But be that as it may be, the "plight" the Maryland watermen caught my attention. Basically, they are saying that everyone needs to get on the ball to clean up the Bay because they have to take part-time jobs so that they keep doing their other part-time job, which is maintaining the sorry state of the Bay's fisheries (and that means shellfish, crabs, and fish). Attitudinally, it sounds like this:
He said both watermen and the bay itself are "at the brink of collapsing," necessitating strict controls on pollution from all the various sources.
[Larry] Simns [President of the Maryland Watermen's Association] said watermen pay the price for pollution and mismanagement. There was the famous rockfish harvest moratorium in the 1980s, recent restrictions on crabbing and persistent talk of shutting down the oyster harvest.
"They don't mind putting a moratorium on watermen when stocks get low, but they won't put a moratorium on building," he said.
Well put. Simns recognizes that there are a lot of vested interests involved in screwing the Bay royally, but that his platoon should be able to keep pulling out about as much as they want if everybody else would just get together and clean the Bay up.
Look at it this way: the Chesapeake Bay's watershed extends to New York, but New Yawkers are going to be far more interested in what affects the Hudson than what flows into Pennsylvania. And Pennsylvania has so little Bay coastline that they basically see it as a downstream dump, and the lovely Susquehanna carries the agricultural runoff of half the state into the upper Bay (and some acid runoff from coal mining, too, and that also includes West Virginia). Speaking of WV, Virginia and West Virginia haven't agreed on much since they split up during that little contretemps called the Civil War, and though they contribute both the Potomac and the James into the Bay, they seem to think that the problem is mostly Maryland's. Now, Democrats Warner and Kaine have been a tad more cooperative than Gilmore and Glendening, who probably would have preferred derringers at 20 yards than actual conversation, but still, Maryland seems to get most of the blame for what's wrong with the Bay. And if Maryland can't control Tyson and Perdue's chicken poop and the combined suburban runoff from the DC and Baltimore sprawling suburbs (except hey wait a minute, DC isn't part of Maryland, so the Anacostia -- or is the the gonna-cost-ya -- River doesn't fall under Maryland's purview), so DC is yet another jurisdiction that has to be somehow involved, but the Feds keep punting this ball back to the states. Who are doing a d*mned poor job of it.
But look what they're up against. Agricultural interests; farmers complain about increased restrictions on what runs off their farm fields and what gets discharged from the excretory systems of their livestock. Illegal dumping abounds because legal dumping costs more. Grow-at-all-costs developers (why oh WHY is housing starts such a fricking important economic indicator? -- it's partly an indicator of how increasing less open land gets converted into homes, driveways, and parking lots) are treated like royalty if they bring venture capital to the table, especially in these economic times. Commercial fishing -- has Virginia yet tried to rein on Omega Proteins' rape of the filter-feeding menhaden? (Let me check: doesn't look like it.) And this particular region also hosts a thriving, commuter-clogged economy, and we certainly don't want to put the brakes on THAT -- despite the amount of water yanked out of the rivers for drinking and lawn-watering and power plants (OK, yes, nuke plants need cooling too) and all the excess fertilizer dumped into sewers and all the food waster dumped into disposalls.
How the heck are we going to clean this mess up? As the saying goes, the answer to that question is: not easily, and not quickly.
The problem is, because the Bay is shared by so many states, it is seen as a shared resource and not a national ecological and historical heritage. Washington DC would not be where it is, and neither would Mount Vernon, were it not for the Bay. Neither indeed would Norfolk or Hampton Roads be as important. Of course Baltimore's primary reason for existence was the Bay: it had a port, and of course the port had a fort, and the Key to that is the National Anthem. And the Bay's oysters used to be a gigantic cash crop, and up until a few years ago, crabs were pretty noted as a Bay specialty too. But again, this is economic exploitation, not ecological preservation. (Oh yeah, Annapolis has a bit of a connection to the Bay; so does the Potomac River all the way to Harper's Ferry; we could talk about how many Civil War battlefields lie within 100 miles of Bay waters, or the Monitor vs. Merrimack, so I could delve deeper into the historical importance, from colonial day to modern day) -- BUT I WANT TO MAKE A POINT.
And my POINT is: the Bay is unique, probably like no other estuary in the entire United States. Had it been viewed as such, as an ecological and historical gem, not as an economically-exploitable, multi-interest facilitator of commerce, it might have been viewed as something to preserve, just as explorers in wonderment saw everything in the valley of the Yellowstone and decided that it was too unique to lose.
Had we collectively viewed the Chesapeake Bay as too unique to lose and made it a national park, then the wildlife (terrestrial and aquatic) would be protected. Activities occurring outside of Chesapeake Bay National Park would all have to be viewed in terms of their potential impact on the ecosystems of the Park. Oysters, crabs, stripers, menhaden would be exporting themselves to waters external to the Bay, not trying to survive in the oxygen-depleted, murky waters of the current Chesapeake Sewer. If this had happened early in the 20th century and maybe part of the Bay was preserved as a cultural heritage park, those plighted watermen would be getting their oysters and crabs out of the Bay the traditional way, like the Indians, and they wouldn't be complaining that there was too little left to make this a viable lifestyle. And there would be recreational opportunities galore: sailing, clean beaches, skin diving to see the beauty of a thriving oyster bed, larger and more viable national wildlife refuges with waterfowl and the things they eat, ungutted coastlines, nook and cranny bays and rivers to be explored by kayak or canoe or skipjack --------------
---- this is a vision of something that will never be, but something that ought to have been. And so I think and wish and hope that these valiant multilateral efforts that accomplish nothing would see the Chesapeake Bay as the mid-Atlantic equivalent of the Everglades, which is a park that was beset with outside influences that threatened its viability, but which (despite what sea level rise is going to do to it) was deemed worthy of receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in restoration money to try and preserve a tenth of what it was before all the outside influences started kicking in to nearly destroy it. Why can't developers be taxed 10% of everything they profit in a development (of any kind) that lies within the Bay watershed? Oh, I know it's a lot of money. But when I talk about what the Bay used to be to my kids (hopefully I'll write more on that theme soon), they think it's a dreamland, a fantasy, an abstraction, a far-removed-reality that couldn't really have ever existed.
The Chesapeake Bay should have been a national park. It's a shadow of its former self, and that is a national shame and tragedy. I feel sorry for the watermen, because they are like typewriter repairmen, trying to hang on in an environment in which their skills are antiquated anachronisms. But it didn't have to be that way.
It didn't have to be like this: Chesapeake Bay Might Now Also Be a Health Threat to Humans
A compendium of a few more articles
Large sanctuaries urged for recovery of wild oyster population
Beauty on the Brink
Failing the Chesapeake
By the way, through the wonders of the Internet, this particular idea did actually come under consideration, around 2002:
Chesapeake Bay National Park?
Chesapeake Bay National Park? Study considers adding bay to system
But yeah, that didn't work:
Bay Gateways Network's future in jeopardy as funds are eliminated
Hmmm...
"The White House [aka the Bush Administration], which did not include funding for the Gateways Network in its last two budget requests, has in policy statements encouraged Congress to terminate the entire Statutory Aid program. The House has also recommended the elimination of the program, and for the past two years followed the lead of the White House and eliminated funding for the Gateways Network.
This is not surprising to me.
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