Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay: An Environmental History by Victor S. Kennedy

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay: An Environmental History by Victor S. Kennedy Geoffrey L. Buckley Shifting Baselines in the Chesapeake Bay: An Environmental History. Victor S. Kennedy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 146, charts, drawings, maps, photographs. $38.50, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4214-2654-9. When I was a graduate student at the University of Oregon in the 1990s, one of my professors, Alvin Urquhart, assigned us to read one of his articles titled "Stripping the Urban Landscape" (1981). The paper, which had served as his presidential address to the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers a decade earlier, focused on environmental transformation—more specifically, the development of an urban strip in Eugene, Oregon. Two sentences in particular made a lasting impression: "That the trend toward environmental artificiality has accelerated in recent decades and that we accept, often unquestioningly, these trends, scarcely needs reiterating" and "Yet the forms which environmental alterations have taken," he noted, "and the direction of the changes do need to be discussed before we forget what the world of some of our grandparents and almost all of our more remote ancestors was like" (Urquhart 1981) (emphasis added). After reading Victor Kennedy's concise and thought-provoking book, I was reminded of this passage because it described a concept that few of us who study past environments knew what to call at the time but recognize today as shifting baseline syndrome. So, what is "shifting baseline" syndrome and why does Kennedy use it to frame his environmental history of the Chesapeake Bay? According to the author, it can best be described as a form of "generational amnesia" (x). As time passes, and the resources on which growing human populations depend begin to dwindle, we become increasingly detached from the natural abundance that previously animated the world and supported the economies of those who came before us. The result is that successive generations accept their increasingly impoverished environments as normal, thereby establishing lower baselines against which to measure future changes. Using a wide range of historical sources, including historical scientific papers, newspaper articles, government reports, port records, and journal accounts—and buttressed by quantitative fisheries data when they became available in the latter part of the nineteenth century—Kennedy seeks to reinstate our understanding and knowledge of the Chesapeake Bay's ecology and past abundance. More important, he admonishes scientists, politicians, state and federal [End Page 113] agency officials, commercial fishers, and others to use this information to raise the bar for ecological restoration. Kennedy's book is divided into nine chapters plus an afterword. The author also includes a helpful appendix that catalogs some of the significant technological innovations in fishing gear—particularly more efficient nets, seines, and pots—that permitted tremendous increases in harvests over the last century and a half. The first two chapters introduce the reader to the concept of shifting baselines; review the ecological factors that made the Chesapeake Bay, in the words of Baltimore's renowned literary critic and contrarian journalist H. L. Mencken, an "immense protein factory"; and then chart the vast fishery's deterioration since the Civil War. Increased sedimentation, nutrient runoff, and pollution in all its forms, not to mention overharvesting of fish and other creatures using increasingly sophisticated technology—all occurring against the backdrop of rapid urbanization and industrialization—are implicated in the decline. Kennedy dedicates the next several chapters to individual species, tracking their rise and fall and, in some cases, their remarkable resilience. These include shad and river herring; oysters; diamond-backed terrapins; waterfowl, especially canvasbacks; sturgeon; and, of course, the iconic blue crab. Relying on "anecdotal accounts of animal abundance" that predate the collection of quantitative data by government authorities—including journals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Kennedy marvels at the degree to which estimates of fish, oyster, crab, and waterfowl abundance corroborate one another. Reinforcing his thesis of past abundance are industry figures that point to the region's economic dependence on North America's largest estuary, including numbers of workers employed in the combined seafood industries of Maryland and Virginia, as well as various ancillary industries—from coopers to sailmakers to net menders. Although the commercial...