Correspondence
Putting oysters in the Severn River [Creature Feature: June 10) amounts to little more than animal cruelty. Saving the Bay is not about putting the right number of oysters in the Bay; it is about improving water quality to a point that oysters can survive. The oysters that have been put in the Severn for more than two decades are dead. More than 50 percent of the oysters that Severn River Association planted this summer will be dead by next year, and their numbers will fall each subsequent year.
The Army Corps of Engineers plans to plant 12 acres of oysters on the Severn on a foundation comprised of, among other things, steel slag from Bethlehem Steel (yes, the same stuff that is laced with heavy metals). Marylanders Grow Oysters or, as I like to call it, Marylanders Kill Oysters, is the absolute worst kind of feel-good, cost-a-lot, accomplish-nothing project that distracts best intentioned members of the public from the real problem at hand: pollution, pollution, pollution.
–Howard Ernst, Annapolis