Overview

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 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.

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9780820326986

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Reviews

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, 18501980

Keiner's rich analysis of the politics of science and her insightful comparisons between governmental programs for farmers and those for fishermen demonstrate the importance of connecting the history of the marine landscapes to understandings of history on land.-- Journal of Southern History

<p> Keiner skillfully illuminates [ The Oyster Question ] by combining environmental, maritime, social, political, and cultural history. -- Journal of American History

<p> Truly impressive. Keiner's remarkably detailed scholarship taps into multiple emerging subfields. Her sustained analysis of nonelite perspectives will contribute enormously by introducing environmental historians to the importance of class, race, religion, and local tradition in the larger conservation picture. --Richard W. Judd, author of Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England

Author Information

CHRISTINE KEINER is a professor of science, technology, and society at Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of The Oyster Question: Scientists, Watermen, and the Maryland Chesapeake Bay since 1880 (Georgia).

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