Channel Effects: The Political Afterlife of Maintenance Dredging on Tangier Island, Virginia, USA

In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay sits small and shrinking Tangier Island, Virginia. Home to 1,200 residents a century ago, the island now has fewer than 400 residents, a population decreasing as the land subsides into the bay. Scientists predict the island will be uninhabitable by the 2040s, while residents themselves profess to be climate change deniers and science skeptics. I examine the politics and social order of engineering interventions and their afterlives on Tangier, endlessly studied and sometimes implemented by the federal government, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. A northern channel bisecting the island, first dredged in 1966, and a seawall on the western side of the island, constructed in 1990, were both obsolete before they were created, showing the ways in which infrastructure, especially dredging of waterways, and its afterlives are channeled as processes controlled by state experts, justified by and justifying endless cascades of interventions, naturalizing the landscape, and ultimately placing Tangiermen as willing victims and imminent refugees in an uncertain crisis.