Washington Life Magazine
Washington Life Magazine

to remove the Bay from the dirty waters list by a court ordered deadline of 2010. As it turns out, there is still not sufficient political will to actually implement the agreement and to get the job done. And the longer our elected officials wait, the more expensive it gets. We know the current price tag. If the states and the federal government committed $3 billion per year for the current decade, there is near certainty that the 2010 deadline would be met. We would have a cleaner Bay and river system with water healthy enough to swim in even after big rains, fish and shellfish abundant and safe to eat, and a worldwide model of success. It is not too late. And it does not have to be so expensive. At CBF, we follow the 80:20 rule: We believe 80 percent of the pollution can be reduced for 20 percent of the cost ($6 billion over 10 years). We have been pushing the states and the federal government to prioritize and focus their efforts on those strategies most efficient to address the problem, specifically re-engineering sewage treatment plants to maximum efficiency and helping farmers implement the best practices and technologies to address agricultural runoff.
Real success has been achieved on the sewage front, and if our leaders stick with the plan, significant pollution reductions will be realized in the next few years. On the agriculture front, farm and environmental interests are working in partnership as never before to encourage adequate funding, training, and technical assistance. One could almost begin to feel optimistic. Unfortunately, however, as winter turns to spring, an all-too familiar reaction to a faltering economy is re-emerging. In state legislatures and at the federal level, we are seeing broken promises and the retraction of promised funds. Are we once again about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?
BY JEFFERSON HOLLAND
ust under a century ago, more than 32,000 people earned their livelihoods harvesting oysters on the Chesapeake Bay. They were known as watermen, and their way of life is synonymous with the Chesapeake and with Maryland’s bucolic Eastern Shore. During the past three decades, commercial overfishing has effectively put an end to this unique piece of American culture by draining the Bay, first of oysters, and more recently, of crabs, and by employing methods that swiftly put local fishermen out of business. William J. McNasby, son of Irish immigrants fl eeing the potato famine, moved his oyster-packing business from New Jersey to Annapolis in 1886. To get an edge over the competition, McNasby moved his operation from City Dock to the other side of Horn Point in 1919. Here, he employed 32 shuckers who were paid between 20 and 30 cents per gallon of oysters. As part of the Annapolis Maritime Museum’s Oral History Project, oyster shucker Lyle Smith recently shared some early memories of working at McNasby’s Oyster Co. “I’m 67, and I worked at McNasby before I went to school in the morning. I would go down with my grandmother, I was in the sixth grade, I think it was, when
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is 40 years old. We have seen downturns before. We were not discouraged then, and we will not be now. While history may yet record that a wellmeaning but ultimately timid society lost the Chesapeake Bay in the early years of the 21st century, we see a brighter future. We believe that leaders can be encouraged to recognize that saving the Bay preserves the “national treasure” President Reagan cited years ago. We know that a victory for the Bay will demonstrate that humans can, in fact, learn to marry environmental, social, and economic prosperity for all. The economy and the environment are, after all, two sides of the same coin. We cannot have one without the other.
Hand tonging for oysters at the mouth of the Severn River, c. 1953. (Photograph by Marion E. Warren © M. E. Warren Photography, LLC 2008)
I started. My mother and grandmother and grandfather, they were shuckers, and that’s how I learned how to shuck oysters. And from there I moved to unloading boats when they came in, and from there I went to packing oysters and shipping them, with McNasby. “A boat got paid by the bushel, 10 cents a bushel, I think it was, and then they went up to a quarter a bushel. We’d go and unload a boat, shovel out a big buy boat in a couple of hours, because they usually had three, four, five hundred bushels on them or more, and after we did that he’d pay us, and then I’d go on to school.”
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