Channel Effects: The Political Afterlife of Maintenance Dredging on Tangier Island, Virginia, USA

Abstract

In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay sits small and shrinking Tangier Island, Virginia. Home to 1,200 residents a century ago, the island now has fewer than 400 residents, a population decreasing as the land subsides into the bay. Scientists predict the island will be uninhabitable by the 2040s, while residents themselves profess to be climate change deniers and science skeptics. I examine the politics and social order of engineering interventions and their afterlives on Tangier, endlessly studied and sometimes implemented by the federal government, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A northern channel bisecting the island, first dredged in 1966, and a seawall on the western side of the island, constructed in 1990, were both obsolete before they were created, showing the ways in which infrastructure, especially dredging of waterways, and its afterlives are channeled as processes controlled by state experts, justified by and justifying endless cascades of interventions, naturalizing the landscape, and ultimately placing Tangiermen as willing victims and imminent refugees in an uncertain crisis.

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Vol.:(0123456789)
Human Ecology (2024) 52:905–921
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-024-00527-z
Channel Effects: The Political Afterlife ofMaintenance Dredging
onTangier Island, Virginia, USA
JonnaYarrington1
Accepted: 31 July 2024 / Published online: 15 August 2024
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2024
Abstract
In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay sits small and shrinking Tangier Island, Virginia. Home to 1,200 residents a century
ago, the island now has fewer than 400 residents, a population decreasing as the land subsides into the bay. Scientists predict
the island will be uninhabitable by the 2040s, while residents themselves profess to be climate change deniers and science
skeptics. I examine the politics and social order of engineering interventions and their afterlives on Tangier, endlessly stud-
ied and sometimes implemented by the federal government, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers. A northern channel bisecting the island, first dredged in 1966, and a seawall on the western side of the island,
constructed in 1990, were both obsolete before they were created, showing the ways in which infrastructure, especially
dredging of waterways, and its afterlives are channeled as processes controlled by state experts, justified by and justifying
endless cascades of interventions, naturalizing the landscape, and ultimately placing Tangiermen as willing victims and
imminent refugees in an uncertain crisis.
Keywords Infrastructure· Waterways· Engineering· Islands· Climate change· U.S. Army Corps of Engineers·
Chesapeake Bay· Tangier Island, Commonwealth of Virginia, U.S.A.
Introduction
Fifteen miles across the Chesapeake Bay from the Delmarva
Peninsula sits tiny Tangier Island, with under 400 residents
on approximately one square mile of land (Fig.1). This
small island is shrinking, physically subsiding and demo-
graphically disappearing through death and migration. With
1,200 inhabitants in the early twentieth century, by 2018
there were 480 full-time residents who dwindled by at least
120 by 2024. Since permanent Anglo-American settlement
in the 1770s, islanders have witnessed the creeping material
threat to the island’s human inhabitants and built property, as
sod washes away and tides creep ever closer to the thresholds
of houses.1
The island has three low ridges, Main Ridge, West Ridge,
and Canton, connected by asphalted roads and bridges main-
tained by the Commonwealth of Virginia. As an incorpo-
rated town, Tangier is part of Accomack County, whose seat
is the town of Accomac on the Eastern Shore of Virginia,
and employs a town police officer, a mayor, a town manager
and her assistant, and an elected Town Council with two-
year terms.
Beginning in the 1880s and until only recently, most
island men have worked as watermen, harvesting seafood
from the bay. In recent decades, many have shifted to work
on tugboats on the eastern seaboard and in the Gulf of Mex-
ico. Women seeking employment outside of their homes
generally work in the tourism industry cycling between jobs
at one of the two inns or two restaurants. Only one grocery
store remains from once multiple stores on each ridge. In
summer there is a lively lawn-mowing economy for grass
and hedges that have not been killed by saltwater intrusion
on what remains of the so-called “good land.”
Islanders call the land subsidence erosion and are keenly
aware of the displacement threat they face. Scientists predict
that Tangier will soon need to be abandoned; full “wetland
conversion” is predicted by 2051, putting predictions of the
island’s necessary abandonment at the 2040s. Scientists
* Jonna Yarrington
Jonna.Yarrington@colostate.edu
1 Department ofAnthropology andGeography, Colorado State
University, FortCollins, CO, USA
1 In contrast to Tangier’s popular narrative, which claims that the
island was settled by British colonists associated with John Smith in
1609, historical sources indicate settlement in the 1770s by Anglo-
Americans from the Eastern Shore (Mariner 1999).
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