The Chesapeake Bay Skipjacks pictured in this short post represent what’s left of a fleet that numbered in the hundreds back in the golden age of sail. I shot these photographs during the years I worked as an editorial assignment photographer/ feature writer for the U.S. Postal Service. My “beat” was the Chesapeake Bay region that encompassed the Maryland Eastern Shore, which was part of the Baltimore Division mail delivery area during the 1980s. I worked on the staff of the division newsletter at the time, appropriately named The Skipjack in honor of these beautiful sailing craft designated as the official Maryland State Boat in 1985. Celebrating the occasion the General Assembly noted: “…recent efforts to restore environmental integrity of the Chesapeake Bay have rekindled interest and appreciation in the majestic estuary as not only an economic asset, but also as the foundation for a way of life for many Marylanders; and…Nothing better represents the way of life of Maryland watermen than the historic Chesapeake Boat known as the Skipjack…”
There are only a half-dozen or so of these iconic sailing oyster dredgers in service today, doing their very small part in the harvest of oysters that now amounts to only one percent of what it was a century ago. According to Rod Fujita, author of Heal the Ocean, “The excessive harvest of oysters over the decades appears to have interfered with the ability of estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay to cleanse themselves—oysters were once capable of filtering the entire volume of the Bay every three days, but no more.” According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, throughout the Chesapeake Bay watershed the forces of environmental exploitation have despoiled the landscape at an alarming rate, and as a result, this unique water resource is “dangerously out of balance,” and functions at “barely more than one-fourth of its potential because water pollution, primarily from excess nitrogen and phosphorous, inhibits overall improvements to the system.”
Recently the Chesapeake Bay from Kent Island to Virginia’s James River was recently declared a “dead zone” by the Environmental Protection Agency, and a lot of disenchanted yachtsman I’ve met over the years agree that culturally and aesthetically, the landscape surrounding the nations’ largest estuary has been dead for years. Unbridled growth is the primary reason and there appears to be no end in sight. As of 2020, 18.2 million people inhabited the Bay region and experts predict those numbers will exceed 21 million by 2040, accelerating the rate of industrial pollution, chemical run-off from farms and industry, and toxic contamination from sewage treatment plants—all putting increased stress on this once bountiful fishery.
Despite some improvement over the past twenty years or so, the Chesapeake Bay remains on the EPA’s list of impaired waters. Single-use housing subdivisions are having an especially bad impact, creating sprawl and other destructive land-use patterns that generate pollution. Unfortunately, federal and state governments subsidize sprawl by creating tax incentives that make it cheaper for developers to build on farms and open spaces rather than near established town centers. As a result, cars, trucks and traffic-jammed roadways dominate the region in a vast nowhere land of office parks, commercial highway strips, ugly urban subdivisions, and squalid suburbs, a maze of spiritually degrading places that, as Geography of Nowhere author James Howard Kunstler points out, have “become so atrocious in the postwar decades that the Disney corporation was able to create an artificial substitute for it and successfully sell it as a commodity.”
One of the ironies in all this greed-driven development is that polls show people actually prefer traditional neighborhoods common before the Second World War to today’s suburban paradigm. According to Fannie Mae, Americans favor a house in a close-knit neighborhood to one in a tract development by a margin of three to one. Unfortunately, low-density zoning laws that favor sprawl are a boon to developers to make quick profits, so small, mixed-use towns rarely get built. As Bay Country author Tom Horton points out, “In the twelve-year period for which statistics are available, development for houses and shopping malls in the five-country Baltimore metropolitan region claimed another 130,000 acres of farmland. All told, the changes in the region produced the most drastic rate of deforestation in the northeastern United States and reduced the forest which covered virtually 100 percent of Maryland when the colonists arrived, to 40 percent by the year 2000.”
The drastic loss of wild woodland has perilous implications for the future. The forest not only provides habitat for wildlife; as Horton points out, it is also a key to water quality. “The silt from farm and developed land runs into the Bay at a rate fifty times greater than from woodland,” he writes. “Phosphorus, another prime pollutant, comes eighty times as much from cropland as from forest, and forty times as much from residential areas. For nitrogen and toxic chemicals, the story is similar.” The bottom line is that more roads and more housing developments mean less pristine wilderness to filter rainwater and that spells trouble for small creeks and streams as well. “The quantity of aquatic life in a given stream declines in direct proportion to how much its watershed gets paved over,” Horton says. Another sad consequence of sprawl around the Bay Area is the increase of sediment build-up that destroys Bay grasses, which have declined from nearly a quarter million-acres in Colonial times to less than 40,000 acres today.
With these aforementioned facts in mind, I tend to regard images of Skipjacks as beacons of hope in the possibility of turning things around and restoring the Chesapeake Bay watershed to vibrant health. But those Quixotic yearnings were dashed by a report in the U.S. Edition of The Guardian newspaper, August 11, 2021: “Groundwater on military bases along the Chesapeake Bay is contaminated with toxic PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ at levels many times above the level some regulators say is safe for drinking and they are likely ending up in blue crabs, oysters and other marine life that are consumed by humans. The compounds are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, decreased immunity, hormone disruption, and a range of other serious health problems.”
On a concluding note, here’s a quote from Roy Hillyard, a wise old sailor I met in my travels around the Bay whose memory inspired me to post this piece on Earth Day this year. In a conversation about the impact that chicken farms were having on the waters of the Chesapeake, Roy said “As the Bay goes, so go people.” Roy also emphasized that the situation is dire and depressing, to be sure, but not inevitable, pointing to the guarantees as designated in the Constitution as the means to change. But effective, fundamental improvement demands a revolution of consciousness and a consensus that puts the well being of the planet first, guided by the radical “whole earth” ecological perspective that’s necessary in order to meet the difficult challenges ahead. “When enough people come together, then change will come and we can achieve almost anything,” says Greta Thunberg, but we’re clearly not there yet. As professor Paul Street writes in his indispensable Paul Street Report on Substack, April 4, 2024: “US-Americans live in an upside-down political world where falsehood regularly masquerades as truth…In the upside down world of US-American media politics culture, climate ranks far below other citizen and voter concerns including “the economy,” terrorism, health care costs, education, Social Security solvency, crime, immigration, drugs, “the deficit,” “corruption,” and more - a great accomplishment of the petro-capitalist climate denial industry and capitalism’s longstanding separation of humanity from the natural world (of which homo sapiens is a key wild card part.) How absurd. The climate crisis is arguably the biggest single issue of our or any time. There’s no democracy, justice, love, play, poetry, civility, music, economic security, science, spirituality, health, on a dead planet. Who wants to turn a baked and poisoned world upside down?”
Finally, consider this statement from Rachel Carson, whose landmark book Silent Spring raised national consciousness about this vital issue 62 years ago. “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature,” she wrote. “But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself. [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”
Beautiful, poignant, and essential readings. Thanks so much for the photographs and the prose---and quotations. Humans have made a mess of things.......
Great post, Stewart! One of the ironies of those single resident huge house complexes that are springing up in farmland is that residents are now wanting to move out because with rising energy prices those huge houses are expensive to heat and cool.