Saving the Chesapeake Bay

In late July, it’s between 5 and 6 o’clock in the morning that the Chesapeake Bay awakes, when light slowly trades places with darkness. Around Cape Henry, just east of the bridge and tunnel that connect Virginia’s mainland to its eastern shore, it’s not unusual to see tankers and cargo ships in the hazy distance creeping from sea toward ports to unload and maybe load again. It’s also about this time that early morning walkers take to the sands and go for miles along the lapping water’s edge.

The bay for centuries has been a symbol to the world of Virginia’s commercial viability and recreational appeal. It beckons from far and wide shippers and watermen and boaters and sunbathers alike, all to come and do their thing, whether it’s buying and selling or resting and relaxing.

Their draw to the bay is the very uniqueness of the bay itself. Shippers are called into its feeder-rivers’ deep-water ports that have been built in some of Virginia’s oldest cities. Millions of cargo containers are swapped each year in Norfolk’s and Portsmouth’s public and private terminals, importing our wants and needs and exporting to the world the American-made desires of others. Crabs and oysters and clams and fish are harvested by Virginians in skipjacks whose very way of life on the bay has helped define Virginia itself. The leathery watermen from the Eastern Shore, Tangier, the peninsulas, and the Northern Neck are as renowned as the jimmies and sooks and steamers and blues and spots they bring in seasonally for their own tables and ours. And on any given summer weekend, kayakers and windsurfers and jet-skiers and pleasure boaters can be seen on the open water by the copper-toned beachcombers strolling among the dunes.

The bay is in many respects the anchor of the Old Dominion’s natural resources. It’s where the waters flow from some of Virginia’s – and America’s – most historic rivers: the James, the Rappahannock, and the Potomac. It’s a wide-open, 12,000-year-old estuary – North America’s largest – that’s 195 miles long from north to south and is some 35 miles wide at its broadest points, yet, amazingly, it’s average depth is just over 20 feet.

For decades, it’s been an accepted fact that the bay so many love for so many reasons is in danger. The quality of its water that supports thousands of animal and plant species is increasingly oxygen-starved. Excessive levels of nutrient pollution – mostly nitrogen and phosphorus – feed fast-growing algae that prevents sunlight from reaching the bay-bottom grasses that provide oxygen and habitat for many of the living things we like to catch and sell and eat. When the grasses are depleted, so are the creatures they support.

Nitrogen and phosphorus come from fertilizer and animal waste that rainfall washes into streams and rivers as well as from the sewage treatment plants that empty into them. It’s these very streams and rivers that eventually make it to the bay.

While the bay’s watershed extends as far north as New York, it’s fallen mostly to Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and D.C. to join together in partnership and devise strategies to dramatically reduce pollutants to the bay and reverse negative water quality trends. These jurisdictions and the federal government signed agreements in the 1980s to work cooperatively for a healthier bay by agreeing to certain goals in habitat protection, water quality improvement, and land management. They updated these goals and reaffirmed their commitment to them in 2000.

Nevertheless, it continues to be apparent that, despite the efforts of so many and the good intentions of so many more, the bay remains an unhealthy body of water. Fertilizer and animal runoff continue to be a problem, and numerous sewage treatment plants remain in need of physical and technological upgrades. Water quality tests still show that nutrient levels in the bay’s contributing rivers – and in the bay itself – are at unacceptably high levels. Algae blooms continue to spread, block sunlight to underwater vegetation, and choke off the oxygen supply to the bay’s fish, clams, oysters, and crabs. Some species’ annual harvest levels – especially oysters and crabs – continue to struggle against decline. Watermen’s already tough way of life grows harder by the season. The supply of the bay foods for commercial sale that are so much a part of Virginia’s economy – and history – remains at risk.

Money, of course, remains at the center of so many reasons why proposed bay clean-up solutions haven’t been fully deployed. Some state and federal regulators and scientists estimate that it’ll cost Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and D.C. some $11-12 billion to meet stated water quality goals.

While more money needs to be put into efforts to save the bay, it’s unrealistic to expect that many billions to be spent in the relatively short time period many bay advocates would like. It’s not unrealistic, however, to expect tens of millions annually to be put toward improving Virginia’s sewage treatment facilities as well as adopting policies making public-private partnerships in this effort more easily fashioned and executed. It’s also imperative that programs continue to be expanded to promote land conservation, improve agricultural land management, and teach and enact better suburban and urban land planning and design.

The Chesapeake Bay is the place from which a commonwealth and nation were born. It’s what has so greatly contributed to Virginia’s expanding economy and enviable quality of life for nearly four centuries. It’s certainly in our best interest to preserve it.