Chesapeake Bay Action Plan
After decades of effort, the voluntary, collaborative approach to restoring the health and vitality of the Chesapeake Bay— the largest estuary in the United States—has not worked and, in fact, is failing.
A diverse group of 57 senior scientists and policymakers have joined forces to save the Bay. This is our plan.
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.
The Fog of the Bay
(Posted by Fred Tutman) As this is my first post on a new blog, I feel I should explain who I am and why I think my perspective brings something different to the table. A child of my waterway (the Patuxent). I grew up with a deep love and a soulful connection to nature of…
Science 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.
Who Will Tell the People
(Posted by Howard Ernst)
When the Bay dies there will be no headlines, no major news flash, no one to sound the alarm. “The Bay” is as much an idea, as it is a place of water and mud. But to keep the idea alive requires capturing the attention of the general public, and for years the key to that was capturing headlines. But as anyone who reads a daily paper knows, and there are fewer and fewer of us, the number of headlines are shrinking, the amount of print given for each headline shrinking even more, and the number of professional journalists covering the Bay can now be counted on one hand.
Saving the Bay
(Posted by Gerald Winegrad)
My name is Gerald Winegrad and I’m worried about the future of the Chesapeake Bay. I grew up in Annapolis and spent many a summer day with my friend Michael Bailey fishing all around Annapolis. Michael Bailey is now dead and the Bay is dying.
Earlier this month, my wife and I were planning our big annual end of summer crab feast on our deck on Oyster Creek south of Annapolis. We have two crab pots and had a dozen crabs to share but for 22 family members, I had to find a bushel of nice ones. So I called local waterman (a dying breed) who I knew from years back and tried to order a bushel of crabs. He had sold me a busting bushel of fat Jimmies in May but told me an incredibly sad story: Now, when crabs should be plentiful, he could not catch even a bushel because dead water had killed every crab in his pots in the West River. He was saddened not just because his livelihood was hurt, but at the terrible waste caused by oxygen deprived water killing every crab.
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We are senior Chesapeake Bay scientists and policymakers from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania who have concluded that after decades of effort, the voluntary, collaborative approach to restoring the health and vitality of the largest estuary in the United States has not worked and, in fact, is failing. Our group unanimously recommends that all states draining into the Chesapeake Bay adopt our 25 action items in their Watershed Implementation Plans (WIP) and implement them to improve the Bay’s water quality and to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act.
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