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The Chesapeake Bay Is Ailing, and This Time It's Serious

An oyster boat heads back to Smith Island in the Chesapeake after a day of harvesting, which is down dramatically over the past decade.
An oyster boat heads back to Smith Island in the Chesapeake after a day of harvesting, which is down dramatically over the past decade. (By Ricky Carioti -- The Washington Post)
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That's not entirely fair. I was buoyed last week to hear from the Coastal Conservation Association, one of the few environmental groups with the courage to stick its neck out. CCA is urging folks to show up at public hearings in Maryland and Virginia this month and next to support a controversial move to cap the massive catch of menhaden in the bay by the industrial giant Omega Protein.

CCA also recently wrote Maryland's Natural Resources secretary Ron Franks to call for endangered-species status for oysters, with a subsequent moratorium on oystering to give the beleaguered stocks a chance to recover.

These are unusual positions for an organization basically made up of sport fishermen. Nobody in CCA goes oystering or menhaden fishing, but these are tough times, and someone has to step up.

CCA reckons the answer to the bay's woes, if there is one, lies in "ecosystem management," meaning a holistic approach to its problems. "It's like triage at a hospital," said CCA's fisheries scientist, Dick Brame. "You've got a patient that's dying of arterial bleeding, but he also has cancer. The arterial bleeding in this case is over-exploitation of species, the cancer underneath is the continuing decline of water quality.

"If you can't stop the bleeding, the cancer doesn't matter. But if you do, you still have to deal with the cancer."

So there in a nutshell is the state of our bay: A morbidly obese patient in the emergency room with IV lines pumping poison in, while blood spurts from arterial wounds and an underlying cancer lurks. Meanwhile, the staff runs around insisting everything's fine, all we need is more tests.

Welcome home!

Anglers and others interested in speaking for or against capping the catch of menhaden in the Chesapeake by Virginia factory ships can attend public hearings Wednesday at the Annapolis Radisson Hotel; July 12 at the Potomac River Fisheries Commission in Colonial Beach, Va., or July 13 at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Va.

For details, check the Coastal Conservation Association Web site at http://www.ccamd.org/ or phone 1-888-758-6580.


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