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- One of the biggest things that I like
about being out on the water and being a waterman
is watching the sunrise every morning
and seeing God's glory shining all around.
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- The Bay never essayed truer,
nor flowered more gloriously
than its creation of Tangier and Smith and islanders.
Far more than any mariners' museum or mystic seaport or Williamsburg,
places like the islands are art
made all the more artful
for contriving nothing, for simply being.
- Chesapeake Bay Foundation thinks that the Bay,
compared to the original Bay that John Smith saw
about 400 years ago,
is at about a quarter of that health level.
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- Tangier Island is situated
about an hour from the Virginia mainland
in the waters near the southern tip of the Chesapeake Bay.
It's accessible only by boat.
Tangier's 800 inhabitants are descendants of immigrants
from Cornwall, the west country of great Britain.
In spite of their Christian heritage,
the exploits of some islanders over the past 300 years
have earned them a reputation for lawlessness.
They have always lived off the bounty of the bay:
crabs, oysters, eels,
and they call themselves watermen.
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- I started when I was 17 with my father.
That's uh 21 years.
Now, it's just nice being out and in the air, and...
you do have the freedom
to decide what you can do aboard your boat,
uh, how to fish your pots.
- Nanner Pruit: I've got two boys, one which is 19 and one which is 13,
and there's nothing that I would love any more
than to see them have a future on the water.
- There's really no other way to generate income
unless you're a storekeeper unless you operate a gift shop,
or you have to be lucky enough
to be one of the tour boat operators.
It's truly the crabs, the oysters, the fish
that are the engine, the economic engine
for those islands.
- Tangier is famous for its soft-shelled crabs,
which are harvested in a number of ways.
In some cases, watermen cast wire mesh crab pots,
which are later pulled back on board.
In the winter, they dredge the ocean floor with a large net.
At other times, they drag the floor with a smaller net
known as a crab scrape.
- And it catches everything it catches,
and we just pick out the good crabs.
We may catch anywhere from 50 crabs to 350.
- I'm usually harvesting the fiddler crabs,
and which I shed out to my crab house.
I shed them for the soft shell crabs.
- This is a pale blue crab.
We call him a wren crab
because of the red... the red rim around the fin.
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That means in a few days,
he will be a soft shell crab.
- Tom Horton: You know, a Smith islander told me once,
he had rambled on for some time
trying to kind of put his finger
on what made the waterman and the islanders unique,
and finally, he said,
I guess the thing we do best out here is share the Bay's fate.
What he meant was they,
more than any other people in America,
are living off the shore,
harvesting nature's bounty, are really linked into it.
They share the Bay's fate.
- John Crockett, his eight sons, and their families
were Tangier Island's first known settlers.
A third of the islanders still bear their same last name,
and most consider themselves kinfolk.
Crockett's legacy is evident in the tightly clustered backyards,
where tombstones bear only a handful of last names.
The island has few cars
as residents usually weave their way through narrow streets
on bicycles and golf carts.
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It has just two grocery stores,
which are supplied by a 65-foot boat from Crisfield, Maryland,
that brings food, mail, passengers,
and the occasional video rental.
There's just one police officer but no jail,
as crime is almost non-existent.
As a result, parents let their children roam the island
knowing that a watchful eye is always near.
Islanders are so isolated that many mainland residents
don't even know they exist.
While their lifestyle may seem simple to outsiders,
islanders fiercely protect it.
Yet they have long been criticized
for damaging the very ecosystem
upon which they rely for their survival.
Scientists claim that pollution, over-harvesting, and runoff
have destroyed sea grass beds,
causing harvests to plummet.
- In terms of habitat,
we've lost about half of the Bay's filters.
Fisheries: we have some real weaknesses,
like oysters at one percent of what they were.
- The Chesapeake Bay watershed is over 5,000 square miles.
There's a lot of farm runoff.
There's a lot of unnecessary lawn fertilizer.
There's a lot of pollution from cars.
There's a lot of pollution from factories.
And there's a lot of pollution from watermen themselves.
- I know sometimes people are shocked
when they see watermen dumping.
But you see that you see engine oil
dumped over or pumped out of the build.
You see cans thrown over.
- As the Bay's health has declined,
oyster populations have declined,
leaving many watermen with really only the blue crab
to survive on.
Thing of it is the watermen are at the bottom of the cycle.
So, we're the one who suffers the most,
but we're the one that gets regulated the most.
- Around 1967, people concerned about the deterioration
of the Bay formed the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Its single purpose was to save the Bay
through environmental education.
In 1995, CBF called for a ban on all crabbing
beyond a depth of 40 feet.
Many islanders felt
that the environmentalists were attacking their livelihood,
and that dynamic quickly ignited
a cultural and political firestorm.
- Tangier's watermen do not have much respect
for environmentalists.
They see environmentalists and scientists as the enemy.
- I think some of the environmental groups themselves
would like to see the watermen off the Bay altogether.
They see the waterman as a threat.
That they're just out there to take and take and take.
- And the scientists, of course,
have an income whether the rain falls or not,
so they can afford to be concerned
about the long-term condition of the Bay.
The watermen can't.
- I think the conflict makes sense and is predictable,
in fact, because CBF has the ability and the obligation
to look long-term,
to look out, you know, 2, 5, 10, 20 years,
whereas the watermen can't do that.
- One of the difficulties that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation
has had in communicating with watermen
is that we use language of science
and science talks about generalities, probabilities,
lots of numbers, and it's very different from the hands-on,
"I was here last week, and I know this part of the Bay
like the back of my hand," experience that watermen have.
- My husband despised CBF.
I mean, he had circle with a slash through it
and CBF painted on his crabhouse.
He hated it.
- Over 90% of the people on the island
are related either to the fishery
or are in the fishery.
That if the fishery goes, Tangier goes.
As the debate raged, mounting regulations,
including limits on new commercial fishing licenses,
put economic pressure on the watermen,
whose very survival may hinge on
whether the next generation has confidence in the future.
My youngest son doesn't have any hope at all
in being a waterman
and carrying on the heritage here on here.
I mean, we're to the end of the road.
We can't fall back anymore and make a living.
We just can't survive.
- In response to CBF proposals.
Maryland's legislature closed the crabbing season
in mid-November instead of the usual date of December 31st.
With the harvest at a 36-year low,
the watermen saw the law as an assault
on their $186 million dollar annual impact on the region.
- We were willing to give up December,
but we didn't want to give up all or half of November.
It's just like you slammed the door.
There's no more income.
That's the worst time of year.
You need that to tide you over for the winter,
in case the oystering is not good.
- You put that up there with a little bit of twisted truth
and untruth and half-truth, and pretty soon,
it got to be a pretty ugly scene.
[match strike]
- We had a fire in one of our buildings on Smith Island
and it was ruled arson by the fire marshal.
The fire became a visible expression
of the heat of the conflict.
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So, we don't know who did it.
- For centuries, watermen have been as rough and salty
as the sea from which they make their living.
In fact, throughout much of the 1800s,
watermen commonly launched pirate-style attacks
and raided each other's oyster beds.
- You know, there have been a lot of people shot
over the last century or two over crabs and oysters.
You've had fights between Tangier and Smith,
fights among watermen,
fights between the states Maryland and Virginia.
In more recent decades, it's been more legal battles,
so you know there has been a lot of conflict.
- In the early 1800s, Methodist preacher Joshua Thomas
crisscrossed the Chesapeake Bay,
hoping to convert islanders
and tame them of their notorious lawlessness.
In spite of his missionary successes,
it's doubtful Thomas could imagine
it would take nearly 200 years
for the spiritual seed he planted to fully bear its fruit.
- The biblical perspective, from my part,
was brother against brother.
Sister against sister, friend against friend,
church against community.
I thought we need to heal that.
- It's something that the Lord
put on my heart years and years ago,
and I prayed about it
that the Lord would send someone here to teach us,
you know, exactly where he wants us.
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- In 1997, an unknown outsider,
a doctoral candidate from the University of Wisconsin- Madison
stepped off the boat
and right into the Bay's raging firestorm.
Susan Drake, who had worked on environmental treaties
for the US State Department at the United Nations Mission
in Washington, DC, came to Tangier
after hearing about the shed burning
and the spiritual revival
that had swept the island in 1995.
Drake believed that it might prove an ideal testing ground
for her thesis that conflict in faith-based communities
requires faith-based resolutions.
- My original hypothesis for my research work
was that if you work within the value system of a community
it will enable them to see their responsibility
to care for the creation, to care for the environment;
that it would also empower them
to feel that they have control over their future
and not their future controlling them
or government controlling them.
- People around here are very slow to change
and a lot of people don't take calmly to strangers,
to outside people coming in.
- There's no one wants to change.
I know, I'm the worst for one to change,
but there had to be a change.
I went to several members of the church
and I saw that the church was the major force for change,
and that women were also a major uh force for change
in the community.
- This is a part of our way of life,
just like crabbing is, God is
I mean, you can't separate the two.
- And so, if you come in, make no reference to the church,
no reference to the scriptures,
it is like telling only half of the story that has to be told
in order to generate the needed change, the needed action.
- When the faith-based effort was first proposed,
I was both interested,
but also had a certain level of skepticism
about its ability
to be able to truly change the behavior
of the people on Tangier.
I've been working with Tangier for 15 years.
I've been trying to instill an environmental ethic there
and I know how difficult that is
and to think that some effort can come in
and in a very short wave of the wand make a difference
our frankly was very skeptical.
- Though she was an outsider,
Drake's faith-based approach impressed islanders,
who invited her to speak at a joint public service
of Swain Memorial United Methodist Church
and New Testament Church.
Citing the second chapter of Genesis,
she told islanders that obedience to
the earthkeeping, fruitfulness, and Sabbath principles,
would ensure the preservation of the environment
and maintain the integrity of the Bay's fisheries.
- When I was giving this message, I used this picture
which is found in every waterman's boat practically
on the island.
On the one hand, the water is praying
thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,
and the next minute,
throwing bottles and cans and whatever overboard.
I think that many of the watermen
actually understood and saw for the first time
the linkage of their faith to their livelihood
and their everyday life out on the water.
She had the Bible to back up all of her five nations
and everything that she was trying to accomplish and prove.
- When Drake finished speaking,
a group of watermen gathered at the altar
and made an unexpected and radical promise,
which would later be called "The Covenant."
- The covenant was a group of men.
Sixty-some men stood up in church one morning,
and vowed before God.
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I'm sorry.
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That they would obey his laws.
So many people made so much fun of The Covenant,
and some people said, "Well, you don't need it
if you're a Christian."
You're supposed to obey God's laws anyway.
But what is my weakness might not be your weakness.
Some people needed that covenant.
It was a statement that said, "Hey,
you'd got a bunch of Christians here who--
some of them weren't obeying the law--
who are going to commit to obeying the law no matter what.
No matter if it affects the pocketbook.
No matter if it affects anything else.
We're going to stand up and we're going to make a statement.
I thought it was the prettiest thing
when they stood up Sunday morning
and we handed out about a two-foot piece of red ribbon
signifying Christ's blood to me.
And they wrap that around their antennas, put it on a door,
something of their boat.
It didn't say, "Hey, I'm a better man than you.
I'm a Christian."
It said, "Any Christian might end up behind that boat.
You're not working for man; you're working for God.
- The covenant covered not only working on the water
but you shouldn't break any laws now.
You should pay what taxes you're supposed to pay.
Voting laws, I mean, speed limits, taking care of used oil.
- She's opened a lot of the watermen's eyes to the fact
that hey we need to stop throwing our trash in the water.
We need to keep our oil cans on the boat.
- Nanner saved his for a whole week.
It was the talk of the island about how many bags of trash
Nanner had on his dock
that he would normally have dumped in Chesapeake Bay.
- I never seen any harm of throwing trash overboard
until it was revealed to me
that I was damaging my witness for Christ.
And the first few weeks of doing it, it was a pretty big hassle.
- The change I've seen in my husband is enormous.
I mean, it's nothing short of a miracle.
- I've had people who come here occasionally
tell me that the island is so much cleaner now
it looks like a different place.
- I do the best of my ability to abide by the laws
such as no saving any little crabs
or no saving any illegal soft crabs.
Well, one of the laws that has been made
is you can't put a fish in a pillar pot.
- {Inaudible] refused to put um bait in his peeler pot.
Refused it, no matter what.
- When you can't do that, you don't catch as many pillars
and you lose the jimmy crabs, which is the bait in the pot,
and basically, just make less money.
- I think the Lord just sent crabs his way.
Some of them lost a lot of money by not doing it,
but they still did it.
And I'm so proud of them.
I just-- and I know God is.
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- With the covenant as their catalyst, islanders created
Tangier Watermans' Stewardship for the Chesapeake.
Known as TaSC, the group is focused on implementing
the 2020 vision plan,
and encouraging stewardship throughout the Bay.
- We've got an environmental movement going.
We've got an economic movement going.
We've got an education movement going.
It's been the first time in my 25 years of covering the Bay
that I've seen some of these communities like Tangier
really brought into realizing, "Yeah, you know,
"we not only have this responsibility.
It's absolutely a mandate to care for the creation."
- The stewardship initiative has empowered both men and women
by giving them a voice in regulatory matters.
They founded an advocacy group known as FAITH,
which stands for Families Actively involved in Improving Tangiers Heritage.
It's focused on enhancing and sustaining local fisheries,
providing better family health care coverage,
developing a more diversified job market,
and addressing commercial licensing
and legislative issues.
- I remember one person,
when we went to talk to the federal government
in Annapolis,
she said, "Thank you for coming."
You've put a face on issues that we didn't have a face to.
She said, "We'll never make a decision about Tangier anymore
without thinking about people of Tangier
and what they've been doing
with this faith group and with the initiative 2020.
- We've asked other partners to come in,
to look at relocating businesses there.
We've looked some in aquaculture
but also looked at things like telecommuting.
So ways that they can make a living,
bring some money to the island,
yet still maintain their culture.
- We would like to get the women together to do more crafts
because we have a lot of tourists coming into the island.
About three boats come in every day in the summertime
between May and October.
Susan got us in touch with a couple she knew from Norway
who did decorative art,
and then, we have a local who does a lot of woodwork,
a lot of woodworking.
What Susan brought,
what this whole idea was able to accomplish
was to resolve a conflict in a non-violent way.
- My role is simply and has only really been
as a catalyst, as a spark.
But all the ideas that have come up,
whether it be the covenant,
whether it be the 2020 Vision,
all have been derived from Tangier man.
- Though the faith-based stewardship initiative
began to ease the battle between watermen and environmentalists,
it also ignited an entirely new one.
Because of the covenant's emphasis
on obedience to civil and fishery laws,
opponents argue that willing reduction in the harvest
by watermen will destroy the local economy.
They contend that harvest levels are simply cyclical
and will rebound on their own without the initiative.
Opponents also demanded that Drake leave immediately.
They not only threatened her life,
they have severely ostracized those involved in the covenant,
FAITH, and TaSC,
some of whom have felt pressured
into abandoning their pledge.
- There is some fierce resistance
to the stewardship initiative.
I think some people in Tangier are very upset about it.
- I being called a lot of different stuff,
and that I've been brainwashed,
that I don't understand what's going on.
I've had a lot of backs turn on me.
I've lost my closest friend.
Uh, we talk, and we, you know, we speak to each other,
but it's not like it was.
Probably never been like it was.
- If we hadn't had Susan,
we probably would never have done that.
But it takes an objective person not to do the group,
pulling everybody together, and saying,
"Okay, now, here's what you want.
"Here's what you want.
"What are you going to do about it?
Who's willing to give up stuff?"
- I think the whole experience has kind of refined us.
We needed to sort of weed out
some of this stuff in our lives that weren't so important
and focus more on the things that are important.
- I've learned that it takes more than talking love.
I mean, you have to show it regardless how people treat you.
- A house divided cannot stand.
The Chesapeake Bay divided cannot stand.
The farming community divided cannot stand.
We have to work together, and we have to pull together.
= There is a very interesting thing that I realized,
which is that after 15 years of working with Tangier people,
Was doing ethics there
and working in many different dimensions,
that we were never going to be successful
because we never used Jesus,
which is their medium for understanding the world.
And so, once we were able to make that bridge
and to see that this Christian-based community-valued things
in a Christian way
and that if we could get them to embrace the environment
within the Christian value system
that, in fact, we were going to move forward.
- When you think about small communities, rural communities,
this is an area of enormous importance to study
and to realize the saliency of what that faith does
in terms of behavior.
- You're never going to regulate your way or legislate your way
to where you really need to be
if you intend to have a sustainable society.
- I believe that this faith-based stewardship initiative
is quite a universal process.
- The lessons, I think,
can be applied to the timberman in the northwest,
can be applied to, you know, the rangers in the Midwest.
it can be applied really to anywhere,
whether it's Christian
or no matter what the fundamental belief is.
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- In many ways,
all people are alike. Chesapeake Bay islanders.
Whether you live on or beyond the Bay,
you'll likely struggle with
the inexorable ebb and flow
of both environment and human relationships.
Yet, unlike the watermen and their families,
most people see themselves
as so far removed from the earth's natural resources
that they remain ignorant of the destructive power
of excessive consumption and waste,
behaviors which nearly killed the waterman way of life.
Back in the misty, scenic Chesapeake,
islanders continue to tie their fates
to the sometimes precarious life cycle
of the Bay's valued blue crab.
As they battle the forces that threaten their legacy,
islanders now carry a renewed and deepened resolve
to keep their new covenant to serve as a vital link
between the spiritual and physical,
between heaven and earth.
- The relationship between CBF and Tangier
has changed dramatically and profoundly,
and I hope and think for the long term.
- A lot of the feeling of total helplessness is gone
and a lot more confidence that there is a future
and that their children and grandchildren
very well may have a place
and be able to stay here.
- There was a pillar run that started in end of July,
and it's just finished the first of October,
and it's unheard of to go that long and this late
into the season.
You know, I made less money this spring,
but God made up for it,
more than made up for it
by what he provided towards the end of the season.
- And it says he channels the minds of kings
like it does the paths of rivers,
so that's what we're relying on.
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