When asked what I miss most following my retirement two years ago, I’m reminded that in my two decades as a New York theater critic and arts writer my tickets to shows I reviewed displayed the cost to me: $0.00. That usually gets a laugh from whomever poses the question. But there’s nothing funny about furloughed federal government workers who, starting last week, received pay stubs bearing their value: $0.00.

To what end? The president insists there’s a security crisis at our southern border and that the only remedy is to build Wall from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. The $5.7 billion for said Wall over which he has shut down much of the government would cover only 200 miles, if that. There are already 700 miles of barriers in strategic places along the border with Mexico, which would leave another 1,000 Wall miles to build. To figure the total cost you might suppose that quintupling would cover it–$25 billion and change. You would be incalculably wrong. The Wall will never be completed in Trump’s lifetime or anyone else’s. Just as we all should have known that Mexico was never going to pay for it. Forget that the president now insists he never said that. Who does he think he’s fooling? There are hundreds, at least, of videos proving what he promised time after time, often leading call-and-responses: “What are we going to build?” “The Wall!” “And who’s going to pay for it?” “Mexico!”

Don’t tell me the president doesn’t lie. “I never said Mexico was going to write a check for the Wall,” he said along the Texas border recently. He wants us to believe he was speaking metaphorically. But read any of his endless streams of mostly mindless Tweets and you’ll see that the president wouldn’t know a metaphor from a meatball.

But what matters right now is all the suffering he’s causing for a stupidly impossible vanity project. A week before Christmas, Trump was ready to sign off on a compromise that would leave the government open. All departments would be funded except the Department of Homeland Security, which would stay open with a continuing resolution until a compromise could be reached on border security, with $1.3 billion already on the table for Trump’s Wall. The compromise now sits on Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s desk. All he has to do is put it up for a vote. It would pass, perhaps by a veto-proof margin.

But Trump spends much of his “executive time” watching cable news. (If you doubt it, just look at the timing of his Tweets.) Right-wing commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter derided him as a fake president should he back down from his central campaign pledge. Forget Mexico paying for it. Just build Wall anyway and let middle-class American chumps pick up the tab. The word “fake” must have riled Trump, who’s always throwing it around regarding news dispensed outside of Sean Hannity’s Fox orbit.

Trump shut down the government over comments delivered by a blowhard former prescription drug addict and a wicked-tongued woman who once said of 9/11 widows who questioned George W. Bush’s Iraq invasion that they “reveled” in their husbands’ deaths. These are Trump’s “advisers” now that he’s chased away most of those who have some clue of which they speak.

All of this to build a Wall that can never be realized and would be ineffectual anyway. When Trump visited the border, he was shown pictures of tunnels dug beneath portions of walls, fences or other barriers. And he was asked about photos showing a steel-slat barrier, which he’s favored lately, that had been sliced through using a hacksaw you could buy at Lowe’s or Home Depot. His response? “That wall was built by previous administrations” (translate Obama), ignoring the lineup of other prototypes ordered by Trump clearly visible in the background. He further lies that 4,000 terrorists crossed the southern border in the last year and dispatched his vice president, secretary of homeland security and hapless press secretary to repeat his lie. The figure from the latest year available, 2017-18, from the president’s own Department of Homeland Security, is 6. And these were only suspects, such as people who bore similar names to known terrorists. Other numbers show that illegal immigration at our southern border are lowest they’ve been in this century.

There is a crisis at the border, a humanitarian one as Trump mentioned in his Oval Office address. But the crisis is of his making, starting with separating children, even preverbal babies, from their parents. Many parents who’ve not already been deported are held in internment camps while their children are detained separately in other obscenely for-profit facilities. And we’re all paying for it. Not Mexico.

Trump’s Wall will never be built no matter how loudly he huffs and puffs. Most of the land along the Rio Grande as well as parts of the desert west of Texas is privately owned. The president has threatened to divert FEMA funds meant to help American citizens devastated by wildfires and hurricanes and also the Defense Department budget to pay for Wall. But that’s only part of the bill. To build his Wall, the president has proposed declaring “military eminent domain.” That sounds like martial law—using force to take private land from ranch owners and others. Still, they would have to be compensated at whatever is deemed “fair market value.” One ranch owner said he wouldn’t sell “if they offered me a trillion dollars.” Eminent domain, even with a military threat—does the president propose arresting anyone who doesn’t take his offer?—means litigation. A massive government takeover of thousands of square miles of private land would occupy courts along the southern border for decades at an astronomical cost unimaginable even to Trump.

The best outcome I can foresee is that the president goes through with his threat to declare a national emergency and the courts give him even a partial go-ahead. Before an ounce of concrete is poured after all the court challenges, Trump will be out of office. We’d be left with a precedent for the next president to use for a global emergency—climate change. Maybe we’ll still have time to save the lowlands and islands of our Chesapeake region from being swallowed up by rising sea levels.

May that be your ironic legacy, Mr. President.

Steve Parks is a retired journalist now living in Easton.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) often boast about their sanctuary projects. They commend themselves for locking up thousands of acres and planting over one billion oysters in Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) sanctuaries. Such a large account should earn ample interest, but in the case of the sanctuary projects, these banked oysters see no return or interest from the investment.

As indicated in their charter and declared at public meetings, the prior Administration at DNR and the various oyster partners such as CBF, USACE, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) made it clear that sanctuaries were created to be engines of oyster reproduction. Promises and guarantees were made that the industry would benefit from these spat sets and see an increased harvest from the sanctuary program. Instead, these plantings have marooned hundreds of thousands of bushels of oyster shells which will never be retrieved for future plantings or cultivated for better results. The spat progeny are not even located in nearby areas. One needs to question the benefit for oystermen or for the value chain into the communities from which they work. There is no interest from the investment, yet CBF wants to further reduce harvest by tightening the management of the fishery and adding additional restrictions. CBF needs to leave the oysters that are in legal harvest areas available for legal harvest and both they and Riverkeepers need to conduct themselves in a fair equanimous fashion that guarantees access to all programs.

Charles Darwin once described a mathematician as a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat which isn’t there. The disappointment voiced by the collective opposition to the recent findings of the oyster stock assessment reminded me of that quote.

This search in the ‘dark room’ was a result of a reaction to an enhanced sanctuary management experiment that was agreed upon by the Oyster Advisory Commission (OAC) which would turn four designated peripheral portions of a tributary sanctuary into a plant and rotational harvest program. The plan called for a constant planting of seed on shell in perpetuity at the industry’s expense. Planting would also have been carried out on the heart of the sanctuary that would remain a pure sanctuary, devoid of any harvesting. This more active investment by watermen working portions of the projected sanctuary would have increased the numbers of oysters in the designated tributary at no expense to CBF, Riverkeepers, or the state. It was seen as a win-win for all stakeholders represented in the OAC.

Unfortunately, the CBF did an end run on the very commission of which it is a member and betrayed the hours of work that went into the plan. The CBF led opposition went to the state legislature with a bill forcing a stock assessment that would stop the experiment from being implemented. Elementary school teachers, sports fishermen, recreational fishermen, and Riverkeepers voiced variations of the CBF opposition and, with no fact-based information, testified against such an active management plan. Although there was a consensus that any additional oysters in the Bay would be favorable, the emotional testimony included lip service about respecting the thousands of people dependent upon an actively managed oyster industry. The legislature chose to ignore the opposing arguments about the benefits of the proposed rotational harvest experiment and, despite the fiscal costs, gave in to the demands of CBF for a peer review study by a University of Maryland-led team.

Their ‘black cat’ was to have been a confirmation of their reputation for constant doom and gloom about oysters in the Bay. The stock assessment was going to be their final solution to their issues with the oyster industry and replenishment strategies. In its original vision, the stock assessment obviously and unfairly targeted just the industry. Much to the opposition’s chagrin, the state concluded that to be more scientifically accurate, the oyster sanctuaries needed to be included. The CBF led coalition thought it had found their ‘black cat,’ and rammed it through the ‘black room’ of a legislative session. The law passed and prevented changes to any sanctuary.

The assessment, however, did not produce the anticipated findings. It seems as if the parameters for the survey were biased from their inception. For example, the actual modeling mathematics was based on the Atlantic scallop which had little or no relevance to the Chesapeake Bay. Sanctuary numbers were not as good expected, industrial areas were not as bad as expected and generally speaking the mixed results did not indicate a dire crash that would necessitate further limits on any active management of sanctuaries, or furthering any new restrictions on the industry.

The writer(s) of the recent op-ed in the Annapolis Gazette revealed just such a bias. The headline, Our say: Oysters will be the big environmental fight when the General Assembly returns to Annapolis, was unnecessarily brash. The solution to the current state of oysters is evident to anyone who has spent years in the politics and biology of oysters.  Plainly put, oysters are being stressed at critical junctures in their lives by factors beyond the opposition’s control. There is a real need for all parties, and especially the industry, to seriously invest more time and money in the very same oyster programs that the opposition and the past O’Malley/Griffin/O’Connell administrations did away with 12 years ago. In addition to pursuing the environmental issues that threaten the actual Bay, these scientifically and economically proven programs need to include: more seed and shell plantings (using mutually agreed upon artificial substrates), researching more suitable artificial substrates that would take the pressure off of the dwindling stocks of oyster shell (for both sanctuaries and public oyster bars), more harvest reserves, and a return to rotational openings and closings of industry bars.

Several of these programs worked for many years.  However, the past administration decided to place all of their ‘eggs’ in the mega-sanctuary basket. There was no reasonable justification for this move, except a series of sincerely hoped for results from computer projections and theories. This political legacy, however, is still influencing oyster management. The Gazette op-ed does not mention these facts.

NOAA recently released the findings of their Atlantic coastal survey of shellfish. According to Chris Oliver, Director of National Marine Fisheries Service, “Our Northeast Fisheries Science Center recently published findings from a study focused on identifying the causes of the sharp decline in landings of the four most commercially important bivalve mollusks from Maine to North Carolina between 1980 and 2010. The four species are eastern oysters, northern quahogs, soft shell clams, and northern bay scallops.” In the past, overfishing was blamed for declines. However, this study showed that “habitat degradation from a variety of environmental factors, not overfishing, is the primary reason.”

CBF and its associates need to refocus on the water quality, sewage from Baltimore, better urban run-off solutions, air quality, and the environmental issues it can affect through better management of their dwindling funds. Attacking the industry is nothing more than grabbing the low hanging fruit as they have done for far too long. Great for attention-grabbing headlines, but not productive for Maryland.

Everyone needs to work on the oyster situation acknowledging that there is not just one solution. Let’s try to save the Bay for oysters instead of on the backs of oysters and oystermen.

Marc Castelli is a artist and photographer living on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His work is focused on watermen, lobstermen, their workboats, America’s Cup racers and their yachts, and the extended families that race their log canoes of the Chesapeake Bay’s Eastern Shore. Marc hold a commercial fishing license with an oyster permit.