Tourists on Smith Island in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay slosh through high waves during a nor’easter.
After Hurricane Sandy caused massive flooding on Smith Island in 2012, the Maryland Housing Authority set aside $2 million in buyout funding for homeowners. The deal was simple. The idea was to take the money and start a new life somewhere else.
Instead, the community stood its ground. Residents formed a civic group and campaigned for flood prevention measures. Over the next 10 years, they secured more than $20 million in infrastructure investments.
Efforts like this have almost certainly bought time for the 200 or so people who call Smith Island home. But scientists say rising sea levels will likely make the low-lying islands of the Chesapeake Bay uninhabitable within decades.
More places across the country are facing permanent flooding in a rapidly changing climate, and rescuing residents from danger could be difficult, a new study suggests.
Two social scientists, David Casagrande of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Aaron Lampman of the University of Washington in Maryland, spent more than two years interviewing more than 60 people at risk of losing their homes to rising waters. Their targets included homeowners, commercial fishermen, tourism operators, and local government officials. Most were from Smith Island, but others came from other flood-affected locations on Maryland’s eastern coast.
Their research was published in the journal April 2025. climate frontier. this bay journal Interviews with researchers have been edited for length and clarity.
question: How did you become interested in Smith Island?
David Casagrande of Lehigh University, Pennsylvania;
Casa Grande: I think it was about 8 years ago. I just came across a news article about Smith Island turning down a takeover offer after Hurricane Sandy, and as I read the article, many of the issues resonated perfectly with what I was studying at the time. It seemed to me that if there was ever a place on earth that would be ideal for an acquired or managed getaway, it would be Smith Island.
question: Can you define a “managed withdrawal”?
Casa Grande: Managed shelter is an organized and strategic process that helps people move out of harm’s way. In some countries, very well-developed managed retreats exist. For example, obviously a place like the Netherlands. However, the United States does not have a managed withdrawal policy. All we have is this FEMA acquisition process, which is kind of ad hoc. It is aimed at individual homeowners rather than relocating entire communities.
question: Have you ever had a successful supervised retreat anywhere in the US?
Casa Grande: A typical example is Wallmeyer, Illinois. In 1993, a Mississippi River flood destroyed this town of about 900 people. The mayor worked hard to convince residents to move the town to higher ground, rather than rebuilding the levee and hoping it wouldn’t fail next time. So why does it work on Valmeyer and not on Smith Island?
question: What was your first reaction when you started asking questions about climate change?
Lampman: We made this grave mistake… Our first question was, “Tell me everything that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘climate change.'” And that immediately provoked a really dramatic, angry, defensive answer. We were starting interviews with people we wanted to talk to for an hour with a kind of defensive reaction. I think after the third or fourth interview,[the researchers]all looked at each other and said, “Oh, we can’t do this.”
Aaron Lampman of the University of Washington, Maryland;
question: Why do people stay on Smith Island?
casa grande: Some people want to quit,[but]what’s interesting is to see how conversations at the community level develop in ways that drown out those voices… We’re working on (what’s called) cultural risk theory, the essence of which is that the kinds of risks we pay attention to are a function of our group identity. So it’s no wonder that politically conservative people are less likely to believe in climate change.
question: So what do they see as a risk instead?
Casa Grande: People are disinvesting in our communities, schools are slowly declining, and children are moving away and not coming back because of a lack of job opportunities. We worry about that heritage being lost. We don’t like[people]coming in as retirees and buying up houses and changing our communities.
question: Is there a word called “myopia”? Where did it come from? How does it apply here?
Casa Grande: If we look across the breadth of human experience, from the collapse of the classic Maya civilization to Easter Island, we see all cases in which people have become so bogged down in how to organize themselves that they have become unable to see ecological reality.
Lampman: Simply defined, it is the tendency to ignore environmental information, especially when it challenges existing power structures.
question: Are you using the word “myopia” in a derogatory way?
The swamps and beaches of Maryland’s Smith Island have been gradually being washed away for centuries.
Casa Grande: We use the term “myopia” in a clinical and medical sense, and do not mean it lightly. As with any medical diagnosis of myopia, it is not assumed that the patient is at fault or has any defect.
question: In these examples you cited from the past, things didn’t end very well. Is there another road to Smith Island?
Lampman: What we think is happening now, and the most likely outcome, is an involuntary withdrawal rather than a strategic withdrawal. They will probably withdraw due to consumables. And that means the individual gets up and leaves the house, possibly leaving behind whatever assets they had.
question: I would argue that it is already happening and has been for decades. Could I be wrong?
Lampman: No, that’s right, yes.
Casa Grande: But a lot of things are converging. It’s not just sea level rise. It is very difficult to distinguish between signs of sea level rise and signs of simple economic change.
