Spitting In The Ocean
Victory in the Oyster Wars
I'm on a couple of listserves that send daily links for news stories about the Chesapeake Bay. Those listserves have recently taken up items from a pretty flimsy source - though I didn't know that when I read the headline for a recent link. It read: Chesapeake Bay Oysters Making a Comeback. I had to check that out.
When the latest Fall Survey of Oysters was made public a few weeks ago, I got a brief boost reading about improved survival and spat set across the Chesapeake. But then I thought about the last time there was a good spat set and decent survival and what happened three years after that. There were oysters where there hadn't been oysters for awhile and people who had pretty much hung up their tongs said, well golly, I'm going oystering. And there went that age bracket.
Of course now we have 24 percent of the oyster bottom set aside as sanctuaries and, if those restrictions can be enforced, spat that sets in those areas will grow and three years hence maybe some will create progeny instead of providing human nourishment. But also of course, if you had some positive underlying growth rate for oyster stocks in the Bay, accepting just 24 percent of that growth rate means that you have to wait four times as long to get the stock growth possible if it were all set aside. But I digress.
I was kind of waiting for somebody in the press to pick up this news and declare victory in the battle to restore Maryland's oyster fishery. And here it was. The link took me to a page that billed itself as the Environment and Climate News. I wondered why the name Heartland Institute up at the top of the page sounded familiar, but the article read ok until I got to the heading, Private Sector Efforts Successful. Somebody from some group thought that this good news about oysters was a result of all the homeowners who have been growing oysters in floats off their docks. Yes sir, that ought to do it.
That's when I noticed that there was a video link next to the text offering to give me the real story on "Climategate". Maybe I need to say that I believe that the purloined e-mails from the East Anglia's Climate Research Center have been pretty well vetted by the mathematicians of the world. If they say that there was no smoking mushroom cloud, I am going to go with them. So, anyone who is still hawking a Climategate video is probably, well, let's say, wrong. I went to the homepage for Environment and Climate News and the big story there asked angry and impatient questions about why we can't see James Hansen's (the NASA climate scientist) ethics file. Yikes.
So this was not a serious article from a serious source. I'm not sure what it was. Toward the end the author started talking about tradable fishing quotas - as if that is something that is ever going to happen in Maryland's oyster fishery. It was sort of amusing to see a libertarian group like the Heartland Institute be shown so far to the left of our Maryland watermen. They got your tradable quotas.
Clearly, the listserves do not have very high standards for what they count as "news". But otherwise, nothing was revealed.