Hard Decision Time
On one thing, prophets and folk singers agree: There is a time for every purpose under heaven. September 2019 doesn’t seem to have yet decided what kind of month it wants to be. But in the tides of human affairs, this uncertain month is a time for making big decisions.
Three of the big ones made or pending nowadays affect the future of three key inhabitants of Chesapeake Bay. That means they also affect the quality of our environment and economy.
Two of those decisions, one made and one pending, affect rockfish, a fish so highly valued that it is to the Chesapeake what salmon is to the Pacific Northwest.
In this week’s feature story, first-time Bay Weekly contributor Matthew Liptak introduces our rockfish — aka striped bass — as a finite resource mistaken for an infinite one. Everybody wants a piece of them, anglers for sport, commercial fishermen for income and many of the rest of us for good eating.
In a good fishing year, like 2016, close to 13 million pounds of rockfish are harvested from the Bay alone.
But there are bad years, like the early years of the 1980s, when the rockfish in the Bay — the nursery of much of the pelagic species — were so few that the fish’s survival was at stake. Maryland’s five-year fishing ban gave the population room to rebound.
Today the figures are back in scary territory. Now is the time to act, and act wisely, watchers of the fishery say. So it’s timely that the species’ East Coast regulator, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, meets next Thursday, Sept. 26, to consider proposed cuts in recreational and commercial quotas (6-8pm, Calvary United Methodist Church, 301 Rowe Blvd., Annapolis).
We’ll let you know to what that meeting leads.
You’ll have no voice in another decision critical to the future of rockfish. A starkly for-profit Canadian enterprise, Omega Protein Corp., will increase this year’s harvest of menhaden, a little oily fish that’s a favorite of rockfish. That harvesting goes on down at the mouth of the Bay, out of Reedville, Virginia. As our cofounder Bill Lambrecht writes in Way Downstream in this week’s paper, that decision — made without interference from the Virginia General Assembly — goes against the recommendation of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission.
A decision like that can shake the whole edifice of rockfish management.
Here in Maryland, another big decision has just been made for oysters, a foundational species even more fragile than rockfish, as oysters can’t swim around to look for a habitat that suits them better.
The figures documenting the sad state of Chesapeake oysters are so familiar that they hardly need repeating — except that they’re getting worse. Adult oysters lost half their numbers over the last two decades, dropping from 600,000 to 300,000.
What to do about that but reduce harvests?
This week, Maryland Department of Natural Resources announced its plan to cut this year’s harvest by, best guess, 26 percent. Wednesdays become no-oystering days and the number of bushels harvested are reduced.
Those measures were a surprise as DNR had announced it was leaning toward a plan to reduce the harvest 30 percent by trimming days off the October and March ends of the wild oystering season.
Please don’t! begged watermen, who feared losing their valuable Thanksgiving market. So they’re happy with DNR’s decision.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, are disappointed, with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation claiming that DNR’s own Oyster Advisory Commission had advised against the decision that won out.
Winners depend on losers. That’s why making decisions is as popular with many of us — even those paid to do so — as spending the night with the flu.
Harvesting the water is a Chesapeake way of life. Naming the point at which it’s not sustainable may mean killing that way of life. That’s the hard truth — as it is for many industries today, from coal mining to print journalism.
Enough said about tough decisions for this week.