NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Failure Is Not An Option
Writing about 14 years of federal and state efforts to repopulate Chesapeake Bay with oysters and revive the businesses that depend on them, The Washington Post notes that “[t]hey have succeeded at neither,” and asks, “How do you spend $58 million to get more of something and wind up with less of it?”:
[O]fficial estimates show there are fewer oysters in the bay and fewer oystermen trying to catch them. If those estimates are accurate, the effort would be a failure of environmental policy that stands out for its scale, even on a bay where policymakers frequently promise big and deliver small.
Scientists and activists say the missteps of the save-the-oyster campaign will have consequences far beyond the half-shell bar. The whole Chesapeake will struggle, they say, missing a species that was as vital to its ecosystem as coral reefs are to theirs.
"You've got fewer oysters and fewer oystermen and fewer oyster-related businesses," when the goal was to help all three, said Robert Glenn of the Coastal Conservation Association of Maryland. "Clearly, your money was not well spent."
Officials who have led these programs defend their work, in part, by pointing to the factors arrayed against them. The bay's dirt chokes oysters. Diseases harmless to human diners kill them by the millions.
In spite of these factors, officials say, they have put millions of oysters in the bay that wouldn't have been there otherwise.
"I wouldn't use the word 'failure.' We obviously have not achieved the restoration response that we had hoped for," said Thomas O'Connell, director of the Maryland state fisheries service.
Um, that’s exactly the word The Stiletto would use. Natch, the “solution” is throwing even more taxpayer money into the drink.
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