Tangier Island, facing oblivion, waits to see: Will Congress will help?

“When I talk about saving the island, I’m not talking about just a small piece of land or a building. I’m talking about saving the whole island — the people, the culture, a whole way of life,” Eskridge told Kaine at the back of the boat, as it idled just offshore from the island’s least-protected areas.

The 400-plus residents in this devoutly religious, solidly conservative fishing town have been pleading for years for investments to save the island — while standing defiant against warnings that they may have to one day abandon it as “climate change refugees.” But this clear-skied Wednesday afternoon, Kaine and Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) journeyed across the Chesapeake by ferry to deliver — tentatively, at least — some good news: Help may finally be on the way.

Kaine and Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) had secured $25 million in the Senate budget proposal to fund a pilot project that would repurpose dredging material hauled from navigation channels to be deposited on Tangier Island — serving as a natural buffer against erosion and sea-level rise. If the budget and project pass Congress, it would mark the largest investment in protecting the island in decades, said David Schulte, a marine biologist with the Army Corps of Engineers who has studied the island’s shrinking land mass.

The project, Schulte said, could also turn Tangier Island into a poster child for a pressing moral question as climate change threatens the fates of many small, coastal communities like Tangier: How far is the federal government willing to go to save them? Or would it rather evacuate and abandon them, letting the sea swallow the remains of their homes?

“That’s something that’s really going to need to be answered, I think, as a nation: What are we going to do with these small towns that cannot pay for these large projects to save themselves?” Schulte said. Often, he said, “the large cities with the big tax bases can get help, while everybody else is left to fend for themselves. That’s what gives me real hope about this Tangier project, because what you have here is a small town that [could] get significant help, and that is one of the first times I’ve seen that.”

Tangier, known for its unique dialect and a local economy that revolves around crabbing and tourists, has lost two-thirds of its land mass since 1850 at an average…