Science
Do We Need Any More Science to Restore Chesapeake Bay?
(Posted by Bill Dennison)
Chesapeake Bay is arguably the best studied estuary in the world, with a long history of scientific research culminating in theses, scientific journal articles, scientific society activities including workshops and conferences. Many of the paradigms on how estuaries work have been developed through studies of Chesapeake Bay. This leads to the question posed in the title, “Do we need any more science to restore Chesapeake Bay?”. Many people have said to me that we know enough already and we don’t need more science, we just need to get on with the restoration. These comments are in part a result of the frustration that we have not more made more progress in Chesapeake restoration. Research can, in fact, be used as a delaying tactic if restoration activities are forced to wait for more data. Researchers can be complicit in the criticism if they allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good or if they simply document the decline and focus solely on the problems, rather than the solutions.
Read MoreScience and the Chesapeake Bay Action Plan
(Posted by Howard Ernst)
For decades, discussions about Chesapeake Bay policy have been dominated by the hundreds of environmental organizations that claim to represent the Bay and the hundreds of industry leaders that the environmentalists often oppose. The industry leaders are typically depicted by their environmental opponents as profiting from using the Bay as a cheap and convenient place to dispose of unwanted byproducts (poultry waste, toxic waste from steel production, runoff from developers…). The environmentalists, on the other hand, are viewed by their industrial opponents as championing pie in the sky ideas that are too expensive and too impractical to be taken seriously.
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