint of a smile, “as much as any family member I got.”

The [CNN] segment aired four days later, on Friday, June 9. Gray’s report juxtaposed the island’s steady inundation, its support for Donald Trump and Trump’s characterization of climate change as a hoax—and included a brief interview with me toward the end. In the first minutes after the story ran, several Tangiermen posted Facebook comments lauding the piece and congratulating Ooker for his comments.

But almost immediately CNN’s Twitter account blew up with comments from viewers astounded that the island voted overwhelmingly for a man who derides the science behind sea-level rise. “I have NO sympathy for the people of Tangier Island,” one wrote. . . . And: “Hard to be empathetic for residents, who are objectively stupid and proud of it.”

The islanders I spoke with, and those whose Facebook accounts I follow, were dumbstruck by the ferocity of this invective from strangers, and confused—heartsick—disgusted—alarmed, even—that their support for Trump had moved fellow Americans to wish them dead. . . . “We’ve actually got people sitting around debating whether these people are worth saving. How is that okay?” she said. “I don’t care if you want to call it erosion or sea-level rise or Aunt Sadie’s butt boil. It doesn’t matter what’s causing it. The point is that this disaster is happening, and these people need help.”

He [Trump] said that he and his family loved the citizens of Tangier. And he provided fodder for headlines around the globe. As Ooker described it to a reporter, “He said not to worry about sea-level rise. He said, ‘Your island has been there for hundreds of years, and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.’ ” Many islanders were reassured by this. The world at large found it preposterous.

Tangier Island epitomizes the problem with rural areas of Virginia - they embrace ignorance and religious zealotry and then wonder why no one wants to move there or open new businesses. Meanwhile, the population dwindles and the downward spiral continues despite state efforts to grow economic opportunities where the local population is the biggest obstacle.  On the lower Virginia peninsula, Trump loving Poquoson will be the first to disappear beneath the waters of the rising Bay levels.