the mac all right, well, good evening, everyone. thank you so much for joining us here this is a great crowd. and jennifer mcdavid, manager at her unit market location on behalf of the owners and the staff like to welcome you to today's event.

some housekeeping items in brief notes before we get going. first we would greatly appreciate it if you could turn off for silencer cell phones. for the q&a portion of the talk, please remember to step up to the microphones before asking a question. it looks like we have one microphone this evening. the microphone is here so apologies. copies of the book are behind the register at the front of the store. if you'd like to purchase one copy or multiple, this is a really great book, guys, to start thinking presents now. purchase many. there will be a signing after the q&a. if you'd like to picture like to picture books and like to get your book signed complete line up in orderly fashion to the right of the podium just a long here at the conclusion of the top. at the end of the event, please hold your chairs and laymen against the nearest bookshelf or pillar. our booksellers will appreciate you. if this is your first event of politics & prose, please know that we do many event almost

daily, so feel free to care of a calendar as you're leaving at the front info booths. this month alone we have justice sonia sotomayor, debut author arnold kline and i see it to jen for washington black, which is less did. the last two events are unity market. so that's pretty fun. it's now my pleasure to introduce oral smith, author of chastity greco income a year with the water meant a vanishing tangier island. he's written five books including the big roads, the untold story of the engineers, visionaries and trailblazers who created the american superhighways. a former fulbright fellow in new zealand he's been a residential fellow at the virginia foundation for the humanities at the university of virginia since 2012 player so what makes the community were saving? is it guys, history, location

and his swift spent most of two years an offshore fishing community in the virginia waters of the chesapeake bay. this detailed and empathetic portrait from the uncertain economics and ecology of the blue crowd to the communities stanch evangelicalism and rejection of climate change showing how complicated -- shows how complicated the question actually is. as jack davis, author of the making of an american seed note earl swift is as much a master at creating words on the page is capturing the insert their voices of the shrinking just a beguiling. he's written on a farewell but a commencement, and insular but universal story, one that we should all know a challenge from a forbearance impossibilities. without further ado, please join me in warmly welcoming earl swift to politics & prose.

[applause] >> thank you, jen. before we begin i would like to see some hints. how many people have been to earl swift? it always amazes me that their session incidence of visitation on the mainland. transfer and went for those of you don't does this back the mud and marsh the widest portion of the chesapeake bay. populated by 400 xt people, most of them, very few exceptions can trace their lineage back to the original settlers in 1778. an iron and that is earned a reputation as a somewhat odd place based on a few characteristics number 18 near

theocracy of of old-school method is one of the old-school ending really a school -- old-school. no municipal decisions are made without the assent of the religious leadership on tangier. number two, it's got an almost incomprehensible accent. tangier if they're talking to tourists, but kind of tone it down a bit for you so you can achieve basic communication. but if you're listening to them talking, you know, pay no attention to you, you would be hard pressed. it's a mixture with this weird nasal elongation that stretches single syllables into two or three and then complicating things further have a habit of

saying exactly the opposite of what they mean. even if you do figure out the words, and decode with their same in the third thing, one of only two offshore islands with dozens of inhabited islands filled with little towns and vibrant places and survive through the 19th century. one after another the six miles apart stateline and what drove people out more than anything else was these islands begin to shrink and what we now know to be sea level rise but at the time was erosion through the 19th and 20th centuries, what you see is the point of inflection in the mid part of

the 19th century, right around 1850 erosion was taking away but a bit surveillance prior to that. beginning in 18 to accelerate into the 19th century and moving to a gallop through the 20th you see the islands to shrink away. tangier was one of them. lucky enough to have these living in the west side. and you're probably familiar. do not interest in the day, coupled with places like holland ireland but the last house of a vibrant community in the day in 2010 in holland 9230 more people living in it. it still had 170 some in 1910. there wasn't a single person

laughed. he was just abandoned. what i'm going to do is read a couple of passages from the book. i'm not going to waste a lot of time talking appeared because what i found his people come with questions about tangier. i hope that's the case tonight. without further ado, we read the first half of the introduction so no one can complain and do not jump ahead to a piece of chapter four and will talk about departures. the day after the storm passed, set up for the roots of human. it was her habit to start the harbor into the channel of silver island and she threw up the -- to open the throttle and mr. and dug deep for his six-foot frame the consoles that cited the fiberglass hollow.

the ball cap pulled low. she would speed past the county docket parked up support and a ragged line of crime shanties perched on stilts a few feet surrounding deck stacked high purity water a little business district home to the greatest pitcher of his kind. i'll pass the last of the shanties, channel open to the chesapeake area most everyday she most everyday shooter devoted turn to the north. she was running the prevailing wind and it therefore enacted the tide the journey would not be smooth like most neighbors carol moore had been poured into a seafaring family. she was the eighth generation never can board a train for island. she could handle a boat before she could read. i typical afternoon should the edge of a marsh that islanders

until a mile-long she reached tangier's tip or a century passed a community thrived pitching and i'm on pins washed away but she found sanctuary on the deserted beach there an escape from the close quarters and relative bustle. she came upon patent medicines offered by island women 100 years dead in 19th century tonic invites the dog and infallible limited a cure-all for man or beast in turlington's balsam of life to cure kidney stones. she found 18th century clay pipes and had was porcelain dolls. back when it had its own school in 30 odd houses and stay until

they quit the place. the time she was born in 1962 the abandonment with decades past and buildings remained the chat of associate chickens and goats roaming loose their with rhubarb in so much in us that the whole place smelled like licorice. she remembered walking into the marsh with her father weeping among bushes to a small cemetery far from the day that the marble headstones testified good christians. here is her great grand parents and their parents and their people who persisted with reminders of what she would become in the permanence of all things said sunday she spent hours walking along the water's edge whether she stayed for just minutes almost always she left more sturdily, steadily

grounded. this afternoon promised to be different. for the previous three days the wins have been blowing a steady 50 knots or better. they conspired with the tag of the place. whitecapped waves rolled in from the east region whatever street and into homes. water had served as a channel sweeping away anything. at high tide only a few knobs of high ground in a single hump a bridge escape the flood. now what the are scrubbed clean whatever codifies revealed itself in greater natural detail for a few crime shanties have been flattened from a distance or stacker plywood showed off its grain bin/plinking to send a surreal yellow strewn in the shallows. twisted among the reeds at the water's edge. she sped into the bay. it was a sunny afternoon deep

and false are the water flat, split: the watermen say. back in town trees were down compiled with trash the tide has lifted from the martian families for tracking furniture outside to experience such peace out here just hours after the storms may hymns and unreal. sure enough when she ran to the island's northern tip she thought had not spared her the shoreline had been broken into pieces by three new channels. much of this and she walked for years have been ripped away in minus this protective the island's marsh grasses rooted in the soil crumbled with each pulse. she muttered along the water's edge until she found a place to land the boat and a she scrambled out she notice updated footer to offshore. submerge to maybe six inches of

water rocking gently with the push and pull of the waves. she stepped nearer she saw after moments of hesitation she bent down for one and came up with the humans goal. it was well preserved by the agitation of this earth. donovan adult with all the teeth missing and its lower jaw too so it's hard to reckon much beyond that. she rescued its may finding similar conditions well above the timeline. when her eyes on the succession the rib cage first in a palace in all the components of a human skeleton found to the tiniest bones of the toes. do they lay face up and base relief with the rest still encased in clay for traces of a coffin underground that sharp edged wreck tangle cut into the

earth. a few feet away was a second complete skeleton likewise only partially exposed held fast by the clay on each side of the school and beyond that a third grave containing the tiny casket inside a bigger coffin in the middle the skeleton of a small child perhaps no more than a cobbler or shrouded long since it came to rot to bright white as it held the garment close on the child's breastbone. carol moore looked around her and saw that she stood a half dozen no with haphazard cluster at the water's edge and for skeletons. their contents stirred by this earth with shin bones. a few yards away they white marble had done the she remembered him as a youngster. the four years since they had chipped away at the shoreline and little by little stolen the ground under canaan.

so that's the first half of what i think you'll agree is a cheery start to the book. first half of the introduction. it does set the scene. ultimately this is the reason i went to tangier was not only to record what was happening, but to record this place because it is so interesting, so unusual in the fact is we are going to lose this place unless we decide to do something about it. i'm going to jump ahead to the end of chapter four. departure is the theme in tangier lack of the population dropped from a high of 1300 in about 1930 to a third of that, about 460 people there. to put it another terms when i went to visit the island as a reporter on the virginian pilot

in 1999 and 2000, the school, which is k-12, the only k-12 left in virginia had 100 students. when i arrived to establish residence in may of 2016, 16 years later the population had dropped to 67 in next year it will stand at 53 in the class of 2020 in fact has one member, matthew parks. here's a passage from chapter four. a couple of weeks later we gather again for a different kind of farewell. the annual graduation ceremony with a few undergrads were eagerly anticipated in knowing on the graduate as well as the circumstances of their birds, their academic standing in the

dating history to a degree that would horrify most teenagers. tangier kids aren't allowed many secrets but the flipside is many island adults have played some role large or small and cheap in the class of 2166 boys and one girl early june at the crew to launch us into a medley of wind beneath my wings and climbed every mountain to a memorial century packed with about 300 people from the two thirds of the population. the church air conditioning rattles and gasps in its battle with the heat. i'm sitting beside showing daily a member of the class of 1960 at another nature of the family of the family that owns the grocery. these have graduation at the school. it was always hot. you'd have to leave the doors open and the horseflies would get in. graduates marched wearing dark

putdowns and the schools edinburgh principal and the only resident point database of flowers on the table below and in addition to the seven graduates tonight while on a westerly daily been a member of this class that died in march march 1998 and suffering a fatal aneurysm. i see many in the audience dabbing arise. joanne jordan snuffles beside me. we hear from the new superintendent of the public schools the graduates to get as much education as you can and always get to the community come again to the old people. next up commensurate parks in 1997 graduates, were tangier's two marine policeman. he's a media fellow's was overpowering accent vanishes when he opens his mouth to sing garth brooks river. the song has a suitably maritime

theme and it peaks at the end. all of this is prelude. take in what turned to introduce the commencement speaker. in 1982 graduate who a few years ago fell victim to an incurable neurological disorder that crippled her and woke one morning to find herself field. do you believe in mariposa principal asked the church that i present to you our miracle. trended whispery to lonnie morris younger brother tracey's strength easily to the microphone. she is tall, one, shorthaired, no-nonsense. the approach her fair share my 2 cents worth these past five years. i'm glad to be afforded one more chance to offer what i feel are important values as you begin the next phase of your life. as you leave us in a she tells the graduates in what sounds like a bon voyage i ask one last

thing of you. take pride in your heritage. be proud to be called a tangier. as a teenager you think of the place is of the place is too confining like living under a microscope she says. soon you will come to realize what a special place it is to take with you the strong traditions of hard-working family that are so evident that the graduates file out to nancy criddle's rendition of onward christian soldiers in the receiving line at the porch. blissfully squeeze out of the sanctuary. i find myself beside a native who left for college and stayed away for decades until she found love in her hometown in the back nine years ago and his stepson is very to carol morris daughter. it's brain-dead quick to laugh just a touch lighter than most of her fellow islanders. cozy tearjerker of the ceremony

to everyone around her. when i stop crying over once terry, along came another. [applause] thank you. just in case you're wondering, i've noticed several points in the last package that identified people by how they related to others that came earlier this story but you of course don't know. the reason i did that was going in the story are recognized i could not tell the story of 460 people. i had to pick a half-dozen or so and concentrate them as main tourist ended over the course of several months to establish who the 06 would be. there's an awful lot of peripheral yours as well and i found the easiest way for you as

the reader to get to know who they were in deal to figure out the webwork of relationships in tangier west have them connected to the big six through lineage or marriage or whatever. so that's what that was about. yes, sir. >> yes, sir. do you think it's possible to physically observed tangier and if so, what would it take and what would it cost? >> short, anything is possible. the army corps of engineers has a plenary proposal for a concept that would buy tangier a lot of time. it would be a lasting solution similar to what's been done in maryland were in that case the state of maryland in the four combined forces in ireland that all but disappeared due to the

same forces the tangier is now wrestling with and rebuilt it. they built cells that rock to the harbor there. and over several years have now to decide if it was in the mid-19th century and will continue dumping and expanding it until 2030 or thereabouts when the project is supposed to finally end. it will cost $1.4 billion. the interesting thing is they rebuild the island because it's the whole justification for doing this is that the day has lost a tremendous amount of habitat for wildlife. the corps has come to tangier

with this concept. again, this is really embryonic and i hesitate to even say it to so many people. it proposes to do with tangier what maryland on the court did with poplar. blake had earlier project, the main justification would be to rebuild tangier is habitat and people would be saved as kind of a side benefit. that's the only way they can make up the numbers for it because it has to show a cost benefit ratio that makes sense in there are too few people on tangier to justify spending the $800 million or so it would cost to save the island in such a fashion. but the other animals, see

animals included actually are worth more than the infrastructure. >> thank you. >> you bet. >> i spent a number of occasions on both smith and tangier but the chesapeake foundation and i wonder based on a couple things that have come out recently, your session on 1:00 a.m. some of the other things i've picked up over time. if dean says this maryland has been more fortunate in some ways in getting something started in terms of protecting smith in virginia and i wanted to see what you thought about that. >> they've actually done something. there's five. tangier doesn't do a good job of presenting it in case to

decision-makers. but the fact is and has been kind of check decide time and time again as a priority. a good example of this is in a wrap of the state of virginia necessarily. the court shares the heat for this. since the mid-70s, the state of virginia the commonwealth has known that a boat channel that cuts tangier and half is going to suffer in a version that someone state or federal would have to do something about it. they would have to build a jetty for some armory to keep the west end from tearing the island to pieces. mid-seventies disappeared in a state report. they started talking about actually putting the project in

place. the real discussion began 15 to 20 years saturday pass. they've been talking about wilting to safeguard the west end ever since 1992. 26 years later we see multiple studies of the project. it's got to be the most studied federal project. now the republican congressman scott taylor announced this week that the work has been permitted in construction is definitely going to start next year. that's not the first time they forgot. i hope it's the last, but the past doesn't leave one very domestic. >> thank you.

>> surely there are tons more questions. >> let's talk about the feet of this whole thing. he mentioned being in the eye lens 15, 16 years ago and highly decided. >> okay, i was first sent to tangier in the summer of 1999. tangier was wonderful makeup of virginia towns that outlawed the virginia lottery on moral grounds and so they sent me their to check out how the place was faring years after that. it was an iffy premise for a story, but didn't the course of getting that story, i heard from a lot of tangier about the terrible irony that faced, which words people depended for sustenance for two centuries but now poised to reach them

completely. later on that year the pilot sent me back to the island to spend y2k they are. i spent the millennia on tangier. i don't often mention this with theocracy or near theocracy, but it's also a dry island. there was a particularly quiet celebration and let me tell you. but again, while putting together another's tory of shaky merit, i again talked to them came away with a definite sense that the island was experienced team below grade panic over the situation, that low-grade were shifting by the month really. so i got the paper to send a photographer back to the island

for six weeks in the spring of 2030 big package of stories, which appeared in the paper under the title he was referring to. i was very proud of that package. it occurred to me even as i was writing it that this was a bigger story into the very finite compounds and even so, i was also convinced when the story appeared at what a way for 15 years. i lived on water and more folk in two different places in with each story the water seemed to come higher in my basement i found myself wondering if it's this bad in the mainland in the city has got to be getting pretty dire in the tangier so i

resolved idly that i go back one of these days. i had friends -- not friends, the people who might become friendly. and it really was slowly mulling over that idea when my fiancée kind of gave me a kick in the pants talking about the last book casting around some ideas and it was pretty firmly attached to a completely different story and she said that, you've got a great story sitting in your lap and you have to go take another look at tangier. in december 2015 i went back and was astounded at the difference in the island from 15 years before. you know, you're almost at a

disadvantage because you spend your life on the ground and rarely do you have occasion go up in an airplane. and it's from a height that you really can recognize what's happening. when you're on the ground, you see marsh grass. it's a sea of ron in pale green in the summer and it doesn't reveal its inner workings to you, but you get above it and you can how it's funded and laced with rivulets. pretty watery macramé of marsh in open water. when i went back i left a solid marsh and when i came back in 2015 it was a work.

it's coming apart in its happening really fast. way faster than i thought possible. needless to say that convinced me that i should stick around and support for 10 months i rented the second floor of a house in one of the three bridges. this is an island 70% wetlands and everybody, all 275 houses were crowded on the three parallel rims over imperceptibly above march. that's a pretty broad use of the term. i lived on the west ridge and when outcropping a lot with the islanders, went to church several times a week and had islanders sit down for

interviews and just live the life they are. the thing about tangier is it a face-to-face sculpture. cell phones die halfway across. currently they have no -- most of your interactions are on the sidewalk sized road. you run into people when you're going to the post office or the one grocery store or wherever your folded. and that is how news is delivered and opinions shared and good news and bad news celebrated or lamented.

the result after 14 months at that point had probably finished writing how the book and went home and finished writing. but the long answer to a sure question, but there you have it. >> how did you find the initial stages of continuing an insular community and getting trusts to open up about their lives and livelihoods and lastly, how is the book been received? >> by the tangier? well, the first month and a half i was trying to figure out a time when i was kind of showing i was involved in everything i could be on the island. i was there pretty much full

time. i think i went home once and not. to cut the grass. you know, i wanted to establish in the islands there was not a tourist and i was not part of the long procession of journalists who'd written essentially since the 1890s. the media has been fascinated for a long, long time. very savvy and it dealings with the media. but i think even they are sick to death of newspaper stories that talk about their supposed that elizabethan accents. you see the same mistakes repeated over and over. so anyway, the six-week period allowed me to establish my credit and it also enabled

tangier to get used to seeing me. so i lost my novelty. i always carried a notebook wherever he went. there is never any question when i sat down with somebody, set in a church i had my notebook with me. when i went to the afternoon possible spammers situation room i always have my notebook with me continue the row was my notebook style, i'm writing it down. but over time i don't think i ever became a fly on the wall to the point where they forgot about me, but i think they stopped being worried about it and they pretty much treated me as a tangier. ..

instayed of asking question, one by one day stood up and offers testimony but me, the book, and my fiancee and i was just amazing, tears or near tears and it was a wildly emotional and incredibly -- i did not see it coming. hi daughter was worried but my going back to the island because the book is unblinking in it's a assessment of the place and there are things -- episodes covered in the narrative about which tangier men are uncomfortable, they sensitive. and my daughter had worried that the reading might end like the

wickerman, but in fact it did not happen. just the opposite. >> thank you very much. >> hi. i watched the recording of the cbs this morning show about your book and the island last night, and the mayor was interviewed, and at least according to that interview, he still believes that wave erosion and not climbed change and sea level rising is the main reason for loss of the island. in the also talked about his religious and political police officers, and i think he said he spoke to the president about the island and so i'm just curious, without spoiling your own book, do you in a certain way feel like maybe the tanagermen or their own enemy preventing saving the island compared to what is going on in maryland?

>> no, i don't. it's september man particular there's in such a bad place, what you call is it almost immaterial. they need salvation but the salvation would take the same form whether you believe it's wave erosion or its sea level rise. to me the science iser refutable and i suspect that is the way most people in this room feel. i think that one of the problems that tangier mean have in accepting is it's a society driven by personal observation they don't see it. the reason they don't see it in part is because they live on an. it's a marsh, you don't eave should shoreline in which to watch wart advances. the marsh drowns and uplean

turns slowly to marsh and there's a slow evolution, i if you're watching day-to-day you don't see. it is sneaky. and so i think they -- there's that. there's the whole nature of how they came by this idea that can't be sea level rise. just through personal observation. the second thing is that they have a deep distrust of scientists, whom they have disagreed with for generations over the blue crab. whether it's a chesapeake bay foundation or the state of virginia, anytime they have an interface with the marine biologist, it seems to go badly. tangier men tend to view them as a bunch only college boys who don't nope that water is wet, and so there's that, too.

and part of the dilemma that faces tangier is the water isn't just rising. the island is actually subsiding into the crust of the earth, of which it is a part, subsiding into the mantle below and it's happening all around the chesapeake, and this one-two punch of land going down and water coming up gives us some of the highest relative sea level rise on the planet. especially down at the south end of the bay. and you tell that to tangier communicate he is going to have hard time accepting that because this ice age supposedly ended 11,000 years ago and as a biblical littallist he believes the earth to be 6,000 years old so this does not square. all of these things combined into a severe doubt about what science is saying about what is going on with our oceans and i

really think that if you were to get, again, a bunch of tangier men up in helicopters to hover over the island and look down and see what i it's doing, the island is being eaten from the inside out, that would be transformative. >> thank you. >> you bet. yes, ma'am. >> hi. thank you very much for your talk and your book. i haven't read it yet but what i'm understanding from you is that there may be a variety of different opinions about what is causing the erosion or sea level rise and how they term that, but what i want to ask -- >> you mean on the island? >> yes. >> i -- just one opinion. it's pretty wall to wall. >> so, sea level rise and increasing co2?

on the island it's just the opposite. the island sees this is a strictly wind-driven waves can erosion been going on since day one, as long as there's been a tangier. >> but they also see that the island is starting to dissolve beneath them. >> the thing -- not really, no, because, again, they dent have the perspective necessary to see that. just in terms of height. if you point out to islanders that astronomical high tides bring the water percolating into the ground to turn yards into ponds. they'll respond by saying, well, that's not sea level rise, that's flooding. so it's a see man tick battle and -- semantic battle and we're at the wind where it's moot. it doesn't matter at all.

what does matter, and i don't anyone hijack your question but you have me on a roll here. what does matter is that tangier is the canary in a coal mine. the fact it the plight is there, and this is a playing that's going to be shared by all of us, no matter where we live, in the not distant future. we're looking at a projected two feet rise in sea levels in the bay by 2050, which is tomorrow, and there's just not being -- not a lot being done to prepare for it. so what you see happening on tangier today, this disillusion of the place, and make no mistake, it's coming on fast. tangier has 20, maybe 25 years. it's going to be visiting a neighborhood near you or your neighborhood real soon.

and it's -- so, a lot of people have gotten hung on the fact that tangier refuses to use the same nomen clay tour that the scientists. do i'm arguing, who carolina. >> i'm from norfolk, and it seems norfolk is in somewhat the same position. so, there are a lot of coastal areas in addition to islanded that are facing the same issue, and it seems that there could be some -- first of all, there's a commonality of land going away, value of homes going away, being faced with retreat, and it seems that these areas could unite and push for change towards the cause of sea level rise.

>> i hope -- >> rather it's sub subsidence but we have increasing co2 causing sea level rise. he guess my question but your population is, is there any motion towards action other than asking the government for funds to assist their island? >> what kind of action do you mean? >> so i think in terms of causes. so, co2, could they unite, say, with norfolk and other coastal communities, to try to push the government for positive action in limiting our co2 emission and greenhouse gas emission. >> i imagine they could but we're talking 460 people and a lump of mud in the middle of the bay, and -- >> a number of children who experienced a shooting in their community and they made quite a

vocal response that people listened to expect -- felt because it's just human empathy. >> i agree. >> preface to a question. some years ago, decades ago, far north of here in was place getting hammer bed erosion and very pretty cliffs were coming down, and the corps of engineers said it had a plan, and they were public hearings, and the plan was to cover these cliffs with some sort of concrete or i think think it was fiberglas, and someone got up in a public meeting and said, but gayhead is adored because of the variegated

colors and the corps of engineer said we can make the fiberglas any color you like. my question is, the corps has exhibited, shall i say, insensitivity to people on the ground or in the marsh or on the islands in the past. it has been -- it competence as been doubted. if we don't trust the corps to know what to do, who do we trust and who is likely to be, in the scientific community or government community, parties who the island will trust to do something? that is to say, someone needs a plan. the islanders need to suck it up and accept a plan and go along with something, but the trust has to be built between the government community and the sciencety community think island

community, which itself may be -- may have veriations of opinion, but there was a question the there. i don't know -- >> well, yeah. if not the corps, who do we trust or who do they trust? who do they turn to? i don't think that -- i mean, i'm not engineer, but the corps has demonstrated at pauper island it's concept for tangier is viable. they could do it. the question is one of money. i was told by the folks who presented it to the tangiermen that they expected it would run about $800 million, now. when you're talking about putting that to congress and you are talk us about benefiting an island of 460 for that kind of

expenditure, as the corps also acknowledges, it's pretty likely that some congressman can figure out that, well, we can spend a tenth as much and give ann on the island a $200,000 home and help them relocate and we'll be fiscally conservative by doing so. so, money is the issue. it's not smarts. they've got a way that they could save tangier. now, you could argue, i guess, it would not be the same place if one of the possibles is that if it were built in cells like pauper island was, that tangier would be picked up as a block and moved to one of the first cells built, and then they'd left the town site where it is, riff to marsh.

that raise questions, is this really tangier anymore at that point? and concluder -- considering that one of the appealing thing is its direct connection to its origins, direct desk the past, people live in houses they're great-grandparents lived in and have been anywhere families for five, six, seven generation us. the streets have always run down the middle of the three ridges. nothing really has changed a heck of a lot since the civil war. it looks a lot like it did. there are golf carts now but otherwise, life on tangier is isn't a heck of 0 lot different than it was back then. so if you start messing with the infrastructure, with the actual physical layout of the island and the nature of the place, make it into a pretty new england fishing village, is that still tangier? you rearrange the houses so

they're not strung along ridges but in anise little clusters village, which would make far more sense, is that still tangier? that's the -- i don't know. but the big thing that the corps of engineers concept raises in terms of a question is, how do we decide what we save and what we surrender? because tangier is just the first of many hundreds of thousands of communities that will face the sort of existential $lema it does -- dilemma it does today, and given that, we won't have the money, means or the time to save them all. so, we face the horrible decision not only of deciding which we save and which we surrender, but maybe even the uglier question of, how do we decide how to decide? and that's where things will get

politically nasty, i have a feeling, going to be really difficult because you -- tangier, you can say it's easy, 460 people there, let it sink and a lot of people have said that to tangiermen in recent months but it's going to be tougher in other places and if you use head counsel as your sole criteria you're going to kiss off a lot of important places to us as a people. if tangier's story is important now, it's because it should serve as a wakeup call. this isn't an isolated case. this is coming to all of us, and we need to get busy. decide what we're going to do about it. >> we'll take the last two questions and then we'll be doing our signing, okay? thank you.

>> actually you kind of addressed my question there at the end because what i wanted to ask is, you ultimately this is going to be a policy decision. whether to save tangier, and if so, how to save tangier will be a policy decision, and i'm just wondering if this doesn't give us an opportunity -- as you said also, the canary in the coal mine, a policy decision that we're going to start facing often and in communities that are larger than tangier and more visible to, like, lower manhattan or florida, louisiana. and this gives us an opportunity -- just wondering what you think about this -- to try to figure out what are cite tia used to decide this? you talk but the numbers in tangier working against them in terms of about being bit saving

people. but what further works against that is what you talk about, the departures. these people -- if sea level rise stopped tomorrow, there probably going to keep leaving the eland and then you'll get to a tipping point. just not enough people to make the island function. so, looking far out, is it -- it's not really about people anyway if this departure continues, and you mentioned the sea life and the bird life on the popular island, what was idea to save that. i seems like it's going to come down to what does it cost and what are we save big spending that and how much times over and over can we do that over the next 50 years. and i know -- it's obvious you have great affection for the people in the community, which is why this is

such a wonderful gift, because if the island is underwater, your book will still be there. but openly it does come down the he green eye shade decision and what are the cite year and? what do we weigh. >> that's where it gets ugly because it requires you thank you quantify what we value, what is important to us? and i'm not even going to try to to figure at out. i don't know myself. changes from day to day. i'm like most people. but the -- on the question of tangier's population slide dooming them regardless of what happens, there's no question that two forms of erosion have the place in their grip, and i think a lot of tangiermen would argue that if it weren't impossible to sell a house on

tangier, which it's very difficult to do, as you can imagine, who wants to buy a house on a disappearing island. if it were -- if that were stable, if the place -- if potential home buyers or immigrants knew that it was going to be round for a while, they would not be suffering the slide to the degree they are. if young people knew their home town had a future, they wouldn't be abandoning it to the extent they do. no question, the demographics will continue as they have. the population ages by the year. there are an awful lot of tangiermen in their 80s and 90s, very few of child-bearing he age act least compared to the past when the was a baby factory, and -- but i think most islanders would tell you that has action sell rated like sea level rise with the passage of

time and that possible to pull back from the abyss dem -- demographically. >> a push for people to -- the pull for people to leave and the push for -- >> why stick around. even if you're a successful, what do you have to show for it after 20 years when you don't have a home town anymore and don't have a home? it's a difficult -- it's a rotten situation. >> my wife and i visited tangier island a few weeks ago now and on the boat on the way out, i was excited to see the watermen and excited to see the economy that had friend up around crabbing and oystering, but i actually didn't see much of that, and most of the economic activity i saw was actually built around tourism, and i

don't know if it was the time we were there. we may have been there when everyone was out but what effect does tourism have on the island and its call tour and economy, for better or worse? >> let me ask you, what boat did you good over on? >> oh -- >> what town. >> out of chrisfield. >> on the mail boat? >> no. we went over on the -- one of the regulars. >> you were over there for three and a half, hour hours. >> that's right. >> stephen thomas pulled out at chris feel at 12:30. >> that's right and we got in at 12:30 and out there for about three hours and then came back. >> well, while you were there, most of the men were out on their boats, so -- the industry was cooking along. it was out where it actually does its work. i think tourism has been great for tangier in many ways.

the island has a wonderful museum that if you go to tangier for no other reason, it's worth going to check out the museum, in indication to capturing island history, does a nice and very clear-eyed job of capturing its current dilemma, but the problem with tourism is that the money from it stays in relatively few hands. you've got -- it's provided a lot of jobs for women, who did not have viable means to make a living before. there is -- that's good. but when you -- away from the restaurant staff and you have five island restaurants, only one of them ohm year-around this others open five months. you take away the wait staff and the cooks at the restaurants, the women who drive tour buggies

which elongated golf carts you can get a narrated ten-miniature of the island. you have run the -- that's the extent of the effect that tourism has on the population at large. otherwise it states in the hands of the folks actually running and owning the businesses. >> do you have any idea in terms of the domestic product for it, like what portion of that is tourism versus what portion is still -- >> i think tourism is still pretty small. part of it is that on the one hand, the restaurants make out very well from day trippers, but they don't stick around in the island long enough spend money besides lunch. a lot of lunches are sold but crabbing and tugboating remain the biggest sources of income. >> great. thank you. >> you bet. [applause]

>> i just want to thank you again and to remind everyone that at the becomes are behind the front counter if you want to purchase one, and if you want to get your book sign, lineup a nice and orderly line and we'll be happy to do that for you. thank you again. i was a amazing. >> thank you, everybody. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. every weekend we bring you off her to talks and interviews from around the country. for a complete division schedule visit booktv.org. >> book tv were at the national press club's become fair in washington, dc and spoke with elaine weiss about suffrage history. >> the woman's hour is the name of the