Read the saed story here about the collapse of the Chesapeake Bay's blue crab population, and more generally about our nearly complete failure to "Save the Bay." The problems are all man made -- warmer water (possibly due to global climate change), low-oxygen "dead zones" (created by "manure, treated sewage and suburban fertilizer, which cause algae blooms that remove oxygen from the bay's water)," and probably overfishing as well. As with so most environmental problems, this one's fixable but only if we're willing to do what's necessary:
"We know what to do" to clean it up, said Ann Pesiri Swanson, the executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, an advisory group of state officials from around the watershed. "We just bloody don't have the money to do it."
The types of things we need to be doing include "stopping runoff at tens of thousands of farms, replacing hundreds of thousands of septic tanks, overhauling numerous sewage plants." We also need to look at protection for female crabs, which "are the key to the species' reproduction" but which are caught by the millions each year BEFORE they are able to spawn.
The fact is, people say we "don't have the money" to Save the Bay, but it's nonsense. Of course we "have the money," it's just a matter of priorities. Also, if we do NOT save the Bay, the costs are that we will lose "not only a resource, but a unique and irreplaceable cultural heritage," as U.S. Naval Academy Professor Howard R. Ernst says.
Finally, I'd note that the Bay's problems are in many ways a symptom of other problems -- suburban sprawl and global warming -- that we need to be dealing with for a lot of reasons. Given the latest report by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which describes the risks of inaction on global warming in stark and frightening terms, the costs of NOT taking action will be far greater than the costs of taking action. The bottom line is that we, as a society, need to bite the bullet and treat these problems as the emergencies that they are. At the state level, we need to HAUL ASS, and we need to start by pressuring lawmakers to make environmental protection -- including Saving the Bay -- their top priority. What is more important than this?
P.S. This is a good start, but we need to do a lot more to cut the flow of phosphorus and other pollutants flowing into the Bay.
I agree that the problems are really just symptomatic of other problems. An overpopulation of humans is at the core of this.
The huge overburden of human biomass is eating up all of earth's resources, polluting the air, water, and soil of our planet. Unrestrained fecundity is in fact going to be the death of us, not the life of us. If we don't stop screwing so much we will screw the world.
Lowell, you're exactly right -- we have the way to save the Bay, but we don't have the will.
The tragedy of the commons is one of the many arguments against today's Republican mantra that less government is always better government. They enjoy throwing out absolutes without any philosophical context and appealing to the self-interest of the few to the desecration of the whole.
Of course, we could always privitize the Bay. Then it would no longer be a common concern.