Alexandra Bowman for Vox

On a recent August afternoon, Seneca Bowen and I walked around his land, just off southeastern Long Island’s Shinnecock Bay, as he recalled how Hurricane Sandy wiped away the small beach at the edge of the property where Bowen grew up swimming and fishing. Bowen showed me exactly how high the water came that year: 100 yards past the usual high tide mark.

In the years since, that beach has become a grassy wetland that floods regularly, encroaching ominously on his home.  

Bowen, 36, lives on the Shinnecock Nation reservation, where the rising waters have left residents facing a dire situation. 

About half of the Shinnecock Nation’s 1,600 tribal citizens live on an 800-acre reservation that includes 3,000 feet of shoreline on Shinnecock Bay. Of the roughly 250 homes within Shinnecock territory, around 50 are on the coast and in immediate danger from rising sea levels and increasing flooding.

Powerful storm surges, which are also becoming more frequent, make all of this even worse. The tribe’s 2013 climate adaptation plan predicted that nearly half of the Shinnecock reservation will flood after a major storm in 2050. Forecasts have only gotten worse since then. 

In the past few years, the Shinnecock have employed a combination of strategies to protect themselves against rising seas, like planting beach grass to strengthen dunes and developing oyster reefs to blunt tidal energy. But unless the pace of climate change can be slowed, these solutions will not be enough to save what’s left of Shinnecock lands. 

“We’re running out of space,” Bowen, who is the treasurer of the Shinnecock Nation Council of Trustees, told me. “Our population is going up. We haven’t been able to acquire more land.”

Water isn’t the only thing hemming the Shinnecock in. In every direction, they are surrounded by the multimillion-dollar homes of Southampton, sometimes mere feet from the border of the Shinnecock Nation. As Bowen stood facing the water at the edge of his land, he pointed out the Southampton Yacht Club, a private club directly across the water from his home. 

For nearly 400 years, since Southampton was settled in 1640, the Shinnecock have fought to stay where they are. Now the fight is even more difficult.

“We obviously don’t want to leave our homeland, but at some point we’ll probably be forced to do that,” Bowen said. 

What Bowen is talking about is known as managed retreat: the strategic relocation of people or communities away from areas vulnerable to climate impacts like flooding. So, as the Shinnecock grapple with climate change and retreat, they’re pursuing a solution that’s radical in the face of contemporary history: expanding their territory.  

“[Other] Council members and I have realized that we need to start making some serious money so that we can start purchasing land, not just for commercial use, but for residential purposes,” he said.

Even without storms, Gavin Cohen, the Shinnecock Environmental Department’s natural resource manager, estimates that at least 7 percent and 15 percent of the current Shinnecock territory will be completely lost to water by 2050 and 2100, respectively. While all of Long Island, including Southampton Village, is projected to lose land, many of these communities have more land to fall back on, not to mention more resources to deal with climate change.  

The Shinnecock are not alone. Around 129 million Americans — nearly 40 percent of the population — live in coastal communities. Even if the world can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the average sea level in the US could still be about 2 feet higher in 2100 than it was in 2000. With less aggressive climate action, projections show that sea levels in the US could rise by over 7 feet by 2100. 

The map on the left below shows what 1 foot of additional mean average sea level rise would look like in the area near Shinnecock Bay; the image on the right shows what 7 feet of additional mean average sea level rise would look like.

Noaa.gov

Sea level rise at these rates means that millions of Americans will have to move, which will lead to devastating impacts on roads, schools, and other critical infrastructure. By 2050, for example, damaging floods are predicted to be 10 times more frequent than they are today. And many more coastal communities will have to reckon with their increasingly precarious positions. 

But relocating an entire community is an enormous task. 

When Shavonne Smith, the director of the Shinnecock Environmental Department, thinks about possible relocation, she thinks about her massive extended family, nearly all of whom live on the reservation. “It’s not that simple just to move,” she said. “It’s not like me moving by myself. We’re talking whole families. How do you have somewhere for whole families to restart again?” 

Smith has partnered with Malgosia Madajewicz, a Columbia University economist who is running a three-year study of community adaptation to coastal flooding. After just one workshop, Madajewicz says she is already finding valuable lessons in the Shinnecock approach. “They’re really planning for a few generations, whereas in other communities, there’s often a time horizon that revolves more around political cycles and is much shorter,” Madajewicz said. 

But especially around some of the most expensive real estate in the US, managed retreat will take a massive amount of money and land. 

If the Shinnecock do buy more land to relocate, they would prefer for it to be in their ancestral territory, which covers thousands more acres and several adjacent towns. But Bowen says he and a few others have also floated the idea of land in the Catskill Mountains, about a hundred miles north of New York City. 

Leaving Shinnecock lands would be devastating, Bowen says, but buying land in the Hamptons is prohibitively expensive and rife with nimby — not in my backyard — opposition. 

“Every project that the tribe has ever tried to do has been slowed or stopped by some special interest group that’s in this area, by the town or the village itself,” Bowen said. William Manger Jr., the Mayor of Southampton Village, did not respond to a request for comment.

Michael A. Iasilli, the Southampton Town Council liaison for the Shinnecock Nation, is trying to build bridges with the tribe. He acknowledged that some Southampton residents outwardly discriminate against tribal members. This October, Southampton Town will recognize the first Shinnecock Heritage Day, an initiative led by Iasilli to educate the town about Shinnecock history, and find ways for the tribe and the town to work together.   

According to Iasilli, Southampton has the resources and the Shinnecock have the vision. Southampton already has funds in the form of its Community Preservation Fund and a Community Housing Fund. These are the kinds of financial resources that Seneca Bowen and the Shinnecock government are trying to build up. 

When I visited in August, Cohen, the Shinnecock natural resource manager, showed me drone pictures he had taken of the Shinnecock coastline. The alarming images showed just how close the water was to encroaching on not just homes but the powwow grounds and other important gathering places. The cemetery, which sits just feet away from Shinnecock Bay, has already flooded on multiple occasions.

Shavonne Smith is not ready to leave, even though she understands there may be no other option. “This is all I’ve ever known,” she said.

AFP via Getty Images

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The podcast launches on September 18.

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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