It's the start of the new semester and this is the boundary of what this semester's students are responsible for. You can take a look at posts from the last year to see what previous students did, of course, but you're responsible for the material from this post forward, including this one.
The Maryland Department of Natural Resources is proposing a new set of regulations that will set aside a fair amount of the Chesapeake as a sanctuary, meaning that people won't be allowed to dredge for oysters there. Naturally, the workers aren't too excited about this: they protested in Annapolis last week against the proposed legislation. A counter-proposal was issued a few days later to put control of the fishery in the hands of the legislature rather than the DNR.
Last year we had a speaker from the DNR who described the difficulty of regulating the fishery. He said that the problems are caused by all of us- note that one commenter on the first article proposes that no one fertilize their lawns this year- but the solutions mostly end up on the backs of the harvesters. No one wants to see harvesters put out of business, but unless something is done to regulate the streams of effluent that are messing up the habitat, DNR thinks that the best thing is for us to put up with some hopefully short-term restrictions. It's a complicated problem with no easy solution!
