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Our Changing Contents
Welcome to Chesapeake
Four Maryland Students
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Twenty Years After
Our Changing Vision of the Chesapeake
By Jack Greer ![]() Years of research have taught us to better understand what ails the Bay - why does the goal of restoration that we set out to accomplish still remain almost as far out of reach as when we started? Back in the early 1980s a young scientist, rocking in a small skiff in the shallows off the Eastern Shore, stared out at where a wide swath of underwater grasses once blanketed the bottom. "Doggone it," he says, "grasses used to be all over this cove. Now you can't even find a sea grass plant." These words, uttered with considerable dismay in the 1984 documentary, Chesapeake: The Twilight Estuary, were Walter Boynton's. Between the late 1960s, when Boynton began graduate school, and the late 1970s, when he returned as a research scientist to the Chesapeake Biological Laboratory (CBL), part of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, much had happened in the Bay. Underwater grasses, often referred to as SAV (submerged aquatic vegetation), once thick along the Bay's shallow fringe, had begun to disappear. By the end of the 1970s, many of the grass beds Boynton once studied as a summer student were gone. Today, according to Boynton, in those same coves, "The grasses have still not come back." For more than twenty years scientists like Boynton, along with natural resource managers, conservationists, watermen and others, have labored to understand changes that have taken place in the Chesapeake system, and especially the causes of sea grass loss. With grasses covering only a fraction of Bay bottom compared with the early 1970s, with oysters and their filtering capacity at dismal levels, and with the inflow of nutrients still way too high, what kind of future does the Bay now face? Mounting a Noble ChargeLike a flare spotted at sea, the die-off of underwater grasses signaled that the Bay was in trouble. The response that followed drew from a shift in public attitudes and the rising influence of scientific study of the environment. These twin currents converged in 1975 when the U.S. Congress, thanks largely to the leadership of Maryland's Senator Charles "Mac" Mathias, funded a major study of the Bay, launched by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1976. "Up until the EPA studies," says Fran Flanigan, "people always blamed 'Mother Nature.' 'It was a big system.' 'Things moved in cycles.' After the EPA study, we realized that there were human impacts." Flanigan, who served as Executive Director of the Alliance for the Chesapeake for some two decades, has spent a career in dialogue with citizens throughout the region. When the first Bay study results began to come in, she remembers, many citizens said, "I didn't realize it was so bad." As Flanigan says, looking back, we had a "knowledge deficit." Armed with new scientific data and buoyed by a wave of public concern, a movement began to restore the Chesapeake - it did not begin in isolation. Along with increasingly sophisticated science, a number of important and eloquent books had begun to articulate for the public a new understanding of natural systems. For example, Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, held that land and water possessed their own values, as integral parts of a large, rich and infinitely complex ecological tapestry. And in the Bay region William Warner, Tom Horton and others articulated a deep appreciation for the Chesapeake ecosystem and the water-dependent culture that had evolved on its shores. (See Sidebar, "Learning to Value the Bay.") |
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The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort began to serve as a model not only for the nation but for the world. |
On a national scale, landmark works and environmental activism led to rising public awareness of environmental damage, often unwittingly wrought by America's highly industrialized society. In response to this public awakening, the U.S. Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act (1969) and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, commonly known as the Clean Water Act (1972), which joined the Air Pollution Control Act (1955) and Clean Air Act (1963, 1970), and other major legislation. The federal government also stepped forward to fund programs like the National Sea Grant College Program (1966) and such agencies as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (1970) and the Environmental Protection Agency (1970). Private organizations, founded by concerned citizens, began to rally public support - in the Bay region, most notably the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (1967) and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay (originally the Citizens Program for the Chesapeake Bay, 1971). |
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Compelling scientific information and growing public support led, in 1983, to the signing of the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement. Backed by state and federal funds, and with commitments made at the highest levels by the governors and legislatures of the Bay states and the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Chesapeake Bay Program was born. Building on the foundations of the 1983 agreement, the signatories - Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission and, for the Federal government, the U.S. EPA - made their goals more concrete four years later in the 1987 Bay agreement. An explicit nutrient reduction goal called for cutting both nitrogen and phosphorus loads to the Chesapeake by 40 percent relative to the baseline year of 1985. Key to this new push, says Flanigan, was a concerted effort by scientists and other experts to communicate new findings. "They used maps," she says. "They used a consistent color scheme that helped to the get the point across. For example, red was bad." Also, Flanigan notes, these maps showed the entire Bay - it got people thinking about the whole estuary, not just the Maryland Bay or the Virginia Bay. As a result of these efforts, she says, people made real progress in understanding how the Bay works. The story emerged that the Chesapeake system, like estuaries and coastal waters in many parts of the country, had served as a dumping ground for sewage and industrial wastes for more than two centuries. For years, Bay water quality had withstood these onslaughts - often with disastrous results, especially when untreated sewage led to deadly epidemics in growing Bayside communities. But it was not until after World War II that industrial pollution and a proliferation of nutrients began to draw serious attention to the Bay's general demise. By the 1970s, with population rising, with land clearance continuing, with chemical fertilizers in wide use, with more automobiles spewing nitrogen oxides, these assaults on the Bay had finally begun to take their toll. The new Bay Program, bolstered by efforts of citizen groups like the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, focused its efforts on improving water quality by reducing nutrients, especially from waste treatment plants. By reducing nutrients, the experts explained, we would decrease the frequency of light-blocking algal blooms, which shade underwater grasses and feed the rapid consumption of oxygen, especially in deeper waters during warm weather. With an elaborate committee and subcommittee structure, the Bay Program also worked to address the problem of toxic pollutants in the Bay, as well as land use practices that increase runoff into the estuary, a widespread and recalcitrant problem. Ann Swanson, Executive Director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, speaks of that period as a time of "shared hope." The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, with its multi-state-Federal partnership and its considerable funding - at some $20 million a year in Federal funds alone - began to serve as a model not only for the nation but for the world. At a 1997 coastal seas conference in Stockholm, for example, one international observer commented that there was only one real comprehensive watershed restoration program anywhere, and that was in the Chesapeake Bay. ![]()
Rivers of traffic flow around and through the region's major urban centers, as seen here on the Washington beltway. The internal combustion engine has brought convenience but also air pollution, including nitrogen oxides that add to the flood of nutrients coursing through the Chesapeake watershed.
A Long Hard RoadThen it got complicated. When asked about the birth of the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort, Senator Mathias once said, "We all thought it [the main culprit] was going to be Bethlehem Steel." According to Flanigan, "Everything seemed so simple then [in the 1970s]. "More clear cut. Now there is way more gray. Now people are almost deluged [with information]." In many ways, she says, the more we learned the more complicated it became. The vision of closing off a pipe, or clamping down on a steel plant, began to blur, like a city street on a hot and smoggy summer day. Complications began with the diffuse nature of nutrients. People asked, Where do these nutrients come from? The answer: From waste treatment plants. From farms. From factories. From urban and suburban runoff. From the air. The public began to realize that almost half of the Bay's watershed is drained by the Susquehanna River, a major source of nutrients flowing into the Chesapeake. Even toxic compounds, once associated directly with industrial discharges, had become part of a diffuse mix of sediments and particles eroded from urban and suburban sites, and from the shifting bottom of the Bay itself. Nearly twenty years after the comprehensive Bay study and the signing of the first Bay agreement, underwater grasses have still not rebounded, bottom waters frequently remain oxygen-poor, and oyster populations have hit all-time lows. (See sidebar, "Disease: An Unexpected Curve.") |
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![]() ![]() The largest river lying entirely within U.S. borders that empties into the Atlantic Ocean, the Susquehanna (covering the area shown in tan on the map) drains more than 40 percent of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Though flows change from year to year, depending on rain and snowfall, the Susquehanna consistently delivers far more fresh water - and more nutrients - than any other river in the watershed. The bar graph shows the relative contributions based on representative data from the early 1990s. Graph adapted from the original in the U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. Geological Survey Fact Sheet FS-055-95. |
Adding to the current challenge is a population that continues to increase. The Bay watershed, reaching from Tidewater Virginia to the northern hills of Pennsylvania and New York, has become home to more than 15 million people, and that population is projected to reach nearly 19 million by 2030. Population growth brings the likelihood of even greater clearing of forests, paving over of soils, increased runoff and inevitable waste products. Even more alarming are trends that show vehicle use and land consumption expanding at rates even higher than population growth. At the same time, according to Flanigan, many feel that the Bay restoration effort has become mired in a "big bureaucracy." Whether or not they blame that bureaucracy for lack of progress is hard to say, but focus groups staged by the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and Maryland Sea Grant several years ago suggest that the public has a fairly vague understanding of the large governmental initiatives set in place to reverse the decline of water quality in the Chesapeake. "Haven't we done the Bay?" is an attitude that at times confronts Flanigan. "They didn't know it was going to get so complicated," she says. For example, she senses that while many citizens now generally understand that the Bay is an ecosystem, they have difficulty grasping that their personal impact makes a real difference. Getting people to focus on their own behaviors is going to be "terribly hard," Flanigan says. "It's easy to say, 'Don't drill in Alaska,' but will we cut down on our drive time in Maryland?" she asks. "It is amazing the standard of living we take for granted in this country," she adds. "We don't want to let go of that." In 1982 there was "a sense of newness, a spirit of challenge" in the Chesapeake region, says Ann Swanson. People didn't "put up their hackles" at new laws, such as the Critical Area Law, for example, a law intended to protect a 1,000-foot buffer around Maryland's tidal shoreline. In many ways the Critical Area law may have gone forward, she says, because people didn't realize what it would mean to them, how hard it would be to give up some rights on their own property. Twenty years ago, says Swanson, we had the naïve sense that you could turn the Bay around, "without too much money, without too many laws." Now, she says, people are asking, "Can it be done?" The Evolving Role of ScienceCan the scientific approach that first documented the damage done to the Bay help light the way for its recovery? Research efforts over this quarter century have been intense, far-ranging and impressive on many fronts - and they have taught us to see and understand the Chesapeake in ways we could not have conceived in 1976. Consider the disappearance of the Bay's vast meadows of underwater grasses. It may be difficult to remember, twenty years later, that originally the primary suspect in their demise was toxic chemicals, either from large industries (one thinks of Bethlehem Steel) or from pesticides and especially herbicides used in agriculture. Looking back now, it may seem obvious that the major culprit was nutrients and sediments - and especially nutrients. But remember that early on many felt that nutrients simply would not pose the kind of threat to an open estuary like the Chesapeake that they did in enclosed lakes, in the Midwest, for example. Now an overabundance of nutrients is generally understood to constitute a major problem not only in the Chesapeake, but in coastal waters throughout the world. Researchers like Walter Boynton point out that while year-to-year variations in dissolved oxygen levels may correlate closely with wet years and dry years, the long-term trend is not tied to these variations but rather to a continuing increase in nutrients over the last fifty years. The real problem, he says, is this continuing increase in nutrients. |
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![]() The seagrass dieoff, like the canary in the mine, signalled that the Bay was in trouble. We have learned that excessive runoff bringing sediments and nutrients into the water was the cause - we are still struggling today to reduce that runoff enough to bring the grasses back. Says Walter Boynton, shown here examining shoots of eelgrass, "If there were just one thing I could do to improve the Bay, it would be to turn down the spigot of the Susquehanna and cut its nutrient input by a little more than half." |
Convincing natural resource managers and political leaders that nutrients largely fueled the Bay's decline was not easy in the beginning. Boynton refers to researchers, like Chris D'Elia, Jim Sanders, and especially Don Heinle, at CBL from 1963 to 1980, who were there at the beginning of a sea change in scientific understanding. "At that time," Boynton says, "the state used to think, 'the more nutrients the better.' If you said anything was wrong with the Bay you were a traitor. It was like being accused of biting the hand that feeds you." "People would ask, 'Is the Bay really worse? Are grasses really down? How do we know?'" It took a long time for many, he says, including those in the management community, to admit that there was a problem. "We were twenty years dumber then," Boynton says. Even after research and monitoring had clearly shown that something was wrong with the Bay, many still thought that "the only problem was point sources," says Boynton, especially discharges from industry and waste treatment plants. Then, as studies began to document that nutrient loading from a range of sources was causing declines in water quality, a debate raged over whether nitrogen or phosphorus lay at the root of those declines. "This was not the same kind of denial," Boynton says, "but more like a tactical argument over the facts." The management community was becoming more sophisticated, he says, and the scientists had much better data. ![]()
Population growth brings with it new roads and new houses and more clearing of land and runoff of soil. Essential to the future of the region will be protecting ecologically important lands that are left, especially near streams, creeks and the Chesapeake Bay.
Michael Kemp, Boynton's long-time research associate at UMCES, agrees that the acceptance of science by management agencies took time. "We both came out of graduate school thinking that science should help guide policy. But then maybe we were a bit too cocky too," he says. "About fifteen years ago, there were some impediments," Kemp says. "Managers and scientists and others all have their different cultures, their different reward systems." It was frustrating, Kemp says, that the 1987 Bay agreement, which called for a 40 percent reduction in nutrients, made no real mention of Bay grasses. "We had discovered much about SAV," he says, "and that was not being captured." That has all changed. The Chesapeake 2000 agreement explicitly names SAV as an indicator of Bay health and lists water quality criteria necessary to bring the grasses back. Those criteria - for dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll and water clarity - are the result of continuing research and monitoring efforts during the past decade and more, and from an improved level of information exchange between researchers and managers. "Communication," Kemp says, "has grown enormously over the last decade." What made the difference? He and Boynton both point to a number of factors. Key was the gathering of large amounts of scientific data over numbers of years, and critical to that was the availability of (mostly federal) research funds. "It's a lot easier to be cooperative with others when you're not starving to death," says Boynton. Kemp credits scientists and managers coming to understand each other better, to "sharing beers" and "building trust." "We've all grown up with these problems," Kemp says. "There has been a maturation of the whole community - managers, oceanographers, experts in the physical, chemical and biological sciences. It's been very rewarding for me," Kemp says. "There has been a convergence." And, he adds, "We've mellowed." |
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"We had the naïve sense that you could turn the Bay around without too much money, without too many laws." Now we are asking, "Can it be done?" |
The Bay Program's inclusive committee structure has created opportunities for communication, he says. Scientists and managers also mix at professional meetings, like the Estuarine Research Federation and, Boynton points out, many managers - including Maryland DNR's Rob Magnien, Paul Masicott, Dave Goshorn, and EPA's Rich Batiuk, as well as many others - came up through academic research programs. "There is a sophisticated group of managers now," Boynton says. Some of Kemp's former students, like the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Bill Goldsborough, have become leaders in the Bay community. |
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There have also been important efforts at bridge building, says Boynton, through Sea Grant and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. "All have been contributing to a joint effort," he says. He singles out Tom Wisner, an early Bay educator, and Tom Horton, who has often shuttled back and forth among scientists and managers and environmentalists, helping to increase understanding among those groups. While better understanding has come only with effort, and while Flanigan and others point out that for many in the political arena, the complexity of the Bay's problems seems greater than they originally thought, for Kemp this is not really surprising. "It's the job of an ecologist to think the world is complicated," he says. "We have learned a lot," Kemp says. "We may not have the holy grail, but the process is working." Clearly, the twin currents of public opinion and scientific knowledge have reshaped the way we think about the Chesapeake Bay. As well documented by Steven Davison and his co-authors in their book Chesapeake Waters, the Bay was originally perceived as a limitless source of seafood and a bottomless pit for sewage and other wastes. Gradually these two uses came into conflict, and science began to document how human waste can lead to disease. When an 1893 typhoid case was linked to tainted oysters, it caused an international uproar; in 1912 concerns over contaminated seafood led to the building of Baltimore's Back River waste treatment plant, state of the art for that time. |
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![]() Changing our vision of Bay restoration over the next twenty years may well call for scientific knowledge and action to become even more closely linked. Achieving restoration goals will also require a political and social willingness from all of us to accept responsibility for environmental stewardship. |
Then a more serious outbreak of typhoid in 1924 - resulting in 1,500 cases and 150 deaths and also linked to contaminated oysters - demonstrated once and for all that discharging sewage and harvesting seafood represented conflicting uses of the estuary. Washington D.C. built a sewage treatment system in the 1930s, and Norfolk finally followed in the 1950s. Even after the heightened concern for seafood safety led to significant improvements in waste treatment in the Bay, for many years oysters and other Bay species remained "resources," put there to be harvested and used by humans. Only within the past decade or two have we begun to realize the extent to which oysters, like other keystone species, play a central role in the ecological functioning of the Bay. We are now beginning to understand, for example, that in losing such immense populations of oysters, we lost their once prodigious ability to filter from the water overabundant algae - and therefore nutrients. Those extensive oyster reefs may also have served as important breakwaters, buffers for wave action that slowed the eroding of shoreline and the scouring of sea grass beds. After extensive study of the origin of the Bay's ills, it has become abundantly clear that one factor with an enormous effect on the estuary is the colony of human beings that has grown up throughout its watershed. As John Wennersten writes in The Chesapeake Bay: An Environmental Biography, "Of the 2,700 swimming, floating, and flying species that the bay supports, the most nettlesome by far is Homo sapiens." While continuing restoration efforts will focus on the biology of Bay organisms and the chemistry of water quality, the next major push must be to resolve how we as a people can lessen our impacts on the entire watershed and reverse the declines of the last half century. ![]() Tomorrow's Bay: The Next Twenty YearsAccording to Fran Flanigan, this next step will need to be a "quantum leap." She emphasizes how hard it will be to do, pointing out that while policies can restrict emissions from industries through laws, permits and other regulations, it will prove extremely difficult to direct people's individual and collective behaviors - especially if people don't want to be directed. This will be particularly hard if people are not convinced by the scientific evidence at hand. The laws we passed and the progress we've made, Flanigan says, relied on the scientific evidence - we had to make a case. In those instances, she says, "We had the knowledge." Flanigan's statement matches views expressed by the authors of Chesapeake Waters, who write that it is our "limited scientific and technical capabilities . . . rather than any fundamental bounds in statutory authority" that often stymie pollution prevention legislation. In the next phase of the Bay restoration effort, it may well be that knowledge and action will need to become even more closely linked, and may need to develop together. For example, while there is a growing sense that oyster reef and grass bed restoration in some areas may have to go hand-in-hand, the degree to which this is true can only be borne out by active building of reefs and planting of grasses on the one hand and careful scientific analysis of the results on the other. As Walter Boynton notes, we will have to track not only the successes but the failures and determine what went wrong. Joining such scientific advances - and building on strong links between research and management - are the great social and political challenges inherent in "revisioning" Bay restoration. Central to any next big step will be the role of political leaders, says Flanigan, those who are able to "listen" to the grassroots and to the experts, and who can at the same time provide the leadership to articulate the kind of vision that makes things happen. Flanigan, Boynton and others agree that a key to the initial success of the Bay restoration effort was the early leadership of pivotal Bay leaders, including former Senator Mathias, former Maryland governor Harry Hughes, and former state senators Bernie Fowler (Maryland) and Joe Gartland (Virginia), among others. All were important in promoting the changes in public support that have occurred over the past two decades. The attitude became, says Boynton, "We've got some problems. Let's fix them." "It was all these leaders together," Flanigan says, "and no one individual," though she does credit Harry Hughes with reaching out to the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and playing a key coordinating role in the original 1983 Bay Agreement. Now Flanigan worries that the Bay has become a "political issue" in the worst sense. Especially during the 1990s, she fears that the Bay became part of a partisan debate, whereas before it had been broadly nonpartisan. For her this turn of events represents "a great sadness." Still, the important Bay laws haven't "gone away," Flanigan notes. "These laws [the Critical Area law, the phosphate ban, the tree conservation law] have lasted because they were the right thing to do," she says. The right thing to do this time around will not prove easy. In some ways, says Flanigan, we are "back to where we were in 1980," and, she adds, if anything it will be harder from here on. "We have already gathered the low-hanging fruit," she says, and she fears that we may be "stuck in implementation gear." Ann Swanson stresses that what is needed to "catalyze action" is an infusion of money, a new signal of interest at the federal level. "There simply is not enough funding," she says, "going into innovations such as limited impact development." She points to the important work of innovators like Larry Coffman in Prince Georges County, who have advocated new tools for slowing urban and suburban runoff. "Efforts like that need adequate resources," she says. "The Chesapeake Bay Program started because of interest and money," Swanson says. Some 13 federal agencies were involved, with others signing on over time. To provide the next level of environmental cleanup for the Chesapeake will, according to estimates by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, require some $8.5 billion. But money can only go so far. The Chesapeake 2000 agreement, the latest and most comprehensive Bay agreement, sets ambitious goals for land preservation, for the restoration of water quality, for the enhancement of fisheries. Reaching those goals will require not only political leadership but also a strong stewardship ethic and considerable courage. One thing is certain. We will have to think big. "We have to pursue restoration at a scale that makes a difference," says Boynton. "Too often we've been trying little dippy things. We need to do it big, and to measure hard while we're doing it. Dippy is not restoration." Small plantings of sea grasses won't do, nor will small oyster reefs. The Bay needs large-scale restoration efforts, employing the kind of energy and ingenuity that built the Hoover Dam and tamed the Mississippi River. And while changes on a massive scale may seem unrealistic, consider that many worried that the banning of DDT, PCBs and unleaded gasoline - major controversial issues at the time - would each spell disaster for various sectors of the economy. Those threats did not materialize, and few would now question that the cost was worth the environmental gain. |
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Maryland has demonstrated national leadership in instituting new programs aimed at improving the environment. From the Critical Area law to smart growth, the state was among the first to pass legislation aimed at reducing the impact of land development; it has also implemented goals for telecommuting in order to reduce congestion and pollution. For the next "quantum leap," the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and others have pointed to efforts elsewhere as models, for example, the huge undertaking now underway in Florida to restore the Everglades, with $7.8 billion in Federal support. Other states have stepped out in front on transportation issues - in California auto makers are required to produce 4,450 zero emission vehicles (ZEMs) beginning with 2003 models. Programs like these require that we reconceptualize our individual roles and change long-established habits - to carry out such visions will require a recommitment, a political and social willingness, and beneath that an ethic that includes an acceptance of responsibility for environmental stewardship. Swanson believes that it will be the citizens who decide whether or not to support, through their taxes and donations, the restoration of the Chesapeake. It will be those same citizens, says Swanson, who, through their voluntary efforts and their lifestyle choices, will determine whether or not we will be able to bring back the bounty of the Chesapeake. "If all we can do is just hold the line," she asks, "what will that say to the world, to all those who have looked to the Bay as a model?" |
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ReadingChesapeake Waters: Four Centuries of Controversy, Concern, and Legislation. Steven G. Davison, Jay G. Merwin, Jr., John Capper, Garrett Power, and Frank R. Shivers, Jr. Second Edition. Centreville, Maryland: Tidewater Publishers, 1983, 1997. The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography. John R. Wennersten. Baltimore: The Maryland Historical Society, 2001. Discovering the Chesapeake: The History of an Ecosystem. Philip D. Curtin, Grace S. Brush, and George W. Fisher, eds. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Life and Death of the Chesapeake Bay. J.R. Schubel. College Park: Maryland Sea Grant College, 1986. Turning the Tide. Tom Horton and William Eichbaum. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1991, 2002. Web
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