One afternoon last summer, off a tiny island in Virginia called Tangier, James Eskridge set out to rescue two fledgling ospreys. Their parents had nested on a duck-hunting platform that barely topped the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and a coming storm surge threatened to drown them. “I’ve seen a nest like this before,” Eskridge said. “We had a thunderstorm that night. When I went up there the next day, everything was gone.”

Eskridge, who is sixty, has been the mayor of Tangier for the past decade. Like most people on the island, he is an evangelical Christian; on his right forearm is a tattoo of a Jesus fish, on his left a Star of David. He has pale blue eyes, a Tom Selleck mustache, and deeply tanned, permanently windburned skin. No matter where you met him or what he was wearing, you would know that he had spent his life on the water. Like his grandfather, his father, and his eldest son, Eskridge has been a professional crabber since he graduated from high school. Nearly forty other men, in a community of four hundred and sixty, do the same. He likes to brag, and it’s not much of an exaggeration, that Tangier—located in the widest part of the Chesapeake, six miles south of the Virginia-Maryland border—“is the soft-shell capital of the world.” It’s the only place he has ever lived.

These days, it appears that he may outlive it. Tangier has lost two-thirds of its land since 1850. This is, in part, because of a ten-thousand-year-old phenomenon known as glacial rebound, which has caused the island to sink a millimetre or two each year. But the more urgent problem is a combination of storm-driven erosion and sea-level rise, which are both increasing as climate change advances; scientists who study the region estimate that sea-level rise is tripling or even quadrupling the rate of land loss. Without climate change, the island would have remained above water for perhaps another century; now the cutoff date is only a few decades away, if not sooner. David Schulte, a marine biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the co-author of a study in Nature’s Scientific Reports on Tangier’s fate, told me, “They are literally one storm away from being wiped out.”

Tangier Island in Chesapeake Bay.

Eskridge knows his island is in trouble, but, like many residents, he is doubtful of climate change and believes that the island can be defended. If it succumbs to anything, he told me, it will be to the same forces that have been shifting the sands of the bay “since John Smith landed here.” That afternoon, his first mate on his rescue mission was a skinny seventeen-year-old named Cameron Evans, a lifelong Tangierine with spiky hay-colored hair and stubble on his chin. When they reached the ospreys’ nest, Eskridge eased up alongside, close enough so that Evans could grab the fledglings. “Be careful, Cameron,” Eskridge said. “Don’t get clawed.” Though the birds had hatched only a month earlier, they already had five-foot wingspans and two-inch talons.

Evans maneuvered the first osprey, then the second, into a pair of large wooden boxes in the boat’s prow and covered each one with a towel. Their mother whistled angrily in the air above, aggressively flapping her wings. Another bird, apparently the father, joined her. “They don’t think so right now, but it’s for their own good,” Eskridge said. He whistled back to them, mimicking their calls. Then he turned toward shore, heading for his crab shanty, one of dozens of small wooden shacks built on pilings in Tangier’s only harbor.

On the way, Evans pointed toward the northern end of the island, an abandoned patch of shifting mudflats known as Uppards. “There used to be entire communities up here,” he said—Ruben Town, Canaan. They’d been submerged in the nineteen-thirties. Evans still visited Uppards occasionally; he makes money collecting flotsam and selling it to tourists (driftwood, turtle shells, bags of sea glass, Native American arrowheads), and he’d found good stuff amid the cracked foundations and toppled headstones. But he’d made some unpleasant discoveries, too. On an expedition a few years ago, he told me, he realized at one point that he was standing on the remains of an old casket. “I looked down and I saw the body,” he said. “I could see the ring on her finger.” As we left Uppards, Eskridge said, “Some folks don’t really like to go up and look. It’s an eye-opener of what can happen to the main community here if we don’t get the protection we need.”

Seen from the sky, Tangier Island has the shape of a broken heart. The town, which is set on three ridges separated by marshland and brackish creeks, occupies roughly a square mile. A quick tour by golf cart or motorbike will take you past a school, a baseball field, a health center, a water tower, an airstrip, a post office, a grocery store, two churches, four restaurants (only one in winter), and eleven cemeteries. Residents famously speak with an accent heard nowhere else in the world, said to originate with their eighteenth-century English ancestors. A flat tire is a “punched tar”; an unattractive person “ain’t hard favored”; if you almost fell off a boat, you “came nigh as peas.” In 1998, the town council voted unanimously to keep “Message in a Bottle,” a film starring Kevin Costner and Paul Newman, from being shot on Tangier, out of concern that all those outsiders—“come-heres,” in local parlance—would have a corrupting influence.

James Eskridge blames conservation groups and environmental-impact studies for hindering the infrastructure projects that he says his island needs in order to endure. Photograph by Steve Helber / AP

In the past year, the news of the land-loss crisis has brought waves of “come-heres” to Tangier, including reporters and tourists hoping to see the island before it’s gone. The flurry began in June, 2017, when a CNN reporter visited and talked to Eskridge, who appealed directly to President Trump. “They talk about a wall?” he said to the camera. “We’d like a wall all the way around Tangier.” A Trump staffer showed the CNN segment to the President, who decided to call him. “I was out crabbing,” Eskridge told me. “My son and some others came out and said, ‘You need to get home. The President is going to call you.’ I said, ‘President of what?’ They said, ‘Donald Trump is calling you.’ ”

“He was down to earth,” he recalled. “We talked about the working man, coal miners. He thanked us for our support. We got to talking about sea-level rise, and we were on the same page. He said if that was our only concern, we had nothing to worry about, because Tangier has been here for hundreds of years, and it will be here for hundreds more. But he also knows that we need help because of the erosion.” Trump’s chat with Eskridge became an international news story, even making an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” (“Trump is going to get them that wall—and then make the ocean pay for it!”)

The following month, CNN flew Eskridge and his wife to Manhattan for a televised town hall about climate change, hosted by Anderson Cooper and Al Gore. Eskridge found the encounter disappointing. “I asked a simple question,” he told me: If sea-level rise was occurring, why was he not seeing it firsthand? Gore, he said, replied that “the scientists are saying this and that. Well, scientists say we come from monkeys and I don’t buy that, either. They give man too much credit. Man can’t control the weather. I know he can’t control the climate.”