Image courtesy flickr user Margaret Pizer/VASG
From the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, oysters have influenced our history, our culture and, of course, our eating habits. When Captain John Smith sailed into the Chesapeake Bay, he said oysters were as big as dinner plates. Chefs, oystermen, conservationists, oyster-lovers, and poets Nikki Giovanni (Virginia Tech) and Tim Seibles (Old Dominion University) all weigh in about the legend and allure of Crassotrea virginica.
Later in the show: They’re baaaaack! Liberal use of DDT and other pesticides virtually eliminated bedbugs in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, but international travel has brought these unwanted passengers back into our hotel rooms. Entomology Professor Dini Miller (Virginia Tech) is growing them in her lab, and volunteer graduate students are offering up their arms to study just how the bedbugs bite. Also: Wildlife photographer Lynda Richardson (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College) has risked life and limb traveling the world to photograph animals in the wild.
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I am writing to express my dismay and disappointment over your oyster story — specifically its lack of ANY mention of how agricultural and urban runoff are killing the Bay. The charming Northern Neck oyster advocate didn’t even mention it (and I listened twice, just to make sure I didn’t miss something), even though he mentioned “dead spots” — water that can no longer hold oxygen — showing up on his turf this summer.
Yet it was a prime opportunity to educate your listeners about the causes of such problems: namely the use (and overuse) of lawn and garden fertilizers and similar farm fertilization practices. Runoff pours these fertilizer nutrients into the Bay and just about every other body of water in the country, eventually choking them to death. (Toledo’s recent problems with algae bloom on Lake Erie is a perfect example.)
Until the average homeowner realizes how harmful their Miracle Gro and Scott’s Turfbuilder really are, the problem with these nutrients and other pollutants in the Bay will continue.
I’d love to hear you address this omission in next week’s show. Or, better yet, do a whole segment on the problem! With continued population growth across the entire Bay area — and its accompanying habitat destruction and increased pollution — the problem isn’t going to get better anytime soon unless we make a concerted effort to educate consumers and homeowners and fight the practices that are leading to the Bay’s continued destruction.
I am an oyster fancier and come from a low lands culture where one purchased oyerster by the bushel and roasted them on an iron sheet over a wood fire.
However this program overly romanticizes a bivalve and ignores the concious choices made by the citizens of Virginia and their elected representitives. Quite simply the value of convenient parking, conversion of relatively fallow land into valuable strip shopping malls, links, and office/industrial parks outweighes the intrusive regulation necessay to susidize the antequate profession of “Waterman.”
Those who mourn fresh seafood will simply have to console themselves with fond memories or be satisfied with Mrs. Paul’s. Otherwise they’ll have to change more than a few mind in Richond.
I enjoyed the reading of the poem and I came here to find the follow-up that he wrote – where is it?
Hi Ellen,
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, there’s an orange player under “Related Media.” You can hear the reading there. Thanks for listening!
Kelley
Thanks – I found it but I was too late to delete my question… I shared the link on FB, too. It was fun to hear.