On Blog Action Day, a reminder about the dirty waters of the Chesapeake Bay

The Chesapeake Bay is one of the world’s largest estuaries, or bodies of water where fresh inland water mixes with salt water as tides rise and fall. Located near the middle of the North American continent’s Atlantic Ocean shore, the bay was prodded to form where it did because an asteroid hit the Earth there 35 million years ago. As the glaciers thawed after the last Ice Age, water dripped down toward that low and broken spot on the Earth’s crust. It grew into a stream that created the ancient Susquehanna River Valley as water eroded mud, silt, and clay.

Today’s Chesapeake Bay is imperiled as its watershed drains five U.S. states (New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia) as well as the District of Columbia and collects its anthropogenic pollution. It is so polluted that large areas of it are unable to support aquatic life, the result of areas that boil with algal blooms. The health of humans who come in contact with it is at risk as is the region’s economy, due to the loss of seafood industry and recreational opportunity. The water is brown and the banks are eroded.

I've poured over the situation from many angles (see list below), and I despair that the region's people aren't more up in arms about the Bay. The Gulf Oil Disaster over 1,000 miles away caused some to awaken to the realization that the Chesapeake Bay really is broken. Residents of the Chesapeake region, such as the folks in my hometown, Gloucester, Virginia, didn’t feel the pinch of environmental disorder until the shrimp and oysters stopped coming up here. They knew our restaurants didn't get their oysters from the Chesapeake, but it was never something anyone would say out loud. When I go out to Gloucester and Mathews area restaurants with my elderly parents I’m hearing more and more people say things about there being no oysters on the menu. “Got any of those oily oysters?” or “I reckon we won’t get any more oysters,” they will say.

It goes further. The world’s oceans are impaired and there is less of the seafood we love available, even in Gloucester, blessed with a history of plenteous seafood and hard-working watermen. I took my 87-year-old mother shopping at the Super Wal-Mart in Gloucester last week. They no longer have a seafood counter. The time before that, my mother wanted fresh flounder, so we asked the clerk if any was available. There wasn't. Mom also wanted some scallops, which she thought she would get from the fresh seafood counter. They were expensive. I asked the clerk about the ones in the boxes and she let slip that all she does is open some of the frozen product and put it in the counter display, so there's no difference. Wow. I think she wasn’t supposed to let that slip.

Mathews Book cover site today

Seafood is a really big deal around here. So today, on Blog Action Day 2010, since the theme is water, seafood from my water comes to my mind first. I grew up on the tidal fringe of Virginia. It’s in my blood. My father likes to say he has salt water in his veins.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Chesapeake Bay, I hope you’ll read a few of my posts I've written for the online magazine Suite101. There’s even a recipe for crab cakes you can try at home … that is if you can find and afford any crab meat.

• Dragon Run: An Ecologically Important Chesapeake Bay Tributary
• Chesapeake Clean Water Act Legislation is Needed Now
• Chesapeake Bay Foundation Reaches Agreement with EPA
• Lawncare and Phosphorus
• Chesapeake Bay Oysters and Disease 
• U.S. Atlantic Coast and Sea Level Rise 
• Is It Safe to Swim in the Chesapeake Bay?
• Colonial Williamsburg Crab Cake Recipe 
• Chesapeake Bay Pirates
• History of the Chesapeake Bay
• Chesapeake Bay Oysters
• Disease and Chesapeake Bay Striped Bass
• Blue Crabs and Chesapeake Bay Pollution
• Seventeenth-century Chesapeake Settlers
• How to Restore Chesapeake Oysters
• How to Save the Chesapeake Bay
• Chesapeake Bay Watershed Habitat and Ecosystem