The gravity of what’s happening in the Gulf is just now starting to hit me.

The first time I went with Eikon to the fish market in Southwest, under the 14th Street viaduct, I was impressed with the plenitude of seafood on display, and I wondered how much of it came from the Chesapeake.

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “All of this is flown in from the Gulf.”

And that was supposed to be as a matter of course. Is any of it salvageable now? If not, where is the shrimp going to come from? Yet more mangrove factory farms in Myanmar?

This may well and finally decimate the remainder of American seafood as we know it. I mean, there will still be Pacific crab or whatever, and the seafood stocks in the Gulf will still physically exist, probably, but none of this is going to be salvageable until the oil stops gushing. And it may never stop gushing, not for decades.