This article is an abridged extract from Anne Helen Toomey’s new book, Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy, published in December 2024 by Island Press.Order a copy by clicking here.
Tangier Island is a small island in the Chesapeake Bay off the eastern coast of the United States, part of the state of Virginia. For centuries, the island was used by the Pocomoke peoples for oystering, fishing, and possibly as a seasonal settlement. In the 18th century, the island was homesteaded by white farmers, who established a community that eventually grew to approximately 1300 inhabitants by 1930.
Along with many islands in the Chesapeake Bay, Tangier Island is slowly being swallowed by the sea. Since 1850, two-thirds of the island’s landmass has disappeared, a trend that has been increasing due to erosion driven by sea level rise and increasing storms.
As the land has disappeared, so have many of the inhabitants; by 2021, the population of Tangier had dwindled to approximately 400 residents. Scientists say that climate change is the main culprit and predict that the island will be uninhabitable within the next few decades.
Unlike communities facing similar threats in the Pacific islands of Tuvalu, Nauru, and Kiribati, the residents of Tangier have not been spokespeople for climate action. To the contrary. Many of the residents of Tangier contest the idea of human-caused climate change and sea level rise and think that it is, if not quite a hoax, a distraction from the real issue of God-made erosion. If you travel to Tangier, you can stop by a gift shop and purchase a T-shirt that reads, “I refuse to be a climate change refugee.”
Scientists often understand that scientific knowledge on a particular issue is difficult to get across to nonexperts. It’s not always easy to explain the mechanisms of how things work, especially when those mechanisms are abstract, or beyond one’s personal experience.
But the impacts of climate change on Tangier Island are neither of these things. Residents have regular floods in their yards and in their homes. The level of the Chesapeake Bay has risen by approximately three feet in the last five hundred years, the number of intense storms has increased, and whole sections of the island have been lost along with the homes of many residents. Tangier is a place where climate change can be experienced in a visceral way.
But that is not how many Tangier residents see it. In 2017, the island became the center of a media storm when CNN filmed its mayor, James “Ooker” Eskridge, making a plea to then US president Donald Trump for help in shoring up their island. “They talk about a wall; we’ll take a wall,” said Eskridge, adding that he was a fan of Trump.
With much of the country still reeling from Trump’s election to office and his quick withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement, the subsequent public shaming was quick, witty, and mean. In the opening monologue of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in June 2017, Colbert made fun of the mayor’s faith in Trump to cut through red tape to protect the island, saying, “Trump is going to get them that wall and make the ocean pay for it!”
In another news satire program, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, a reporter visited Tangier Island to interview its residents, poking fun at the social, cultural, and religious differences between the islanders and her (presumably) more urban and liberal audience.
What was lost on the media, who often reported this story as a battle of conservative, religious viewpoints over liberal, science-based perspectives, was that the islanders of Tangier simply, and quite literally, saw things differently. When residents said it was erosion, not climate change, taking their island, they were not just being obstinate. They really meant it.
What Our Brains Do in the Shadows
Behavioural scientists often refer to our brains as “cognitive misers,” cheapskates when it comes to having to spend time or conscious thought on new ideas.
Being cognitive misers means that we often rely on almost anything besides brain effort to make sense of the world, and so we typically use mental shortcuts (often referred to as heuristics) to make rapid assessments about ideas about which we know very little.
Life without such heuristics would be exhausting—we would regularly spend hours pondering matters as trivial as what to have for breakfast or the best route to get to work. The use of such mental shortcuts can have costs, however. Specifically, they bias our decision-making processes, causing us to get stuff wrong.
Our cognitive stinginess means that we tend to rely heavily on previous experiences and stories that quickly come to mind for decision-making rather than taking the time needed for thoughtful deliberation.
We’re also prone to see patterns that aren’t there and to accept or refute new information without evidence. And “we” isn’t just other people—it is all of us, scientists included. Historians have argued that some of the most prominent examples of science losing its way have come about when the leading researchers at the time were biased toward one theory or approach, discounting others.
Another major influence in terms of how we interpret new information is related to our social networks and identities. Humans are social animals, and if we don’t know what to think about something, we often turn to those we trust to tell us what’s what. We are attuned to what is considered normal or acceptable in our social environments, and we instinctively know that acting in violation of such norms will have negative consequences.
Most such social obedience feels so natural that we don’t even realise we’re doing it. When faced with a novel situation, our brains will automatically and unconsciously make assumptions based on what we have most frequently encountered in the past and what “feels right” based on our social environments.
As an example – a 2012 study by Yale’s Cultural Cognition Project showed two separate groups of participants a video of people protesting and asked them whether they believed the protesters were acting lawfully or not. One group was told that the protest was against abortion rights, and the other that it was against the military’s then-existing position against openly LGBTQ+ soldiers.
The researchers found that participants’ political and cultural identities largely dictated how they interpreted the actions of the protesters. This tendency to interpret the same information differently, David McRaney argued in his book How Minds Change, is why we disagree so much and why such disagreements often seem to happen across different social identities (such as political ideologies).
The more complex and stressful the information, the more likely it is to be processed in parts of the brain such as the insula, ventral striatum, or amygdala (associated with emotions such as fear or pleasure) rather than in the prefrontal cortex (associated with rational thinking and deliberation). Research has found that we release cortisol, a hormone associated with stress and the fight-or-flight response, when our beliefs are threatened.
In a similar way, climate change was not a neutral concept to Tangier residents. For decades, they had been trying to raise awareness about the increasing rate of land loss to the sea. In fact, the islanders had been doing measurements of their own for more than a half century, calculating the loss of land from the ocean long before scientists arrived to talk about climate change. Erosion was part of the natural cycle of life, and the so-called enemy they knew, something that their parents and grandparents had dealt with and something that could be addressed in the future.
In contrast, climate change was a concept from the outside, promoted by the “come-heres” (“outsider” in the local dialect of the island) with whom the residents had little in common. It was human-caused and often used by liberal politicians to promote solutions such as carbon taxes and electric cars, but who offered little in terms of protecting coastlines. Whereas erosion could be addressed by shoring up the perimeter of their island—perhaps by a seawall—climate change meant the end of their island.
Furthermore, scientists had a poor track record as far as Tangier residents were concerned. The residents had a long and frustrating history trying to work with scientists and government officials to bring actionable solutions to address the loss of land. The first government study commissioned to look into the problem was conducted in the 1970s, and solutions to protect the island have typically been half measures that proceed at a glacial pace.
In 2017, when the press visited the island in droves to poke fun at the irony of a climate-denying island of soon-to-be climate refugees, islanders were waiting for construction of a promised rock jetty to begin. The jetty had first been proposed in the mid-1990s but had been mired for years in studies and red tape.
In his book Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Waterman of Vanishing Tangier Island, Earl Swift captured the frustration of the townspeople, epitomized in a conversation he had with Mayor Eskridge, who said, “They do studies, then they study the studies. I know that’s their procedure, but it gets frustrating. We’re at the point now that it’s like me coming across a family in a boat that’s sinking, and I say, ‘I’m going to rescue you, but I have to study it first.”
How a Hockey Stick Became a Boomerang
In 2017, with all the press attention on Tangier Island, Eskridge was invited to take part in a televised town hall on climate change, which featured former vice president Al Gore. Gore is most well known for raising awareness about climate change through the release of his award-winning documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
When An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, I was in a graduate program focused on environmental issues. I had already accepted the links between an increase in greenhouse gases and global temperatures, and my worldview was consistent with the policy recommendations that would inevitably stem from climate science—reductions in greenhouse gas emissions from polluting corporations and a focus on social responsibility for addressing the issue.
At the time, Gore’s film really resonated with me, and I remember thinking, “Wow, now everyone will know about this problem.” Gore was straightforwardly presenting the facts, even using graphs to prove his points. Who could dispute that?
Many people did. Conservative-leaning Americans saw Gore, a Democrat who lost the 2000 US presidential election and thus failed to advance his policies through government, make a film depicting a global environmental problem that could only be solved with sweeping policy change. More taxes. More environmental regulation. More public transportation. Hmm.
Such proposals were like those that had been promoted for decades by liberals, long before discussions of climate change took the national stage. Right-wing media mocked climate change action as an “Al Gore deal” and flouted the hypocrisy of his flying around the world to promote the issue, charging a hundred thousand dollars a pop for the pleasure of his telling people to reduce their carbon footprint. Climate change skeptics, with major funding by fossil fuels–supported right-wing think tanks, made it seem like the science was debatable.
In 1997, 52% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun, but by 2008, while the percentage of Democrats who agreed that global warming was occurring increased by 24 points, to 76%, for Republicans that percentage decreased by six points, to 42%.
Some scholars referred to this change as the “boomerang effect,” which is said to occur when a message designed to persuade has the opposite impact of that intended by the communicator. Rather than convincing conservative-leaning Americans that climate change was real and happening, the film and similar efforts to get the word out contributed to an increasing perception that the news about global warming was exaggerated.
Given this political climate, perhaps Gore would not be thought to be the best messenger to speak with a Tangier resident about climate change, yet that was precisely the setup when Eskridge was invited to ask a question of Gore at the televised town hall in the summer of 2017.
After explaining his background as a crabber with fifty years of experience on the water, Eskridge said, “I’m not a scientist, but I’m a keen observer. And if sea level rise is occurring, why am I not seeing signs of it? I mean our island is disappearing, but it’s because of erosion and not sea level rise and unless we get a sea wall we will lose our island. But back to the question: why am I not seeing signs of the sea level rise?”
Gore, perhaps assuming that Eskridge was just trying to give him a hard time, took the bait. He asked the mayor, pointedly, to what Eskridge attributed the disappearance of the island. When Eskridge replied that it was due to erosion caused by wave action and storms, Gore then asked, rather sceptically, “So you’re losing the island even though the waves haven’t increased?”
Yes, said Eskridge. He explained that erosion had been a constant part of life on Tangier ever since its formation. “If I see sea level rise occurring, I’ll shout it from the house top,” he said. “But I’m just not seeing it.”
When I interviewed Earl Swift, he lamented the lost opportunity for Gore to explain the difficulty of using anecdotal observation to perceive something as slow moving as sea level rise. As Swift told me, “The biggest problem in terms of the Tangier view assimilating with that of science is that a Tangier waterman has a different way of collecting data. Instead of the model favored by science, a Tangierman goes out on his boat every day and looks at the water. And that anecdotal style of data collection leads him to a completely different set of conclusions. Namely, he’s trying to gauge incremental change over the course of decades from the pitching deck of a tiny boat offshore.”
But just as Eskridge’s perspective made it impossible for him to see the sea rising up to swallow his island, neither could Gore see that the man in front of him was asking a valid question. Thus, instead of attempting to answer it, he told a parable about a man who, stranded in a flood, asked for the Lord to save him. As the flood waters rise, the man continuously rejects help from others, saying that “the Lord will provide.”
The man ends up drowning, and Gore concludes: “And I think that we have heaven sent, so to speak, enough solar energy in one hour to provide what the entire world uses for a full year. And from wind, we get 40 times as much energy as the entire world needs. We have the tools available now to solve this crisis. And whether you attribute what’s happening to Tangier to what the scientists say it’s due to or not, I’m assuming that if you could get cheaper electricity from the sun and the wind, that would be a pretty good deal for you, right?”
Yes, agreed Eskridge, and the town hall moved on to other matters. But the exchange was unsatisfactory at best. When Eskridge asked why he couldn’t “see” climate change, what kind of answer was he looking for? And although it was clear from the parable that Gore wanted Eskridge to think differently, what, specifically, did he want him to do differently?
The average Tangier resident uses less energy, lives in a smaller home, and drives far less than the average American. Perhaps the approximately 220 voting-age adults living on Tangier are not on Team Climate, but they also represent less than 0.00003% of Virginia’s population, making any attitudes of the islanders unlikely to determine the fate of any future energy policy in the state, let alone nationally. And pointing out that green energy will lead to cheaper electric bills might not be relevant to a community whose home is threatened with disappearance.
How could Gore, or anyone tasked with communicating the science of climate change, have answered Eskridge’s question differently? Read more in ‘Science with Impact: How to Engage People, Change Practice, and Influence Policy’, available here from Island Press.
Anne Helen Toomey is an associate professor of environmental studies and science at Pace University, and an affiliate researcher at both the University of Oregon’s Center for Science Communication Research and the American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation.
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