Richard Moncure Jr. is the son of a Chesapeake Bay waterman. But as fish and oyster populations in the bay fell, the prospects of his family’s line became as murky as the estuary itself. So first he first studied religion. Then he joined the Peace Corps.
“I really didn’t know what I wanted to do with my future,” the 35-year-old confessed while sitting on a chunk of cement beside the wind-swept, brown waters where he used to fish with his father. “I knew Jesus was a fisherman. But I had a lot of questions.”
During a two-and-a-half-year tour of duty with the Peace Corps in Zambia, met African watermen who had so badly overfished their lake they had nothing left. Moncure’s job was to teach them sustainable fishing. He instructed them in the business of fish farming: how to grow their own tilapia in ponds, instead of netting the few remaining fish from the lake.
Although the effort was successful, the whole time he was in Africa, Moncure couldn’t help thinking about home. And when his mission ended, Moncure decided to return to the Chesapeake and his family’s traditional businesses.
He got his license as a waterman with the plan of providing local seafood for his father’s restaurant, the Happy Clam in Fredericksburg. He married the girl, Jessica, who worked next to him at the seafood counter.
“The challenge was, the river just wasn’t providing,” Moncure said. “I was having to pay top dollar to bring in seafood that was local somewhere, but it wasn’t local here. We were having to import shrimp and oysters from Louisiana, crabs from North Carolina. And so that vision of going out and catching what we brought to the table, from fisherman to fork, really wasn’t working.”
A breaking point came in 2010, when he and his wife had their first child, a son they named Richard and his father. They called their son “Trip” to distinguish him from all the other Richard Moncures around the house.
“I looked at things very practically, and I talked to my father and my grandfather,” Richard Moncure Jr. recalled. “And my grandfather said, ‘I made more money than your father, and it’s going to be a hard living for you.’ And so I looked at my son and I said, ‘You know, it’s time we gave back to this river. It’s given to us for three generations. I am going to give Trip a new perspective.”
Moncure took a job as a “river steward” that had been advertised by a nonprofit organization called Friends of the Rappahannock in a local newspaper. The job required environmental advocacy, teaching children about the river, and helping to clean up and restore the waterway.
“It’s funny that I got the title ‘river steward’ coming right out of the seafood industry,” he smiled.
He became CEO of a one-man office in a corrugated steel building in a old boatyard in Tappahannock, Va. His employers gave him a sleek 21 foot Carolina Skiff emblazoned with the logo of the Friends of the Rappahannock – a great blue heron soaring over marsh grass beneath a full moon. In his boat, he acts as a watchdog for the river, investigating and reporting pollution.
“I thought I would be spending a lot of time in the boat, solving the river’s problems,” he said. “But unfortunately, a lot of the river’s problems need to be solved on the shores. So I spend more time than I imagined working with homeowners on their properties. Because even with a cool skiff, there’s not much I can do about the problems once they’re in the river.”
On land, Moncure’s job is much the same as it was in Africa: He teaches sustainability. To watermen, he advocates aquaculture – the growing of oysters in cages or underwater beds, instead of dredging shellfish out of the already- depleted river.
“Watermen need to change their mentality from the mindset of hunter gatherers, to that of farmers who plant seeds and then market what they grow,” he said. “This is the future, and it’s already happening.”
Among local residents, he organizes volunteers to haul trash out of the river. And he drives around to waterfront property owners, advising them not to spread lawn fertilizer (which pollutes the river) or cut their grass short (which accelerates runoff). One of his biggest battles is to convince homeowners not to armor their shorelines with rocks or seawalls, which worsen erosion and prevent diamondback terrapin from laying eggs on sandy beaches.
Moncure replaces these hard barriers with more natural “living shorelines.” Teaming up with other laborers, they rip out the rock walls and plant marsh grass that gently absorbs the impact of waves and reduces erosion. The nooks and crannies allow refuges for turtles to breed and young crabs to hide from predators.
At the edges of these living shorelines, Moncure builds oyster reefs. He works with school children to use bags of cement and steel molds to sculpt diamond-shaped pyramids. They then plaster recycled oyster shells onto these structures and plop them into tanks full of larval oysters, which attach themselves onto the shells.
Moncure plants these artificial reefs into the Rappahannock River, where they form underwater cities for future generations of oysters, fish, seahorses, sea squirts, mud crabs, grass shrimp, and myriad other forms of life. The reefs’ mountain-range like profiles keeps the oysters alive, by lifting them out of the silt, which smothers oysters.
At the same time, Moncure thinks that homeowners – who, unlike the watermen, have hardly been touched by the bay cleanup effort -- must also change their ways of thinking. He said people need to stop buying homes with big lawns and driveways in sprawling subdivisions. Homeowners should stop dumping chemicals on their grass and building seawalls to protect their waterfront properties.
“It’s not just the watermen who has an impact on the water quality. It’s the homeowner, the marina owner, the gas station owner and everyone else,” Moncure said. “So we are all going to have to work together to make this a better and more productive Chesapeake Bay.”
So Moncure did become a preacher, after all. He planted seeds of change in Africa, and now he’s planting diamonds in the minds of his neighbors back home.
