(mellow music) - [Presenter] A special presentation of WORLD and WHRO Public Media.

(ethereal music) (birds chirping) (motor buzzing) - [Lynn Gayle] I often refer to the Eastern Shore of Virginia as the last frontier of the eastern seaboard.

- [Bo Lusk] The Eastern Shore is nestled right in a narrow sliver of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Chesapeake Bay.

- [Buck Doughty] It's wild and natural, and it's historic, it's spiritual.

It's a home.

- [Saxis Resident] I love it because I love the people.

You get in trouble and they're there for you.

(horses neighing) - [Cora Baird] The Pony Swim, the Wachapreague Carnival that's right on the coast, all of our various oyster roasts, they are places where our close-knit community and the land come together.

(pensive music) (thunder booming) (pensive music) - Virginia in the US is experiencing the second highest rates of sea-level rise.

The only place that beats us right now is the Mississippi River Delta.

- Talking to farmers, talking to watermen, everybody on the Eastern Shore, regardless of what they attribute it to, they see all these changes.

We have not had any issue of people saying we don't believe in what you're talking about or we don't think this is happening.

(water rustling) - We're getting more and more flood dates, and those high tides are getting higher, and the low tides aren't going as low, and it's just becoming more and more of an issue.

- You know, at this point, it's like, it is day to day, and so it's much more of like, what are we going to do about this and how are we gonna make this work?

(thunder booming) (pensive music) - [Presenter] Funding for Local, USA is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and by Wyncote Foundation.

(water roaring) (melancholy music) (oysters rattling) (melancholy music) - I love this place.

You know, every day, you go to bed, you feel tired, you're wet, exhausted, but you could see the results of your work.

And one of the cool things that people don't know, besides the fact that, you know, oysters clean up the bays and they're good for the environment, is that it's like wine.

There's different flavors to oysters.

You get oyster about 100 yards away, and they can taste completely different just because the nutrients and the algae and the waters that are by them.

So it's almost like the Napa Valley of oysters here.

They give me an opportunity to really introduce that concept to people, you know, just from a small boat.

(oysters rattling) (oysters rattling) (animals squawking) (animals squeaking) - Born and raised here, yep.

I love my job, I love to do it.

If we're catching crabs, it's seven days a week.

- Bring that out and open that door.

Water business has been a struggle, I'll be honest with you.

But I wouldn't change nothing if I had it to do all over again.

- Every time we have a two, three, four-week freeze in the winter, we do good here.

You know, you can stay home and survive, but we've just not had any winters the past three or four years.

When things fall off and you can't make a living here, we have to travel to Newport News, to James River.

Crabs live better over there.

(car revving) It's not something I want to do, for sure.

(introspective music) We get up at two.

We're on the road at three.

Five hours driving time round-trip.

(introspective music) We work till twelve, one o'clock.

Then we come on back home and we process the peelers here, and I'll get back home anywhere from seven to nine, and we get up and do it all over again.

It's unreal what's happened in 40 years.

I don't know, I'm no scientist, so I'm just going on years of experience and trying to figure it out.

(gentle music) (water bubbling) - Eelgrass is an underwater flowering grass, and it forms great big meadows.

There's all sorts of reasons we want to see a lot of eelgrass out there.

One of the biggest things is this huge habitat, if you're something like a tiny bay scallop or a little crab crawling around in there or fish that are looking for a place to hide.

And then physically it does a lot for our environment.

It's holding the sediment in place.

You know, if we had just a bare bottom without this carpet of grass on it, every time a storm came through, those waves would kick that sediment up.

That sediment might fill in our channels, or it might cover our oyster rocks.

(animals squeaking) (gentle music) (gentle music) - My father was a physician, but he always told me he didn't care what I did as long as I did it well and enjoy it.

And so when I went to college, I followed the path that would ensure that I could spend the rest of my life working outdoors.

So I became a farmer.

- Then some of the issues- And I came home from college and said I wanted to farm and start moving forward to making an operation or living for myself.

I remember just in the other room here growing up playing with little die-cast tractors and playing on the carpet.

I call it carpet farming, and I hope my son or my daughter does the same.

- We're growing a combination of soybeans, wheat, and corn.

We're right here next to Metompkin Bay, and, you know, I've been working this farm here for over 30 years.

And throughout the season, we know we're gonna have several high tides, and at that time, the water will come up into this portion of the field and a couple of other little places around the edges here.

It's salt water, and the salt gets into the soil, renders it totally useless for our crop production.

Routinely, at certain times a year, you can see the salt stains on top of the ground.

I used to plant them years ago, and now just I don't even bother to go through it.

We can only anticipate that it's gonna encroach in the field more in the future.

(jaunty music) - I'm a small farm.

I grow a mix of vegetables, herbs.

I do cut flowers, melons, and then, of course, a lot of the perennial berries, nuts, and fruit trees.

When I started out here, the ground was just hard as a rock.

So I immediately started to just cover crop, you know, use hand tools and rebuild the soil.

My background is actually in IT.

I was doing some work in East Africa.

I think 60% of the people there depend on agriculture, and so it was just good to kind of see how they survived off the land and also just the way that they farmed.

And after that experience, I ended up going back to school and getting my master's in practicing sustainable development.

Seven years later now, I have a farm business.

Highway 13 just runs parallel to this hoop house.

And so when we get the heavy rains, it's designed to run off of the highway, and then that water ends up draining down on my fields.

And I've had times in here where I've been standing in a foot of water inside my hoop house.

(ethereal music) You know, I've lost ginger in here one year that was growing beautifully, and then it just got, the ground just got too saturated.

Organic baby ginger can sell for as much as like $15 a pound.

So that was a devastating loss.

I definitely think about, you know, the impact of more severe storms, you know, the continued rise of sea levels.

It's possible that in my lifetime not being able to farm out here on the Eastern Shore.

(somber music) - Climate change is causing storms to increase.

Not only the number of storms, but also the intensity of storms.

So we're getting more storms and those storms are stronger, and you have this background of increased sea level and rising seas.

It's just gonna be, it's gonna be a problem.

(water splattering) - The weather, of course, I'll look at it first thing in the morning, and if they're calling for a chance of rain, you know, I'll start going to the NOAA website and follow it, and then as it gets closer, I'll go to AccuWeather.

You know, we are one storm away from a disaster.

(thunder booming) (water rushing) (somber music) - In 1933, there was an unnamed hurricane that came up the Mid-Atlantic coast affecting coastal communities all along the way, including those on the barrier islands of Virginia's Eastern Shore.

It overwashed the islands, including the communities on the islands where some people were living.

It was really the last straw for a few people who were still trying to live out on the barrier islands in the face of these coastal storms, and it made them decide to finally move over here to the mainland.

(birds chirping) - It was a lot of land.

It was miles wide back in the day, and now it's only about maybe a quarter-mile.

My great-grandparents' house would sit right about there in that little grove.

(pensive music) Broadwater is a small town on Hog Island, at the south end of the island.

About 200 to 250 residences over there at any given time.

Had their school, they had their church.

Remember my dad telling me, during the storm of '33, he was actually out of town, and they came back and the storm was raging.

He said it was terrible.

He remembered the island being all torn to pieces and all the stress of everybody, you know, trying to fix everything.

After the storm of '33, the government basically told them they couldn't keep them safe out there with the way the island was washing away.

The back half of that church was actually brought over from Hog Island.

And it was brought over on the oyster monitors, and they're like a flat barge.

They tied a couple of these together to carry a lot of these houses over.

Catch the tide and the wind right, and they would pull it over with these little small 15-horse motor.

(pensive music) (pensive music) - The majority of the Eastern Shore lies at or below six meters of sea level, which is 18 feet, and that's kind of the danger zone.

- Barrier islands are beaches offshore that slow down the ocean's energy and allow vast coastal systems to exist.

(light music) - The barrier islands out there, they're moving in three different ways.

Some of them are eroding.

So they're basically standing still, and the front side is just being eaten away.

Some of them are migrating landward, so you can see them actually shifting.

And some of them are curving.

So if they're like this, the land's here and the ocean's here, they're actually like curving around like that.

- If the barrier islands weren't there, we would have waves breaking on the mainland, and we wouldn't have any of the vast coastal areas like salt marshes that give us the rich fisheries and sense of identity that we have here on the Eastern Shore.

(pensive music) - I grew up here in the '50s, and I don't remember any issues with high tide or anything like that getting on and off the island.

After retiring and coming back here around 2010 or so in the last 15 years, you start to realize and you see the high tides occurring that are not in hurricane season, that you need to plan around these things.

And so when people come in the house to play cards or visit from off the island, I say, "The next high tide and the way the wind's blowing, it's gonna probably be across the road on the north end of the island that you're gonna have to drive through to leave, and if you don't want to drive through a foot of tidewater, don't wait till high tide to leave."

And they go, "Are you kidding me?

", and I say, "No."

It's basically how long before we have to leave the island.

The causeway across the marsh, it's about five miles to Sanford, and three of it are in the open marsh.

And they're working on it now trying to replace the culverts under the roadway, hoping that that's gonna allow the tidewater to move from one side of the road to the other instead of piling up on one side.

(gravel rustling) And after they replace all those culverts, I'm wondering if that's gonna matter.

Well, what they're doing in effect is tearing up the road.

- Well, I know they're on number eight, and they got six more left to do.

And the idea is, some of the guys that I talked to over at Richmond, they would follow through with the asphalt road.

And in my hopes, I hope it works, a lot of money invested, and that's really about all I can tell you.

(tense music) - At least once a month, it's across the road.

I don't think anybody's moved off of Saxis to avoid that.

They've just had their house raised.

And a couple of older ladies who are in their 90s, they've been flooded three times in the last 15 years, and they've never left home.

- Tide came up in here.

I was nervous and scared because, you know, I've been through it before and I know what it does.

We heard it was coming so we took up things, you know, before that, what we could take up.

And then we just waited till it went down, you know, the water went down.

A lot of cleaning up to do afterwards.

It used to be it was just hurricanes, but now it seem like it's when, you know, a heavy storm, like wind, and especially if the wind's west here.

If the wind's west, we usually get it.

When I moved here, tide never been here.

I'd never moved here (laughs) if it did.

(tense music) (water rushing) - What I see now, it's sad because you're gonna have to spend a lot of money to save this place, and the people of Saxis don't have it.

Every time we have a high tide and the wind comes right into the west, the westerly wind is the killer here.

It just cuts it right on down the beach.

I mean, we had cinder blocks up here, in Floyd, I think it was.

That was before Sandy.

And when we had that westerly wind, it took the cinder blocks as far as you can see.

- I'm kind of hoping we'll get some kind of seawall here eventually.

If not for me, the younger generations that are coming up here.

I'd like for it to stay Saxis for a long time, but at this rate, it's terrible.

You probably lose two to three foot a year.

And that's with no hurricanes.

That's just your normal winter storms, you know.

And it's nothing you can do about it.

It's mother nature, you can't push her back.

It is what it is.

(introspective music) - I worry about my son, my grandson.

What's it going to come down to?

I mean, I've seen a lot happen here in the last 10-15 years, and it's only getting worse.

I mean, is this place gonna be here?

Is the seafood business gonna be here?

I don't know.

- [M.K.

Miles III] I tell my kids and grandkids, "I don't know, I'm gonna leave this house to you, but I don't know if you're gonna be able to use it."

- It did not look like this when I was growing up.

I grew up on the shore.

I left for 10 or 15 years to go to college and graduate school and do things before I moved back here for this job to do research here, and it's really noticeable how much more the streets flood, how much more the marinas flood.

It's getting shockingly normal.

(laughs) (gentle music) Even though I'm someone who constantly talks about sea-level rise and I show people models and, you know, we look at all these graphics and we do community resilience projects, I ended up getting a house that I probably should not have, and we're talking about like 5-year horizon, 10-year horizon for moving out of that house.

Because I grew up on a farm near the water on the seaside, and that sense of connection to the land and heritage, like I just needed it.

And I had to explain it.

My husband's not from here, but eventually as he lived here, he started to feel it also.

And so we were making assessments based on sea-level rise and flooding, but we were also looking at how far it is from my husband's job, how far it is from my job.

Do we have a view?

Can we keep a boat nearby?

And so once you put all those things together, there are not that many real estate options on the Eastern Shore.

There's not a ton of houses.

And so ultimately the one that was the best out of all those choices was one where we can't stay there very long.

- I've noticed the seasons here are like kind of shifting.

Spring seems a little longer, stays a little cooler, and the winter seems a little shorter.

It was last year where it might be a high tide in the middle of the day or something.

It just keeps the water even higher and it's not draining off, and we can get a Friday off.

And then the weekend comes and then still the water hasn't gone down, 'cause Eastern Shore here, the water table's really high, there's not much space, so we get a Monday off and then we get a Tuesday off.

And it turns into weather days, into remote learning.

(dog barking) What's the weather been like lately?

Has it been real sunny lately?

- No, cloudy.

- Rainy.

- I hear people say cloudy, rainy.

Briar, anything?

- [Briar] It's supposed to be warm today.

- "Supposed to be warm today," she says.

I thought it was gonna be warm weeks ago.

The weather sure is kind of all over the place.

Thumbs up or thumbs down, we gonna go outside for recess today?

I like, I hope so, but Caden's like you never know when a storm's gonna roll through around here, right?

Eastern Shore, the weather can get wild, but, Caden, I think we can hopefully bet on going outside.

(stirring music) - Straight ahead, but following this little trail.

All right, we're good.

(pipe hissing) So what we're trying to do is we're trying to pull out a marsh sickle.

Got it.

- There you go.

- Come on, it was not that easy.

I loosened it up for you.

- No, really- - We know how much sea level is rising per year, and we want to know is the marsh building up at the same rate that sea level is rising.

So that gives us a chance to say, is this marsh keeping pace with sea level?

We know that marsh elevation is increasing some 'cause plant growth is increasing it.

And we know that sea levels are rising, but sea levels are rising faster and faster and faster.

And so if those rates of growth start to diverge, then at some point, the water's gonna rise fast enough that it could overtake the marsh if the marsh can't move inland fast enough.

(pensive music) - That little top of trees right over there, they're spindly, they're getting weak and dying back, and there's a lot of ghost forests underneath of it.

That used to be as rich as that one over there.

We used to camp over there and hike that little forest, and all of this like just dead wood all up in there now.

- A ghost forest is an area along the coast where we see things like standing dead trees.

We see the signs that there was once a vibrant forest there, but the forest has died back and the trees have stopped growing because they're being killed off by salt water.

We see lots of tall sort of silver or white trees where the bark has fallen off, and they just slowly crumble in place and fall.

And then eventually what we see is a salt marsh that has either stumps or holes in it, and those are where the trees used to be.

We have a major experiment set up to look at how ghost forests form and why they're forming, and we've actually had to change the design of that experiment because they were forming faster than we thought they would.

(introspective music) (introspective music) - It got hot in late March and early April, and then the end of April and May, it cooled right back off again, and it was almost as if winter had set back in.

And we had a thick thatch cover crop on this farm that basically was a host for cool wet damp conditions, which is where slugs thrive and grow pretty well.

We saw that the seed itself actually had like black lesions, black spots on it, dark freckles, shall we say, and that was where a slug had basically chewed the seed and killed it.

- The slug infestation was epic in my opinion because it affected a large area and quite a few producers.

All total, we planted 150 acres of soybeans.

You see them out in your yard or on your patio and you pour salt on them, that'll kill them.

You know, we don't have that option.

(laughs) (tense music) - If you look, you can see darker green areas and then light dirt patches.

Well, the dirt patches is where we had to go back through with the planter a second time and plant.

We had to kind of stop and just walk away and let it get warm, and now that it's warm, we will come back and try and get it all back into shape and replant the way we'd like to.

I could leave this potentially, and maybe it will produce enough to break even.

But I'm not farming to break even.

I'm farming to try and make money.

(tense music) (cars whooshing) - Honestly, I want to kind make an impact to sustain future for family and this community.

We're getting more instance where the water table is coming up and really affecting some of the wastewater treatment systems we have here, really affecting runoff pollution.

And that's all going into the bay.

Without clean water, it's gonna be pretty hard to grow oysters, right?

(people chattering) So at the Accomac-Northampton Planning District Commission, we do a lot of community projects that involve climate resilience, that involve housing, that involves pollution abatement.

(introspective music) (introspective music) (pensive music) (birds chirping) - Yes, ma'am.

- Okay, I'm having a problem.

Because my septic is leaking, and what do I need to do, get it pumped out or what?

- Is it a new system?

- No.

- No.

- It is not a new system.

- Well, see, the first time they put it down, they had to put pipe down, were way too small.

All that pipe, they had to leave down there, then go around, put same pipe back down again.

- Wow.

- Oh.

- [Makemie Park Resident] Put it down bigger.

- I go to church here so whenever there's a bad rain and we get those Nor'easters, this thing floods, and I've noticed it's getting higher and higher and higher.

Have you seen the same thing going on, you know, since you've been here?

- Years, it's been going on.

- Sure.

- [Makemie Park Resident] It's been doing that for years.

- And that's one reason why this project's so important.

Essentially what's going on, and the Mid-Atlantic's one of the fastest growing places where there's sea-water encroachment.

And when you have that sea water-encroachment, you're gonna have the water table getting higher and higher.

What you can see is a lot of those old septic systems are gonna be more and more ineffective, and that's why we need those high-mound systems.

If you can't get it off that water table, it's not gonna do anything.

You know where all that's going, all that waste water's going?

It's going to your lawns, it's going to your creeks, it's going to your bays.

(reflective music) We have a disproportionate level of elderly, of minority populations, of low-income populations here on the shore, and I'd say vast majority of them are not hooked up to mainline sewer.

So there's a heavy, heavy reliance on onsite sewage systems, on septic systems for everybody in the community.

It's difficult to put traditional systems here.

- Right, this whole area is flood-zoned, so it's not approved by the Health Department, yeah.

- It definitely puts a higher burden on you, doesn't it, kind of?

- On the residents, yes.

- On the homeowner.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yes, it really does.

- On the Eastern Shore, we have the lightest soils in the State of Virginia.

We're not like Northern Virginia with clay soils.

It's mainly sandy soil.

So the water flies through this ground, so it's really imperative that we treat our sewage to the highest, you know, degree we can.

(pensive music) During the wettest times of the year or during periodic saturation, you could have gurgling in the commodes inside because it will not flush into the ground.

In other words, the worst time of the year, we're trying to be above that and treat the sewage to the nth degree, then dispose of it.

So it'll work year-round, not just during the dry summer months.

- [Kellen Singleton] We saw raw sewage actually on the surface, and the Makemie Park systems, you could smell it.

It is a huge issue.

You know, there's a lot of kids over there, you know, a lot of old folks, and, you know, they're vulnerable to things like that.

And, you know, we all have a responsibility to take care of it.

Our project's covering 26 houses.

We've already installed 21 of those, and we're about to finish up the last 5 here.

And I think it's great work that we're doing there, making up for a lot of the things that have happened that haven't been completely fair.

(contemplative music) - I was getting some things straight with my deed, and while I was waiting, I just happened to notice this book (laughs) on the shelf, The book of freed Negroes, it just caught my attention and so I opened it up.

(laughs) And I recognized a lot of the last names, you know, of people that are still around today, some even from my family.

Today, there's descendants from white folks with the same last names as like the Black folks, and I think there's disparities in terms of those who own land today and that, you know, some of it goes back to this period.

- In the 1920s, Blacks owned at least 50 to 60% of the land in Virginia.

And so there was a systematic effort to take that land, and there were all kinds of laws that were passed that would eventually try to take land.

A lot was taken through eminent domain.

Look at the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

That was to pay farmers not to produce on the land.

So what happened to the Black sharecroppers?

They were told, "Leave the land.

We don't need your labor anymore."

Tenant farmers, the same thing.

- Right now, by demographics, Northampton County is close to like 40% African-American, but again, when you look at the land ownership and the amount of those that are actual classified as producers, we're less than like 1% of the agricultural producers.

You know, so that is frustrating.

So my plan is to actually have a community space, where if I can continue to train people and get a system going where I've been able to mentor lots of young farmers, that would be good.

(gentle music) - We went for almost 70 years of these huge areas that used to be these big verdant carpeted grass beds to being nothing but muddy bottom.

In the late '90s though, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science started trying to figure out how to bring eelgrass back to Virginia's coastal bays.

They developed the technique that we use today.

So since about 2003, we've been using volunteers to help gather seeds and cure those seeds so that they're ready to plant every fall to bring this stuff back.

We've gone from 70 years of having no eelgrass on the seaside to planting a little over 600 acres of grass, and that 600 acres of grass is so happy that it's spread to about 10,000 acres all on its own.

(gentle music) The reason for this project behind us is to grow essentially living breakwaters made out of oyster reefs that will help to protect this eroding marsh shoreline behind me.

Overall, our seas are rising.

Sea temperatures are getting warmer.

So maintaining the width of this marsh is really important to our low-lying coastal towns on the Eastern Shore.

When we have really big storms, our nice wide marshes, we depend on to protect us from all that storm energy.

We've got a couple of what are called alternative oyster substrates here.

So that's just anything an oyster can grow on that's not another shell.

So we have more oysters out here working to clean the water.

We have oyster reefs that are great fish production habitat.

So instead of going out, we're gonna stay up, yeah, right there.

So by building these reefs here, we can help maintain the width of these marshes by helping to slow down or maybe even totally stop the erosion.

(serene music) - We went into a drought spell in August.

The drought hurt the soybeans, and now that we're harvesting them, it's below average.

It'll have an adverse effect financially 'cause we have to tighten up and pay all our bills and make sure we're prepared for next year's crop.

And it'll change how we may do some advanced purchasing.

(pensive music) - Next year, I'll probably increase corn acres.

Corn has been what's sort of paying our bills more, and not only that, that's really what these chicken operations want, I would say.

This year's harvest on our corn crop is running really, really well.

It's a lot more than I had expected and anticipated.

Just like playing a game of poker, you could have a really good hand but the pot may not be much, or you could have a really bad hand and the pot be worth a lot more.

You just never know.

(corn hissing) (mellow music) - I think for people that are descendants of Africa, they've had that connection severed from agriculture, and to me, that's one of the biggest tragedies because agriculture historically has played such a huge part into our everyday being.

My vision is to have a space that does agritourism, so it allows people to come out from the city, experience a day, you know, in the life of a farmer.

And if they want to put their hands in the soil and help, you know, with some of my garden plots or maybe even spend the night, they'll be able to do that.

- Plants out there and then life too as well.

- Yeah, transfer energy, I definitely believe in that.

- Yes.

- Being out here has been, oh my God.

- It's been that, right?

- I can literally just pick up something off the ground, put it right in my mouth.

- That's right, right, and it's so enriching, right?

Yeah.

- Mm-hmm.

(audience applauding) - Thelonius Cook's story is as unique as the operation he established on Virginia's Eastern Shore.

A commitment to preserving his history and heritage is evident in his management strategy, which integrates time-tested approaches with newer methods to make his 7.5 acre operation more climate-smart and productive.

Now it's my pleasure to present the USDA NRCS Civil Rights Advisory Committee Farmer of the Year Award.

Congratulations, there you go.

(audience applauding) - Dairy farm, that's what I want to do.

So like from here to that bee box- There was a time when, you know, the Eastern Shore was sort of like the bread basket of supplying produce, you know, truck crops they called them, to many of the metropolitan areas.

I believe it can return to that.

(Thelonius murmuring) - [Guest] What are these right here?

- [Thelonius Cook] That's like wild radish.

- [Guest] Wild radish.

- [Thelonius Cook] Yeah, that's actually edible too.

You can grab a little snippet of it there, a little bite.

See if he wants to put it in there.

(introspective music) (introspective music) (introspective music) (water lapping) (birds squawking) (rollicking guitar music) - Oh, yeah.

Then down low.

- It's hard to even envision what life's gonna be like on the Eastern Shore when John's an adult.

I know when I look at the climate scenarios and the sea-level rise scenarios, now I have a new specific timeline.

'Cause 2040, he's gonna be graduating from high school, and so now those 2040 predictions that sounded a long way off do not seem that far away.

(gentle music) (birds chirping) - I miss being on the water.

I miss the mud and the long days and the oysters, the clams.

But with the current position I'm in, I could make effectable change, you know, physical change, systematic change, lasting change.

So again, when she grows up, I want Jude to have a place that she could call home.

(uplifting music) - I don't, Daddy, don't push it back up.

- I'm not, you've graduated and you don't need me anymore.

I think my daughter would love to do this.

She always wants to go to work, always wants to come with me, and I say, "I'm going to the shop," and she's not too far behind.

Usually gets a little upset when she can't go out the door with me.

I hope my children want to farm.

That would be a dream of mine.

And I think that sea-level rise could have an impact, yes.

If it takes a certain percentage of our operation away that we're currently paying for, I mean, that's an impact that they'll have to figure out how to deal with and me along the way.

More land you farm, the better off you might possibly be.

So if you lose a certain percentage to sea-level rise, then that's an impact.

I hope that we can figure ways out in the future to help these impacts, to maybe make a crop out of it, whether it be the crops we're currently growing or maybe another crop.

The hope's though is that my kids would enjoy farming and that they would probably start the same way that I did, which would be on the carpet.

- Tractor, tractor, combine, tractor, truck, tractor.

(gentle music) (animals cheeping) (gentle music) (water rustling) (gentle music) - It's not like we're a community where no one has any of the gear they need in order to deal with water.

We have some of the knowledge, we have some of the equipment, and so everybody sort of maybe adapts a little bit more than you would expect.

But we do get forgotten.

People forget that we're here.

So that is definitely one of the challenges, especially since we don't have big vibrant cities, is how do we make the wheels squeak loud enough to have somebody pay attention to us?

It's sort of the classic story of like communities inordinately impacted by these big global processes.

- [Sands Gayle] The Chincoteague Pony Swim has been going on for about a hundred years now, and it is where they swim the ponies from one island over to Chincoteague for an auction to generate money for the Chincoteague Volunteer Fire Company.

(audience cheering and applauding) - I want to ride that white one.

- You want to ride the white one?

Was there a mean one too?

- Yeah.

- There was?

There was a bully.

- Yeah, two of them.

- There were two bullies?

(horses neighing) - You know, the Eastern Shore is, it's a spiritual place.

It's been a really, really good place to grow up.

You know, people tend to stay here for good.

My family's been here for 12 generations.

- There's a history here.

There's an attitude here.

There's a love for this place that we all have that somehow we're able to extend it to each other.

- If we lose a place like the Eastern Shore, I think we lose a little piece of America that we can never get back, and I don't think America would be America without a place like this.

(introspective music) (introspective music) (introspective music) (animals cheeping) - [Presenter] "Against The Current: Life On The Eastern Shore" is part of WORLD's My Home Is Here collection of stories from rural America.

Visit WORLD on YouTube to see the entire collection, including "Against the Current."

Join the conversation using #MyHomeIsHerePBS.

(introspective music) (introspective music) (introspective music) (introspective music) (introspective music) Funding for Local, USA is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and by Wyncote Foundation.

(bright music) (mellow music) - Climate change is causing storms to increase.

Not only the number of storms, but also the intensity of storms.

So we're getting more storms and those storms are stronger, and you have this background of increased sea level and rising seas.

It's just gonna be, it's gonna be a problem.

(water rushing) - [Donnie Porter, Sr.] Water business has been a struggle, I'll be honest with you.

- It's unreal what's happened in 40 years.

I don't know, I'm no scientist, so I'm just going on years of experience and trying to figure it out.

- Hi, I'm Lisa Godley, Executive Producer and Director of "Against the Current."

I had maybe been through the Eastern Shore traveling up to Maryland, but never stopped to get to know the people.

Amazing some of the things we saw.

These trees that are dying from the roots up because of the salt water that's seeping into the vegetation.

People say their freshwater ponds were turning into saltwater ponds, and they knew that because the marine life that once lived in the freshwater pond was no longer there.

- Thumbs up or thumbs down, we gonna go outside for recess today?

I like, I hope so, but Caden's like you never know when a storm's gonna roll through around here, right?

Eastern Shore, the weather can get wild, but, Caden, I think we can hopefully bet on going outside.

- [Lisa Godley] "Against the Current" is the story of Virginia's Eastern Shore and how climate change and sea-level rise is impacting the careers of the folks who call the Eastern Shore home.

There are traditional careers there, where people have been just, for families for generations have been doing one thing in terms of fishing or crabbing or farming.

And now their way of life is being impacted by these water levels rising, and they're wondering, how are their lives going to change, how is the future going to look like for themselves and their families if this keeps happening?

- And so when people come in the house to play cards or visit from off the island, I say, "The next high tide and the way the wind's blowing, it's gonna probably be across the road on the north end of the island that you're gonna have to drive through to leave, and if you don't want to drive through a foot of tidewater, don't wait till high tide to leave."

And they go, "Are you kidding me?

", and I say, "No."

It's basically how long before we have to leave the island.

- To be able to show people what they deal with each and every day has just been amazing to me.

We've been working on this for almost two years, and we have gotten to know some incredible people.

They're trying to come up with creative ways to take care of their community and to save their community, but it is going to be a challenge.

The world needs to know everything that's happening here because it's happening in coastal communities all across the country.

(light music)