Chesapeake Bay Journal

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The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography
By John R. Wennersten
Maryland Historical Society, 2001

For many people, the degradation of the Chesapeake is a recent phenomenon, starting sometime after World War II and accelerating in recent decades as the Bay and its watershed were overwhelmed by growth and pollution while fish and shellfish populations dwindled to historic lows. Maryland historian John Wennersten paints a broader canvas of the Bay’s ecological history, stretching well before the arrival of Europeans, and fills it with rich details.

Prior to colonization, the Chesapeake region’s population averaged one Native Americans per 1,600 acres compared with a continent average of one per 8,000 acres. This density was possible because of the region’s productive water and soils.

Amazingly, in the midst of plenty, the first European settlers often found themselves starving, in part because they did not bother, and were often too lazy, to learn the fishing techniques that could have kept them fed.

That changed as they learned to exploit local resources—especially its soils, when settlers turned to tobacco to earn quick money. Tobacco quickly depleted the soils, which farmers could not replenish with nutrients because there was little animal manure. When soils played out, farmers moved on: There was no profit in conserving the soil, and more fertile land seemed always to be available—either by clearing forests, or ditching and draining wetlands.

Wasteful ways were not limited to farmers: During the peak of logging era in the Susquehanna River forests, only 20–30 percent of the trees were used, the rest were cast off as waste. The Bay paid a price for these ravages as sediment poured downstream; Wennersten suggests that habitats were being smothered by the late 1700s.

Bay rivers became the means of disposal for human and other wastes; by the late 1800s, sewage was contaminating shellfish beds near cities, and the rapid development of urban areas after the Civil War dramatically increased water pollution. “It was the betrayal of a region surpassingly endowed,” Wennersten writes.

The book moves through time, from the roots of the conservation movement in the early and mid-1900s to some of today’s most vexing issues, such as sprawl. He spends time getting insights from some of the scientists who were in the forefront of bringing the Bay’s decline to light, and exploring social, political and market forces that sometimes thwart efforts to restore the estuary.

Today, environmentalists worry about diminishing expectations; that as people become accustomed to seeing degraded systems, they gradually forget what functioning ecosystems are like. Wennersten does a valuable service in vividly reminding us not only of what the functioning Bay system was like, but how people let it slide into the impaired waterway it is today.

— Karl Blankenship is editor of the Bay Journal.

• • • • •

The best stories about current environmental issues rely on compassionate characters, political unrest, expanding scientific understanding and ultimately, a hero that rises to above the fray and wins in the end.

In “Striper Wars,” author Dick Russell weaves together these threads to create a compelling story documenting the decades-long effort to help his protagonist—the striped bass.

Russell builds upon his experience as a recreational angler and activist in the 1980s to tell the story behind efforts to establish the science, navigate the politics and create the necessary political pressure to curtail the harvest of striped bass, or rockfish, along the East Coast.

While many Bay Journal readers have memories of—and ties to—efforts to curtail striped bass harvest pressure in the Chesapeake Bay area, the book provides a coastwide perspective to the political battles along the entire Eastern Seaboard. Russell chronicles public meetings in Rhode Island, conflicts in Massachusetts, studies in New York and lobbying efforts in Washington, DC.

He manages to describe the science in a way easily understood by readers, while remaining true to the detail behind it. His dissection of the politics is pointed, and the reader can hear the line screaming from the reel when Russell chronicles one of his fishing adventures.

“Striper Wars” serves both as a chronicle of past striped bass restoration efforts and a warning sign for the future. Latter parts of the book delve into the next wave of problems facing the species, including the expansion of disease throughout the Chesapeake population and the lack of forage fish in critical nursery areas.

Russell highlights the need to better understand the long-term impacts of mycobacteriosis on striper populations, and argues to accelerate the implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management in the Chesapeake Bay based on the predator/prey relationship between rockfish and menhaden.

From my perspective as an avid angler that pursues striped bass up and down the Bay, Russell’s book is a great read that instills a critical key message—while the striped bass has made an incredible comeback over the last 20 years, we must remain vigilant. If we let down our guard in the future, we put at risk the past sacrifices that gave our hero a fighting chance.

— Christopher Conner is director of communications and marketing for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

• • • • •

“An Island Out of Time” is a languid, meditative indulgence in all things quintessentially Chesapeake: crabs, terrapin, waterfowl, salt marsh, beaches, islands, boats and watermen.

It is also a richly layered chronicle of the people of Smith Island, who have arguably experienced the Bay in a more direct, sustained and challenging way than anyone else in its watershed.

Author and columnist Tom Horton penned this collection of portraits and musings after living on Smith Island for three years in the late 1980s.

It is a culture, Horton writes, “exquisitely attuned to its natural surroundings as only predators can be,” where winds and tides direct the day and people must rely on the Bay’s increasingly unreliable resources.

The move was a sharp contrast to his international adventures as a successful journalist, and also to the life that he and his young family had left behind in Baltimore:

“My street, really just a path, had no name….This gave the United Parcel Service fits, and Federal Express and the Baltimore Sun circulation departments refused to deal with it all. If you are not at a certifiable point on somebody’s grid, in modern American you scarcely exist.”

But Horton, whose roots and heart lie in the Chesapeake marshland, welcomed the change: “A marsh-clad island is a place alive. It ripples sleekly beneath the wind’s stroking, altering mood and texture with every caress and pummel.”

“An Island Out of Time” contains language as textured as the island and people it describes. At times thick with poetics, the book is also folksy and funny, with regular doses of ecology, history and philosophical prodding.

Horton steps aside often to let the islanders speak for themselves in direct and delightfully lengthy narratives.

Veteran waterman Ed Harrison explains, “I always enjoyed studyin’ things. I’m seventy-eight now, and I still wonder, when I am a-goin’ through these guts, how they come to windin’ all around instead of straight like a ditch.”

Journal entries from the 1930s reveal a girl’s simple joys and harsh realities. A neighbor dies on a frigid winter day: “She died of childbirth. They tried to cut through the ice for the Island Belle to take her to Crisfield, but they couldn’t. This is a very sad time. All froze up and no doctor.”

Paul Harrison tells stories of big guns, illegal waterfowl and outwitting game wardens. He dreams about sharing in Custer’s Last Stand: “Yeeahh, by Christ, I’d like to been there with the Indians. They told him [Custer], we don’t want to fight; all we want to do is hunt. But Custer wouldn’t let ‘em alone. And damn if they let him alone. They killed every one of them guvment bastards.”

“An Island Out of Time” records a unique Chesapeake experience, from ecology and characters, to the mechanics of communal relations and grudging adaptations to mainland modernity. The Bay, Horton writes, “never essayed truer, nor flowered more gloriously, than in its creation of Smith Island and Smith Islanders.”

— Lara Lutz is a staff writer for the Bay Journal.

• • • • •

“People of the Mist,” is a mystery set in the Chesapeake Bay circa A.D. 1300, in the Late Woodland II period.

Red Knot, A spirited young woman, the future leader of her Algonquin village, is murdered on the eve of her wedding. The death unravels further the already frayed ties with neighbor villages.

The Panther, a bitter, self-exiled old man believed to be a sorcerer, is persuaded to investigate and solve the murder before the alliances that have thus far held off a war for domination of the region, are destroyed.

This carefully researched book—the bibliography is five pages—is part of the Gears’ First North American Series.

Readers, drawn in by the captivating story, will also learn about the culture and customs of these early Chesapeake tribes. Indeed, the marriage and burial customs—as well as their taboos—are integral to the plot.

“It wouldn’t be long now before she was laid up in the house of the Dead.…With great care Green Serpent would skin her carcass and tan her wrinkled skin. Her bare corpse would lie there, drying and decomposing…After that, they would stretch her tanned skin over her dried skeleton, stuff her with grass, and sew the hide together.

Diplomacy is explored from both sides of the coin: Hospitality, what food was served, as well as how it was acquired and prepared, are featured in great detail.

On the flip side, the culture’s battle strategy and tactics also have a role to play.

“If Winged Blackbird, or one of his warriors, had killed Red Knot, it wasn’t murder, but war. A tactical move in the deadly game played the Weroances and the Mamanatowick…the response would be simple: he needed but marshal his warriors, slip his forces into White Stake territory, and extract revenge. If he escaped without significant losses, and managed to blunt Winged Blackbird’s inevitable counterattack, then the equilibrium would have been maintained in the age-old manner.”

By the end of the book, readers will know a great deal about the Upriver villages (Montgomery complex), the Conoy (Potomac Creek complex) and the Independent and Mamanatowick villages (Rappahannock complex).

And when they finally learn who killed Red Knot, readers will understand why.

— Kathleen A. Gaskell is the design/copy editor for the Bay Journal and author of the Bay Buddies & Chesapeake Challenge page.