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The figure of an old man poling a skiff toward shore against the evening light engaged Susan Brait to learn about Chesapeake Bay, and it is that image which opens this her book on the oystermen of the Bay and the sapping of their traditional life, and even the bounty of the Bay itself, by the demands of American society. With directness and poetic economy Brait takes the reader into the life of the Bay and into the complex relationships that affect oysters and those who make their living from them. Her account weaves easily from the daily work of oystermen to the natural forces that have shaped the Bay, from the experimental culture of oysters by marine biologists to the plans of businessmen who expect to grow and harvest the mollusks on privately owned reefs, from efforts to legislate control of the Bay and its resources to the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River where increasing pollution of the Bay originates from agricultural practices of the Amish and other farmers. These and other disparate elements are gracefully woven into a seamless web that represents the complex wholeness of the Bay itself. Chesapeake Gold is a sensitive portrayal of people and their place, but it is also more. The oystermen and their efforts to maintain their traditional life become a figure for our society's struggle to find an ethic that will serve both man and the natural world that man is apart from and a part of.
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.
Folklore of Maryland's eastern shore.