Crabby About the Chesapeake Bay

There's an old friend of mine — and I'm sorry to say that we've been out of touch for several years — who's been struggling since before we even met. I received an update this week. The news wasn't very good, and it hit me pretty hard.

[The Chesapeake Bay] It doesn't look like a disaster area ... But watermen aren't pulling blue crabs out of the Bay this winter. After years of decline, the U.S. Commerce Department declared the fishery a federal disaster last September and Maryland and Virginia shut it down until spring.

The Chesapeake — the nation's largest estuary — provided an incredible field setting for my graduate studies in watershed and coastal science. But before even starting coursework and research, before digging into the magnificent specifics of its hydrology and landforms in earnest, I'd already fallen in love. All it took was a crab boil.

My housemates and I crowded around a newspaper-covered kitchen table, little wooden shell-cracking mallets in hand, feasting, increasingly covered in crab gunk. The epiphany of that moment still seems heretical, what with my coming from the land of the world's best lobster, but I stick by it today: The Maryland Blue Crab remains my peak crustacean culinary experience.

Editor Steve, thankfully, reminded me of a 2005 National Geographic article that documented the history, challenges, and opportunity exhibited by the Chesapeake, and I recommend it fully in case you missed its initial run.

Estuaries, semi-enclosed coastal forms where freshwater from rivers interact with seawater, subjected to the influence of tides, are rich and important natural systems. When vibrant, they teem with marine life, birds, and small mammals.

In the case of the Chesapeake — and this point really comes alive through this wonderful interactive map revealing how urbanized the drainage basin has become — centuries of sediment, nutrients, and pollution loading from agricultural and residential activity has dramatically hampered the bay’s natural productivity and vitality.

Think of a manufacturing facility, burdened with high costs and bad debts (in the form of pollution), starved for capital (such as dissolved oxygen), and that is consequently only able to limp along at something like 25 percent capacity.

All the while, we’ve too-happily gone after this facility’s products hungrily, repeatedly. It is sad to see centuries-old communities that thrived on the fruits of the bay today struggle for relevance and survival. That does not blunt the truth that we’ve collectively fished this and other systems far more aggressively than they could withstand on a sustained basis, while at the same time rendering the waters less habitable. A couple pictures — graphs of crab and oyster populations in the Chesapeake — really tell the story.

(That oyster situation is especially striking, owing to their being even more useful than delicious, if you can believe it. Such filter feeders clean the water as they derive their nutrition from it. The collective oyster population once would filter the volume equivalent of the entire Chesapeake in a few days. The National Geographic article indicates that today, the existing population needs about a year to do so.)

So, no, it's not looking great. But I am not about to give up on my friend.

The Chesepeake Bay Foundation, for 40 years dedicated to restoration, education, outreach, and advocacy in support of a healthy Chesapeake reminds us that the challenges are real, but opportunities to seek a wiser path and moments of victory and achievement are real as well. Nutrient management programs are growing; basin states are working in concert to address the needs of the bay with technical and policy measures; pollution sources are being controlled; and a nice chunk of stimulus bill money is heading for Chesapeake Bay improvement projects.

Natural systems and friendships sustain us. It's always rough to see them suffer, and often hard to know just the right thing to say or do. But when times are toughest is when it’s most critical to acknowledge them, to be there for them with support, attention and compassion as best as we can.

Because it's so important to us that they pull through.

Photo of Chesapeake Bay courtesy of jimbricketts, via flickr.