yeah, well, you answer your own question. killing huge swathes of the bay doesn’t mean it will never return, it just means it takes a long time.
bed bugs were killed in ‘huge swathes’ too, but they slowly came back when the use of certain pesticides was banned.
when huge swathes of the chesapeake die, it isn’t really obvious from the surface. it is obvious to fisherman, and to anyone who knows what the chesapeake was like before it was decimated by pollution and by exploitive fishing/oyster harvesting. it was full of life.
comparing bay ecosystem to a some of the pests that bother humans is problematic. first, you simply can’t compare the amount of industrial and human waste that goes into the ocean to the relatively small amounts of poison that we use in and around our bodies and houses to get rid of pests. it’s an order of magnitude different in scale.
the problem isn’t that some of the life in the bay will survive, or just the strong species will make it, it’s that a healthy marine ecosystem that produces a large amount of healthy sea food that we like to eat is something we want to take care of, not poison or take for granted.
oysters are a great example. we want the bay to be full of them. oysters should be fat and free from carcinogens.the oysters have completely disappeared from certain parts of the bay. even though it hasn’t been harvested in decades, they’re still gone. point is, it can take decades, centuries, or even thousands of years for certain kinds of populations of sea creatures to recover from exploitation and pollution. some never recover.
True points, and thanks for the insight.
I’m no marine specialist of any kind, of course, but am educated enough to know your description of the issue is a correct one.
I just feel we all have to be extremely careful when saying something we do that isn’t blatant is having “unintended consequences of large proportions.”
For example as some other posters stated, I’m sure there is some huge farm or another source of the issues that is government OK’d that is the true cause, not our home washing water... on that note, why isn’t that drainage water from our houses treated anyway? Can’t they distill it all or some process that would separate out any non-h20 before dumping it (I know I’m likely truly showing my ignorance now!).