"A first-rate analysis of the interaction between science, environment, and politics alongside one of the nation’s oldest and most important conservation problems. This book will be necessary reading for anyone who wonders why good science doesn’t necessarily lead to good policy, in resources management or any other area."
—Arthur F. McEvoy, author of The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980

Description

In The Oyster Question, Christine Keiner applies 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. Keiner 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…

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