More than 80 percent of the coastline is projected to be at high risk of erosion by 2060⁸. At a community meeting last year, a local scientist, Mayka Thibodeau, put it without adornment: We are very small in the face of the immensity⁹.
A fisherman in Havre-Aubert moved his shed back from the cliff three times. He told the story as casually as telling time. The sea had always taken; it was just taking faster now.
Farther south, the truth is harder to avoid. Lennox Island, home to the Lennox Island First Nation off the northwest coast of Prince Edward Island, has already lost roughly 400 acres of land—more than 300 football fields—to erosion since the 1800s¹⁰. Within a single generation, winter ice has thinned, storm surges have grown teeth, and families have watched shorelines collapse in a single violent afternoon. Ten of the island’s seventy-nine homes sit dangerously close to the edge¹¹.
Chief Matilda Ramjattan once told a reporter, We are an adaptable and resilient people and we will figure this out¹². It wasn’t bravado; it was something cooler, steadier. But Canada still has no formal framework for relocating Indigenous communities displaced by climate change¹³. So the planning happens quietly—maps spread across kitchen tables, elders talking about burial grounds and family plots, younger generations asking how much of an island can disappear before it’s no longer home.
Then there is Fogo Island, off Newfoundland’s northeast coast, where the wind comes in clean off the Labrador Current and stays long enough to etch its own grammar into the place. In the 1960s, Ottawa tried to consolidate small outports into “growth centers.” Fogo refused. Memorial University and the National Film Board helped islanders film their way into a political dialogue¹⁴. It worked. Fogo stayed.
The island’s most recognizable voice today belongs to Zita Cobb, who left to make her fortune in tech and came back to rebuild around what she calls “place-based capitalism.” Her Fogo Island Inn—raised above the rocks on stilts—became a symbol of resistance not through indulgence but through insistence: that economy, art, and identity were not separate spheres¹⁵. Cobb has said that modern systems forgot place, geography, and history—and that forgetting always returns with a bill.
For Fogo, the danger isn’t sudden submersion. It’s the warming water. Cod stocks collapsed once; the memory still stings. Federal and academic models show warming seas shifting species northward, rearranging the marine economy that underwrites every conversation on the island¹⁶. One fisherman told me he watches temperature charts like his grandfather watched the sky. You can anticipate trouble long before it arrives.
And then there is Grand Manan, out in the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, where the tides move with the force of twenty-five million horses¹⁷. For generations, those tides fed herring weirs, carved basalt, and decided whether a family’s season succeeded or failed. But they also paired with storms in ways no one had measured until recently. Rising seas, shifting storm tracks, and a thinning margin for error have made certain harbors feel newly vulnerable.