A cultural portrait of the Mid-Atlantic coastal ecosystem
A coastal region's oldest inhabitants, particularly families of
watermen and commercial fishers, often possess the deepest
knowledge about a region and its ecological problems. Because of
this, assaults on watermen lifeways and commercial fishing families
-- whether from organized recreational interests, real estate
developers, or public policy makers -- reduce the cultural and
biological diversity of the coast and often upset the delicate
environmental balance. Through the lens of the Mid-Atlantic Coast,
especially the Chesapeake Bay and the Albermarle and Pamlico Sounds
of North Carolina, David Griffith develops the theme that
environmental degradation follows the loss of the most intimate
understandings of coastal ecosystems.
In The Estuary's Gift, Griffith traces the development of
Mid-Atlantic cultures from the Algonquins and the earliest European
families who hunted whales and netted herring, to present-day
commercial fishing families who work the complex estuarine systems
of the coast. In the process, he chronicles a series of
developments that erode communities across American landscapes: the
wearing away of local and regional history that results when
national retail and restaurant chains convert local merchants into
clerks and busboys, or the loss of biological diversity that
follows the reconfiguration of countrysides to support monocrop
agriculture, industrial chicken production, hog farming, forestry,
and mining.
Griffith insists that we heed the ways we treat one another in
light of the ways we treat nature, measuring both by the standards
we invoke when we give and receive gifts. Stories of conflict
amongfishers, of Mexican immigrant women brought to seafood houses
to pick the meat from cooked, cooled crab -- displacing and
replacing African-American women -- and of the slow yet steady
attempts to criminalize family fishing practices that reach back
thirteen generations show the ways in which the rights,
obligations, and responsibilities of gift exchange have eroded.
Only when we consider human relations as an integral part of the
natural cycles will we begin to restore the balance.
More than an account of the decline of fishing families or
stressed natural resources, The Estuary's Gift illustrates how
pressing social problems, such as environmental degradation and
assaults on working families, play out in local contexts and local
history.
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