Christine Keiner
The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880
 
Athens: University of Georgia Press
$44.95 hardcover [30% discount available via press website]
 
ISBN: 978-0-8203-2698-6
 
344 pages, 6 x 9 inches, 11 b&w photos, 3 cartoons, 1 table, 2 maps, 1 figure
October 2009
 
The Oyster Question features perspectives of environmental,
agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of
Maryland’s iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry.

Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life, and some continue to
use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats.
Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a
lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of
ruin.

But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists,
and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater
communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural
and unnatural disasters weaken the bay’s resilience enough to endanger
the oyster resource. The book examines conflicts that pitted scientists
in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the
statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new
ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state
rather than the federal level.

The Oyster Question concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over
introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that
proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the
last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

http://www.ugapress.uga.edu/index.php/books/oyster_question

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