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Earl Swift is Fellow of Virginia Humanities at the University of Virginia and New York Times' bestselling author of The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways, Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, and the new book Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings. Website: www.earlswift.com
Episode NotesDuring the conversation with Liz Clark, a book was referenced but at that time the title could not be recalled. The book is Earl Swift's Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.Additional resources recommended by Liz include:Kale Williams: The Loneliest Polar BearIan Urbina's The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed FrontierJeff Goodell's The Water Will ComeJill Heinerth's, Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver.Paul Nicklen's photography for beautiful, devastating images of how our ocean world is changing.
Episode Notes:During the conversation with Liz Clark, a book was referenced but at that time the title could not be recalled. The book is Earl Swift's Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island.Additional resources recommended by Liz include:Kale Williams: The Loneliest Polar BearIan Urbina's The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier Jeff Goodell's The Water Will ComeJill Heinerth's, Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver. Paul Nicklen's photography for beautiful, devastating images of how our ocean world is changing.
Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. He talks about the slow disappearance of this unique Virginia island to climate change.Support the show (https://www.southernenvironment.org)
Earl Swift is author of Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. In this episode Earl explains how the unique community in the Chesapeake Bay is struggling as the island disappears through a combination of erosion, subsidence, and rising seas from climate change. He talks about his time living on Tangier Island, the life of a watermen, and the iconic blue crab. Earl also discusses the reaction to his book and the difficult decisions around saving communities from climate change.
This is a conversation with best-selling author Earl Swift, whose latest book is titled "Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Water Men of Vanishing Tangier Island." This small island - located in the middle of some of the richest fishing waters in the world - is being rapidly engulfed by rising sea levels. Swift got to know some of the hearty souls who still live there.
Scientists believe Tangier Island, in the Virginia waters of the Chesapeake Bay, could vanish within the next 25 years. Two-thirds of Tangier's land mass has disappeared since the time of the Civil War, and in recent years sea-level rise caused by global warming took more acres from the island. Fewer than 500 people remain there. Many of them voted for Donald J. Trump, share his rejection of climate change as the reason for their existential challenge and insist that a seawall around the island would save it from further ----wave erosion.---- The deeply religious islanders have frequently been in the media spotlight, often the subject of derision and ridicule for their climate change denials and support of Trump. Journalist and author Earl Swift spent more than a year on Tangier, learning about the island way of life and the work of the watermen who've harvested blue crabs and oysters for generations. Swift has written an elegiac book about the place and the people who could well become the Chesapeake's first climate change refugees. The book is, ----Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island,---- published by Harper Collins.In this episode: A talk with Swift following his appearance at the 2018 Baltimore Book Festival; excerpts of a CBS News report, a Stephen Colbert monologue and ----Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.----
First, ODU economist Robert McNab will help us make sense of the latest developments in US trade policy. Then we will talk to Earl Swift, author of Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. Finally, we'll check in with Mal Vincent to find out what's going on this week in Mal's World.
Tangier Island, Virginia, has been home for eight generations to a unique community of now some 470 hardy souls, many of whom make their living harvesting the region’s prized blue crab. But their island home -- a barely 2-acre sliver of mud and sand and grass in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay -- is fast disappearing beneath the waters. Whether the culprit is erosion by the Bay’s relentless currents, as most Islanders believe, or the rising sea levels scientists say have been triggered by global climate change, the outlook for Tangier Island and its people is bleak. Today, Midday senior producer and guest host Rob Sivak spends the hour with Virginia-based writer Earl Swift, a long-time reporter at the Virginia-Pilot who has spent more than 30 years writing about the Chesapeake region, and who has circumnavigated the Bay in his kayak. The Chesapeake is the setting of Swift's newest book -- his seventh -- which chronicles the daily lives and hopes of the Tangier Islanders, against a backdrop of environmental and political forces that seem beyond their control. The book is called Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island, published by Dey Street Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers).