After Hurricane Sandy caused widespread flooding on Smith Island in 2012, Maryland housing officials earmarked $2 million in buyouts for homeowners. The deal was simple: Take the money and start a new life somewhere else.
Instead, the community stood its ground. Residents formed a civic group to lobby for flood-protection measures. Over the next decade, they secured more than $20 million in infrastructure investments.
Such efforts have almost certainly bought time for the 200 or so people who call Smith Island home. But scientists say that sea level rise will likely make the low-lying Chesapeake Bay island uninhabitable in a matter of decades.
As more places across the country face permanent inundation amid a rapidly changing climate, new research suggests that getting residents out of harm’s way may be complicated.
Two social scientists — David Casagrande of Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and Aaron Lampman of Washington College in Maryland — spent more than two years interviewing more than 60 people at risk of losing their homes to rising waters. Their subjects included homeowners, commercial fishermen, tourism operators, local officials and more. Most hailed from Smith Island, but some were from other flood-plagued places on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Their study was published in April 2025 in the journal Frontiers in Climate. This Bay Journal interview with the researchers was edited for length and clarity.
Question: Where did your interest in Smith Island come from?
Casagrande: I guess it was eight years ago. I just came across a news article about Smith Island turning down buyout offers after Hurricane Sandy and, when I read the article, a lot of the issues completely resonated with what I was studying at the time. It seemed to me if there was any place on Earth that would be an ideal candidate for buyouts and managed retreat, it would be Smith Island.
Q: Can you define “managed retreat”?
Casagrande: Managed retreat is an organized, strategic process of helping people relocate out of harm’s way. Some countries have very well-developed managed retreat — like, obviously someplace like Holland. But in the United States, we have no managed retreat policy. All we have is this FEMA buyout process that’s kind of haphazard. It targets individual homeowners versus relocating entire communities.
Q: Has managed retreat worked anywhere in the U.S.?
Casagrande: The poster child is Valmeyer, Illinois. In 1993, there was a flood on the Mississippi River that wiped out this town of about 900 people. The mayor was instrumental in convincing the [residents] — rather than rebuilding the levee and hoping the levee didn’t fail the next time — to relocate the town to higher ground. So, why does that work in Valmeyer, and it won’t work in Smith Island?
Q: What were the initial reactions you got as you started asking about climate change?
Lampman: We made this major mistake … Our first question was, “Tell us everything you think of when we say the phrase ‘climate change.’” And it really caused dramatic, angry, defensive answers right away. We were starting off an interview with people we were hoping that we could talk to for an hour with a kind of defensive response. I think after the third or fourth interview, [the researchers] all looked at each other and said, “Oh no, we cannot do this.”
Q: Why do people stay on Smith Island?
Casagrande: There are people who want to leave, [but] what’s interesting is to see how the conversation at the community level develops in a way that drowns out those voices … We work with [what’s called] cultural risk theory, and the essence of it is that the types of risk we pay attention to are a function of our group identity. And so, it’s no surprise that more politically conservative people are less likely to believe in climate change.
Q: So, what do they see as the risk instead?
Casagrande: People disinvesting in our communities, and our schools slowly dying, and children moving away and not coming back because there are no employment opportunities. We’re worried about losing the heritage. We don’t like that [people] are coming in as retirees and buying up houses and changing our community.
Q: You have a term “ecomyopia”? Where does it come from? How does it apply here?
Casagrande: Looking across the broad sweep of human experience, we see all of these cases from the collapse of the classic Maya to Easter Island, where people got stuck in these ways of organizing themselves that made them not be able to see the ecological realities.
Lampman: A quick definition is: a tendency to ignore environmental information, particularly if it challenges existing structures of power.
Q: Are you employing the word “myopia” in the pejorative sense?
Casagrande: We are using the root “myopia” in a clinical, medical sense and specifically not pejorative. Similar to a medical diagnosis of myopia, a patient is not assumed to be at fault or somehow deficient.
Q: In these examples you cite from the past, things did not end very well. Is there a different path possible for Smith Island?
Lampman: What we think is happening and is the most likely outcome is involuntary retreat, rather than strategic retreat. It’s probably going to be retreat by attrition. And that means that individuals are going to get up and leave, and maybe they’re leaving behind whatever [home] equity they had.
Q: I would argue that’s already happening, and it’s been happening for decades. Am I wrong?
Lampman: No, you’re right, yeah.
Casagrande: But there are a lot of things converging. It’s not just sea level rise. It’s really hard to tease out what is the signal of sea level rise versus just economic change.
China has been out there creating islands in the middle of the South China Sea since 2013. Do you mean to tell me that an existing island in the Chesapeake Bay cannot be built up enough for people to continue living there?