Chesapeake Requiem is a poignant, haunting documentary by journalist Earl Swift about the existential plight of this tiny island and its few remaining crabbers, oystermen, and their families. Eskridge is the Mayor of Tangier Island, population about 450 and shrinking because most of its high school graduates leave for the mainland and never return. Life on the island is life in and on the water and a life lived with nature both at its most raw and most sublime. Though Tangier is only 100 miles from Washington, D.C., as an Osprey flies, Swift opines it is the most isolated and insular community in the country.
First settled in 1778, the island is projected to be entirely underwater within fifty years, the shoreline in some areas receding by more than thirty feet every year. Two forces of nature are at work in Chesapeake Bay: the land is sinking, a phenomenon known as glacial isostatic adjustment; and the sea level is rising, a result of global warming. The latter, which goes by the more politically correct “climate change,” is by far the more rapid and urgent threat now, but whichever term journalists use for it, Tangier residents are in denial.
For the Tangiermen whose livelihood comes from the ocean, the water is their workplace, the tides daily and the tempestuous storms frequent. To them the shrinking shoreline is simply erosion caused by wind and wave. The land may be sinking and the ocean may be rising, but they see erosion as their existential concern.
Swift has experienced Tangier Island intimately now over almost three decades, first as a Chesapeake Bay kayaker, then as a reporter visiting to cover Y2K, and finally for fourteen months in 2016-17 as an embedded temporary island resident. He has lived in the community, gone to sea with Ooker Eskridge to pull crab pots, visited old cemeteries where headstones are now underwater and old bones litter new beaches, and attended church services for a revered Tangierman lost at sea in a violent storm.
After the CNN interview, Eskridge did a Town Hall with Anderson Cooper and Al Gore, reiterating the island’s belief that erosion, not global warming, is the culprit. Government studies have indicated a seawall could be built that might preserve this unique place with its eight generations old culture. It would cost at least twenty million dollars. This opens the ball for crunch time decisions on climate change. Will we spend twenty million on 450 people when New York, Miami, and Louisiana are also sinking into the sea?
No matter if you’re an environmental activist or climate change denier, Chesapeake Requiem should be required reading. Part Chesapeake Bay history, part adventure thriller, part nature panegyric, part sociological study, Swift’s book brings a sense of place to a vanishing way of life and a sense of urgency to global decisions It’s non-judgmental, but its premise is not an alternate fact. Tangier Island is disappearing. Will its disappearance be a canary in a coal mine or a stimulus to human ingenuity and cooperation?
