The Baltimore Engineers And The Chesapeake Bay 1961 1987

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than the federal level. The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

Although media reports suggest that there always has been public concern over the health of the Chesapeake Bay, this is a fairly recent phenomenon. For centuries people saw the bay as a bottomless sink for waste products--a natural decomposer with the ability to freshen itself with ocean inflows. Not until human health and livelihood seemed threatened did people begin to think seriously about management by such methods as treating sewage and limiting seafood harvests. Chesapeake Waters chronicles four centuries of public attitudes about the bay--and legislative responses to them--from 1607, the date of the first English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, to the close of the twentieth century. In the last few decades, wide-reaching measures by federal and local governments have influenced how people use the bay: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completed a massive study of bay quality; the Chesapeake Bay Program was launched; the Critical Area Protection Act went into effect. The authors make sense of these complex programs, place them in historical context, and explain how they have improved the quality of bay waters. Chesapeake Waters is as much about the power of public perception as it is about efforts to oversee bay water quality. In a work rich with anecdotes and historical art and photos, the authors relate how human attitudes and ideas have shaped four hundred years of decisions about the Chesapeake Bay.