‘Humans can’t handle abundance’

It was the late Bill Burton, outdoors writer for the bygone Baltimore Evening Sun and other publications, who said it: “Humans can’t handle abundance.” It was a couple of decades ago, when the shad were making a comeback to Chesapeake waters.

Once plentiful — massive schools of migrating shad coming up the bay from the ocean, swimming into the rivers and creeks where they were born — the nation’s “founding fish” had been harvested to the point of scarcity. Reflecting on that — the tendency of humans to fully exploit a natural resource that seems infinite — Bill Burton made that remark: “Humans can’t handle abundance.”

I thought of Bill while researching and reporting on my August 24 Substack essay on menhaden, another fish often seen in massive schools. Menhaden (also known as pogies or bunker) are harvested by the ton from the Chesapeake and the coastal Atlantic by one company, based in Virginia, the only state that allows the industrial capture of menhaden. This fish, unappetizing to humans, is vital to all kinds of species — fish, marine mammals and birds — and has been called the most important fish in the ocean. The industrial harvest for menhaden is primarily for the Omega-3 market. The problem is, things are out of balance: Not enough menhaden left for forage, contributing to a decline in the rockfish population and in the survival of young osprey.

After reading my Substack piece, Frank Rehak wrote: “My great-uncle, who was an oysterman and crabber on the Chesapeake, was complaining about over-fishing everything in the Bay 30 years ago. Arthur Sherwood, founder of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and an occasional dining partner at the long-gone Cultured Pearl by Hollins Market, often discussed the menhaden issue back in the ’70s and ’80s.”

Indeed, some people have the foresight to see abundance as something that needs to be carefully managed or even, in the case of a natural resource, left alone to serve a purpose other than the one humans demand.

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Photos: Chesapeake Bay Foundation