Swift is unflinching about the catastrophe on the ground, but careful not to belittle the beliefs of those at the heart of the calamity. His new book, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, is part regional history, part crabber ride-along, part disaster narrative in slow motion.Īt its best, Chesapeake Requiem is a meditation on belief and disbelief in an America shouting about fake news. Earl Swift, an author of six previous books and a former correspondent for The Virginian-Pilot, immersed himself for the better part of two years with the 481 inhabitants of Tangier. In recent years, they’ve garnered some media attention for the paradox of largely rejecting sea-level rise while simultaneously suffering its wrath. Tiny, waterlogged Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia in Chesapeake Bay, is full of people of faith. If you live on an island in the middle of 18 trillion gallons of warming, expanding water, you’re eventually going to sink no matter what you believe. Either way, if you step off a cliff, you will most certainly fall. “The good thing about science,” Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, “is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.” Your stance on gravity is irrelevant. This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
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