The House at Royal Oak by Carol Eron Rizzoli Page B

boat used to harvest bay oysters, and he’ll dredge for oysters, pulling up perhaps a dozen. Ten of the twelve will be dead. Other days he pulls up only empty shells.
    Projects are underway to save the shellfish, such as building reefs for oyster beds and seeding with disease-resistant andnonnative species of oysters. This is a controversial issue, as no one can predict for certain what will happen once nonnative species are introduced. In another effort, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers deposited a million oysters in the bay in the summer of2004, hoping to increase the population. Within weeks, to the engineers’ embarrassment, a raiding party of cownose rays, relatives of the stingray, came along and gobbled up about 750,000 of the young oysters, a feast that cost $45,000.
    Beyond their exquisite flavor, the oysters are important for a much larger reason. They filter water for nutrients, such as algae, and in so doing help to clean the bay. Because an oyster can filter as much as five liters of water an hour, scientists believe that the once-vast oyster population filtered the entire volume of the bay’s waters every three to four days. Oysters were so plentiful at one time that they formed shoals large enough to endanger ships. Overharvesting began after the Civil War with the advent of train service that rushed the oysters to market. Production peaked in the 1880s, when 20 million bushels of oysters a year were taken. Ever since, the harvest has declined.
    So why not set up the grill on the lawn and eat more chicken until the shellfish rebound? Because chickens and lawns are part of the problem. The area’s chicken farms—along with agriculture and lawns all up and down the watershed, including dairy farms in Pennsylvania—represent the single biggest cause of environmental damage to the bay because they produce runoffs of nitrogen from fertilizers and phosphorous from manure. The runoff into the bay and its creeks leads to algae overgrowth, or “blooms,” which block light needed by other plant life. When the algae dieand decompose, consuming oxygen in the process, further species are threatened.
    A chicken tax is proposed by environmentalists to help clean up and truck away the manure. But housing development all along the shoreline, bringing more lawns and more fertilizer use, contributes excessive nutrients to the runoff as well. More paved roads, more auto emissions, more shopping centers, more sewage, and more stormwater from all around the 64,000-square-mile watershed of the Chesapeake contribute chemical contaminants, too.
    The largest river that drains into the bay, the Susquehanna once brought a rush of clean water. In time, the river was dammed, the flow of cleansing water diminished, and the river itself began contributing pollution; by 2005 the Susquehanna was listed as the country’s most endangered river. By 2006 the Chesapeake Bay Foundation ranked the bay’s health at 29 on a scale of 100. Although this represents a 2-point improvement over previous years, underwater grasses scored 18, shad got a 10, and the native oyster scored 4. The cleanup is far behind schedule. By 2010 the bay was supposed to be clean enough to be taken off the federal list of “dirty waters.” No one expects that goal to be met. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is considering moving the deadline to 2020, by which time many say the bay and its tributaries may be beyond saving and leading the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation to file suit against the agency for failing to enforce the Clean Water Act.
    And that’s what happened to the Chesapeake Bay, or the
Chesepiooc
as the Algonquians called it, which some say means Great Shellfish Bay.
    Much of the world chooses to live where land and water meet. In the United States the majority of the population lives within fifty miles of an ocean, bay, or the shores of the Great Lakes. As naturalist Tom Horton points out, people