CLEANINGUPTHECHESAPEAKE
Before sunrise on Chesapeake Bay, some 4,300 watermen are already offshore in their boats- raising crab pots near Annapolis, hauling nets near Solomons, dredging up mollusks off Tilghman Island. Since the 19th century-the heyday of Bay fishing-Chesapeake watermen have supplied U.S. markets with up to half the annual harvest of oysters, clams, and blue crabs.
Lately the catch is getting skimpy. This year, oystermen will bring fewer than one million bushels to market, c...
by Robert W.Crandall
"It's one of the greatest success stories in American history," said Russell E. Train, former administrator of the US.Environmental Pro-tection Agency (EPA).
Train's enthusiasm in 1976 over the cleanup of the Great Lakes may have been excessive, but it was not wholly unwarranted. In 1965, Lakes Erie, Michigan, and Huron were so polluted that hundreds of beaches were closed. Fish perished in waters choked with algae, and raw sewage washed up on the shores.
Today, E...
Trade with its Money, its credit, its Steam, its Rail- roads, threatens to upset the balance of Man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome."
Ralph Waldo Emerson's cri de coeur in his Journals (1840) reflected the fear among 19th-century naturalists that the rise of industry was threatening the American wilderness.
the late 19th century, a new breed of "conservationists," notably George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Na-ture (1864), was beginning...
When, early in his first term, President Reagan called the Soviet Union "the evil empire," right-thinking persons joined in an angry chorus of protest against such provocative rhetoric. At other times, Mr. Reagan has said that the United States and the Soviet Union "have different values" (italics added), an assertion that the same people greet at worst with silence and frequently with approval.
I believe Mr. Reagan thought he was saying the same thing in both instances. The...
They were "the most beautiful creations of man in America. With no extraneous ornament except a figurehead, a bit of carving and a few lines of gold leaf, their one purpose of speed over the great ocean routes was achieved by perfect balance of spars and sails to the curving lines of the smooth black hull. ...These were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon."
So wrote historian Samuel Eliot Morison, recalling one of the early achievements of American technology: the clipper ship.
During...
pipeline, has won much of the heating-fuel market, but oil tanker traffic is still heavy, although gasoline was the dominant cargo on this day.
The port remains the nation's biggest in terms of cargo value ($49.9 billion in 1986); it also claims to lead in cargo weight (close to 55 million tons), although Los Angeles-Long Beach and Houston are close. But 40 years ago, half the nation's foreign trade passed through New York; now 10 percent does. During 1947, 10,806 ships called; this year, 6,000...