The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (Environmental History and the American South Ser.)

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Description

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 a few continue to make use of preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it’s frequently believed that a loss of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin.

But Keiner offers an opposing view through 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 in regards to the evolution of environmental politics on the state somewhat 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 impact the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

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