The geography of Mathews County was carved by catastrophe.

Thirty-five million years ago, a meteorite or comet tore through the Earth’s atmosphere and slammed into its surface somewhere between the county and what is now called Cape Charles. In the ruin it left behind, the Chesapeake Bay would form. Mathews, at the very tip of Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, remains one of the state’s lowest-lying areas, surrounded on three sides by the Chesapeake Bay and the waters that flow into it.

“We’re flat as a pancake,” said Thomas Jenkins, the county’s planning, zoning and wetlands director. “Much of the county is close to sea level.”

Today a far slower but perhaps no less catastrophic force is reshaping Mathews. As climate change drives seas upward, the county is struggling to keep its waterfront properties above the tides.

When the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down an air permit last year for a compressor station Dominion Energy wanted to site in the majority-Black community of Union Hill as part of the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the judges admonished state officials that “environmental justice is not merely a box to be checked.”

In the wake of the ruling, newly ascendant Democrats in the General Assembly looked to legislation as a fix. Environmental justice — the idea that no group should bear a disproportionate share of negative environmental consequences and that communities impacted should have “meaningful involvement” in the decision-making process — was added to state code and its promotion became declared state policy.

But as the 2021 session drew to a close, Democrats split over what to do next.

Eighteen months ago, Virginia released its Phase III Watershed Implementation Plan, which lays out the steps for achieving a restored Chesapeake Bay and healthy local rivers and streams by 2025. Achieving that goal by the target date will depend on significantly accelerated state investments in the key programs that reduce pollution from farmlands, sewage treatment plants, and the hard surfaces of our cities and suburbs.

Virginians are taking note. Before COVID took hold a year ago, legislators approved historic levels of clean water funding. Since then, despite the pandemic, the resulting economic downturn, and the year’s social and political upheavals, signs of continuing commitment to our waterways and natural environment abound. Visits to state parks are at an all-time high, favorite hiking trails and waterways have been crowded, and many have rediscovered in the outdoors an antidote to stress and anxiety.

Legislators are also recommitting to our lands and waters. Virginia is poised to enact landmark legislation (HB 2129 — Del. Alfonso Lopez and SB 1354— Sen. Emmett Hanger) that will require and direct significant upgrades to many older wastewater treatment plants along the James and York Rivers and other waterways. This work — continuing an effort that has seen great success in earlier phases — will lead to substantial reductions in the pollution that reaches the Chesapeake Bay over the next several years. But funding this effort will require help from the state.