|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
This series was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center and the Science Journalism course at Duke Marine Lab.
Pulling into one of the dozens of church parking lots in Davis, Karen Amspacher’s silver Toyota pickup comes into view, green crab pots stacked in the truck bed. She hops out, sporting a worn crewneck with an anthropomorphized mackerel on the back.
Born and raised on Harkers Island and a former middle school teacher, she founded the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum in 1992 and now serves as its director. Amspacher has dedicated her life to preserving the heritage of her part of Carteret County. The museum preserves and celebrates the rich duck hunting heritage of eastern North Carolina, including historical, cultural, artistic, environmental, and educational exhibits.
As we drive along the straight, flat coastal U.S. Highway 70, she gestures toward house after house, noting who lives there. She points out skeletal ghost forests, where dead pines stand bleached and brittle from saltwater intrusion, their bare branches clawing at the sky. Marsh grass steadily creeps into people’s lawns.
“People are cutting marsh like it’s their grass,” Amspacher said. In one yard, a narrow wooden bridge stretches from the asphalt driveway to the front door, a makeshift solution for a home where the ground is often saturated with seawater.
The changes here are impossible to ignore, yet conversations about what’s causing them can be difficult. In a place where the most important things in life are faith, fishing, and family, climate science has been a tougher conversation. Despite their vulnerability to a warming planet, people Down East seldom use terms like “climate change” or “sea level rise,” Amspacher explained.
Exactly what is considered “Down East” changes depending on who you ask, but those interviewed for this story largely agreed that it refers to the 13 unincorporated communities east of the North River Bridge. This apparent paradox between politics and the environmental reality reveals the gap between how locals and scientists talk about the issue—a divide that might not be as unbreachable as it seems.
The environmental and political landscape Down East caught the attention of environmental anthropologist Karl Dudman while he was working on his doctoral dissertation in the United Kingdom. Before making his way to the coast, he spent time at the North Carolina State Climate Office in Raleigh, several hours’ drive from the daily realities of coastal life. After connecting with Amspacher, he spent a summer studying climate communications in this part of the state.
When he interviewed locals about changes they’ve seen, “it was the water,” he said. “It always came back to the water.” During dozens of interviews, Dudman noticed that terms like “climate change” and “sea level rise” were often dismissed as outsider or “dingbatter” language. Instead, conversations focused on firsthand experiences like storms and floods.
People will say “things are changing,” Dudman explained. They might refer to “nuisance flooding” to describe higher-than-normal tides on days where there’s no weather event to blame, rather than the term “sunny day flooding” that scientists might choose. That kind of language is “from off”—the kind of words people who aren’t raised in the area might use.
“It always came back to the water.”
Karl Dudman, environmental anthropologist
American climate journalist and author Elizabeth Rush writes about a similar concept in her book Rising: “‘Climate change’ sounds like a phrase that a government agency might employ to justify new fishing regulations or a phenomenon a scholar from outside the community might study,” she writes. “The words themselves ring as too political, too cold, too loaded to map onto everyday life.”
Rather than debating statistics, many here rely on personal observations of the changing environment. “Somebody that grew up here, moved away, and came back 20 years later would look around and say, ‘My God, what’s happened?’” said Zach Davis, a local fisherman, in the Carolina Voices oral history, a collection organized by the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum.
Whether humans can do anything about it, however, is a different question. “Problem is, you ain’t gonna stop it. I don’t care what kind of policy you got,” Davis said. “You ain’t gonna stop Mother Nature.”
Generations at the Water’s Edge
Down East, values are generational, but so is climate vulnerability. People born there tend to stay. “The goal of most families is to raise another generation like themselves,” said Amspacher, sitting amidst duck hunting decoys in the museum’s library.
She had planned to leave her son Casey one of their two family homes on the island, assuming it would offer him security for the future. One of the homes had once belonged to her grandmother and had been in the family for decades. But when asked which he preferred, his response shook her.
“Somebody that grew up here, moved away, and came back 20 years later would look around and say, ‘My God, what’s happened?’”
Zach Davis, local fisherman
“He says, ‘How about neither?’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, Casey?’ He said, ‘Mama, they’re not gonna be here in 50 years.’” In that moment, the abstract warnings about melting glaciers and rising seas became personal. It wasn’t just scientists or politicians talking about a distant reality; it was her own son. He looked at the land she loved and saw its impermanence.
It’s only a matter of time until more people are confronted with that reality, said Kenny Brennan, who grew up Down East, left to attend N.C. State University, and returned. “When water starts coming up into their house or in their yard or cuts them off, then they will come around,” Brennan said. “People here might find an outsider or even an insider that went away and came back to have some sort of disconnect.”
The changing environment is making it harder for those who want to stay to do so. The southeastern United States, including coastal North Carolina, is the most vulnerable region in the country to climate-related disasters. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea levels have risen 11 inches since 1950. Seas are currently rising at a rate of about 3 millimeters per year in North Carolina, which is anticipated to accelerate over time. This may seem insignificant, but modest projections estimate the sea will rise more than 3 feet from present level by 2100. And in a low-lying region like Down East–one of its communities is even named Sea Level–this will have a particularly devastating impact.
Storms are also getting stronger and more frequent, which scientists attribute to climate change. Hurricane Florence in 2018 caused record-breaking rainfall and catastrophic flooding in the region, displacing thousands and devastating local economies. Repeated storms have made it more difficult to rebuild.
Carteret County is politically conservative—71 percent of voters backed Donald Trump in 2024. And like in much of the U.S., climate change is as much a political issue as a scientific one. Republicans at both the state and national level have long downplayed climate change, seeking to roll back environmental regulations and pull out of international climate agreements.
Resistance to acknowledging climate change as a crisis is prevalent in rural, conservative communities. That’s not because people are ignorant, Brennan said, but because they distrust solutions from outsiders that might, for example, threaten their ability to fish. Brennan explained that, growing up, he learned many people had “preset notions that scientists are quacks.”
Amspacher says limited exposure to outside perspectives reinforces this political divide.
“If you grew up in a place like this and you never left, except maybe to go to Myrtle Beach for a weekend or to go to Tweetsie Railroad in the eighth grade … and you’re 45 years old, think about it,” she said, trailing off. “That’s why the divide is so great.” The scientific community can feel distant, even irrelevant, for many locals.
Despite that, people are very close to the environment. Water shapes every part of life, said Amspacher–the way people work, play, and even worship. “I got baptised in the sound,” she said. Growing up, she was “always in the water or in a boat or on the shore.”
This deep-rooted relationship with the water also shapes the foundation of the local economy. Carteret County was built in large part by the fishing industry. Driving through Atlantic, a particularly affluent section of Down East, Amspacher points at a cluster of large houses and explains that they belong to the fish dealers. Both commercial and recreational fishing remain a significant contributor to the local economy.
Beyond the Data
Amspacher said it’s not that people here don’t believe that the sea level is rising. “I think the data has been accepted,” she said. “What they don’t trust is somebody with a grant trying to justify their existence.”
Amspacher said some locals have developed a sense of research fatigue as numerous universities and researchers have come to study the region. Moving forward starts with humility, Dudman said. Too often, scientists tend to think that they know more than the people who live here.
“There’s a self-righteousness in the science community,” he said. This mindset creates a barrier to meaningful collaboration and overlooks the deep, place-based knowledge of communities. Scientists may bring technical expertise, but residents have local knowledge that cannot be captured in a lab. And when science becomes a marker of identity rather than a tool for discovery, it risks alienating the very people it seeks to help.
“It actually stopped being about what the scientists say a long time ago, and it became about who owns the narrative and who can see themselves represented in that narrative,” Dudman said.
Amspacher agrees.
“What I want you to know is that we’re smart people and that we’ve adapted, and that we’ve figured it out, and that we have persevered, and that we’re committed to this place and to each other,” Amspacher said, her voice firm. She pauses for a moment as if measuring her next words. “Help me. Help me figure out how to do that.”
Her work at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum gives her an opportunity to bridge that gap, she says, by creating space for conversation within the community. But change takes time, and acceptance does not always come all at once, Dudman said. “Feel and understand that just because people don’t acknowledge it now doesn’t mean they won’t acknowledge it down the road.”
Tessa Nyhan is a student at Duke University studying marine biology, with a focus on how climate change impacts ecosystems. When she’s not in the lab or out in the field, you can find her exploring tide pools or sketching sea creatures in her notebook.
Related Stories
Can Lake Mattamuskeet Be Saved?
The largest natural lake in the state and an important national refuge for migrating birds is facing an ecological catastrophe.
The USS North Carolina’s Next Battle
America’s most-decorated WWII battleship helped win the war in the Pacific. Can the USS North Carolina survive climate change?
The Inner Banks’ Rising Tide
Sea-level rise on the Outer Banks captures the most attention, but along the state’s sounds, a persistent and overlooked effect of rising waters is inflicting costs far outside the budgets of the area’s small towns.