cil, one of the groups that filed the suit. "They serve different functions. Just setting aside some acreage and buffers might sound good, but at the end of the day you have to make sure that these bays, with all their species diversity, are not going to be harmed."
The injunction, which halted some work on one of the company's developments, makes Rumrnell fume. "There are still people scared of growth," he says. "But it gets back to our vision of what the world is going to look like in thirty years. I want this part of Florida to be a better version of itself. It would be a shame if it got high-rised to death. I would declare success if ten years from now someone says this looks like it should be here. In the real estate world, that's hard to do."
In the aquatic world, that's hard to do too.
IV. THE SHELLFISH GUYS
In which a group of small-town locals, armed with good data, grant money, and a taste for clams, learns it takes a village to tackle runoff
It's a balmy day in January by New England standards—48 degrees (8.9 Celsius) air temperature, 38 degrees (3.3 Celsius) water temperature—as Greg Sawyer, a big, good-natured shellfish biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, and shellfish constable Carry Buckminster pull their Boston Whaler alongside a clammer's workboat for a chat. Tommy Caradimos, who has spent the past 20 of his 50 years as a commercial shell fisherman, rests his bull rake on the gunnel to show the rewards of an hour's worth of hard labor: a smattering of purplish gray clams ranging from biscuit-size chowders down to littlenecks.
"He's one of the hard core," Sawyer says, as he samples the waters of Wareham, Massachusetts. "He'll be out there five hours when it's 30 degrees (-1 degree Celsius) and blowing. You don't want to arm-wrestle these guys, trust me."
Any region that has five commercial sizes for a clam takes its shellfish seriously, and the Wareham area leads the pack. Unlike a brand-new development in Florida, here 54 miles (87 kilometers) of serpentine beaches along Buzzards Bay have been attracting visitors since Grover Cleveland moved his summer White House to the bay back in 1893. The population of roughly 20,000 doubles in the summer months, clogging the roads with cars, the rivers with boats, and the small cottages that pack the shores with clam-loving people.
Back in the early 1990s, however, the thick beds of quahogs and soft-shells in the town's Broad Marsh River were closed to shellfishing for years, thanks to high fecal coliform counts from runoff that poured off the streets directly into the river. That prompted Sawyer, who also samples the waters of five nearby villages, to dangle a carrot in front of town officials: Remediate the runoff, get the bacteria counts down, and he might be able to open 65 acres (26 hectares) of shellfish area.
Mark Clifford, head of the town's public works department, took the bait, and with help from the Buzzards Bay National Estuary Project, and a few state and federal grants, he began tearing up the old roads along the river and installing sand galleys—big perforated concrete boxes that work like septic tanks for the roads. It wasn't easy. He had to stick the things down between old gas, water, and sewer lines, and deal with a whole new wad of paperwork to get the grants. But the galleys worked. By 1998 the entire river was open to shellfishing.
"All you need to do is get that first inch of water into the sand galleys," Sawyer says, "because that contains the most contaminants and fecal coliform. You get that filtered out, you're ahead of the game."
After that it became something of an addiction. Gifford has installed hundreds of the galleys in Wareham, with the neighboring town of Bourne following suit. Such galleys didn't work for the heavier soils of nearby Marion, so that town put in a man-made wetland instead, with the help of hundreds of volunteers. What used to be a ditch that routinely had fecal coliform levels in the thousands is now a meandering stream full of rushes and boulders, where counts are barely detectable at the