My trips back to my hometown of Norfolk, Va., are often enlightening. A port city with an economy based heavily on the military and steeped in hundreds of years of tradition, it’s a conservative place. There's also no mistaking that it's a coastal city. Ships, barges, and tugboats dominate river traffic outside the apartment window in my mother’s retirement community.

Though conservative, the Tidewater region is leading the pack in being forced to deal with climate change — a problem symbolized by two fixtures within a mile of my childhood home: the Midtown Tunnel, increasingly vulnerable to flooding, and the Norfolk Southern Railroad coal docks, a major link in our fossil fuel industry. There’s a fascinating juxtaposition as continued high use of fossil fuels leads to ever rising sea levels. I found on my trip last week that residents are learning how painfully apt and ominous the name Tidewater is proving to be.

After New Orleans, Norfolk is considered the nation’s metropolitan area most vulnerable to sea level rise; tides have risen a foot and a half in the last century and are predicted to rise as many as five and a half feet by this century’s end. In addition to rising seas, ocean currents that normally keep seas from invading the area are slowing, and Norfolk is also slowly sinking, due to unusual geological circumstances.