Chesapeake Worthless Without Watermen?

A very interesting article in HuffPo today:  Is It Worth Cleaning the Chesapeake If There Are No More Watermen? by Gary Liberson, PhD.  In short, his answer is no:

...EPA talks a great deal about environmental justice. In "EPA speak" this means the protection of minorities and lower income families disenfranchised from the regulatory (e.g., siting of landfills and factories) process. Seems to me that what is going on right now is the disenfranchisement of the local fisherman from the regulatory process. Biologists and regulators are trying to save the Chesapeake Bay, but in doing so they are endangering the local waterman to such a degree that by the time the Bay is saved the fisherman will be gone.

Eventually, the states impacting the Chesapeake will declare victory. The Chesapeake Bay will be a large national park, with a marine highway up the center for container ships bringing goods from Asia and Europe to Baltimore. People will swim, boat, and do recreational fishing. There will be docents in small towns along the Eastern Shore of the Bay explaining how the Chesapeake was, at one time, the richest source of fishing on the East Coast. They will be able to see models of the boats local watermen used and even visit some preserved homes of fishermen. There just won't be any fishermen. The Piscator orientali litore will be extinct.

And my response is, that would be a best case outcome.  The waterman are trivial as source of jobs and money for the Bay states economies.  Recreational fishing is a far greater source of jobs and money to the region, and provides a great many more opportunities for people to see, and experience the bay.

Since the watermen show no inclination to live within the laws that might allow their own fisheries to be managed on an ongoing basis (I'd say sustainably, but the word is too widely used as magic green incantation), the Bay, and it's resources would be better of without them  From the amount of grousing about how hard a job it is to be a watermen, they'd be better off too.

We don't have large numbers of people trapping beavers, skinning them and selling the hides to people who boil them in mercury nitrate anymore either, and the world is better for it.  We don't have market hunters killing Passenger Pigeons for market, or market hunters for deer either, and we're better for that, too.