Green Scene

Big, Beautiful and Bouncing Back

Thanks to three decades’ worth of federal, state and grass-roots recovery efforts, the Chesapeake Bay is making a comeback.By John Steinbreder

SOME 200 MILES in length, Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. Its shallow, mostly brackish waters cut through the states of Maryland and Virginia—and are fed by about 150 individual rivers and streams. All told, the Chesapeake’s watershed covers more than 64,000 square miles in six states.

As beautiful and bounteous as it is big, the bay provides not only glorious marine vistas and superb venues for boating, but also famous stocks of oysters, blue crabs and rockfish, otherwise known as striped bass. In addition, it is home to a striking variety of bird life, from the majestic Canada goose and elegant canvasback duck to the gangly great blue heron and nimble common tern.

The richness of the Chesapeake’s resources was duly noted by the first European to explore it extensively, Capt. John Smith, who wrote in 1612, “heaven and earth never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.” In the decades and centuries following that declaration, many people found Smith’s words to be true indeed, and a culture grew up around the bay in which the daily lives of the men and women residing on its shores depended on the game and fish they harvested there.

In fact, the so-called watermen who worked the Chesapeake came to lead as romantic, difficult and nature-dependent an existence as the cowboys out West, and their lifestyles have been rightly celebrated from the bay’s headwaters at the Susquehanna River in New York down to where it empties into the Atlantic Ocean just north of the Virginia–North Carolina border.

In many ways, the watermen’s heritage is what made the realization in the 1970s that the Chesapeake was in dire environmental straits so tough for locals to stomach. A combination of pollution, disease, loss of wildlife habitat and neglect had gradually transformed the bay of plenty into a place so troubled that it contained one of the first identified marine dead zones on Earth. Its fabled oysters were dying by the millions, along with its vast beds of aquatic grasses. Stocks of once-plentiful rockfish plummeted to shockingly low levels.

But humans—though they were the prime offenders— recaptured their heartfelt connection to the Chesapeake and initiated ecological calls to action, beginning in the 1960s, that eventually resulted in the creation of a federal/state partnership, the Chesapeake Bay Program, in 1983. And although the condition of the bay fluctuates from year to year, depending on the weather, progress is being made thanks, in part, to these cooperative restoration efforts. But an equally important factor in their recovery has been a grass-roots movement that has led to the establishment of literally hundreds of nonprofits dedicated to helping out. In fact, there are roughly 700 such groups actively working on the Chesapeake Bay basin today. They operate individually or collaborate with other nonprofits as well as government organizations. And they are effectively overseeing everything from extensive oyster seedings to the upgrading of waste-treatment facilities.

“Overall, we are making progress, even in the face of continued ecological pressure,” says Stephan Abel, executive director of the Oyster Recovery Partnership. “But we still have a very long way to go to fix the problems.”

The key to restoring the Chesapeake is, of course, improving the quality of its water. Several factors have contributed to its deterioration, beginning with decades of shoddy waste management that led to the regular discharge of sewage into the estuary. Waste not only stifles the growth of all-important grasses by clouding the water and blocking out sunlight, but also is full of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous; these promote so-called algae blooms (rapid growth in the amount of algae) that deplete oxygen and make it difficult for underwater life to prosper.

Equally destructive has been the poor handling of fertilizers and pesticides on the thousands of farms that operate along the bay. Fertilizers that run off the land and into the bay, as a result of either overapplication or storm drainage, have the same negative impact as sewage. And pesticides kill the grasses that are critical to sustaining fish and wildlife.

Similar problems occur with the growing numbers of residential and commercial areas near the Chesapeake, where storm water frequently washes toxins like lawn fertilizer and rock salt into the bay. Silt, a side effect of soil erosion, is also dumped by the tons. But development is not abating, according to Frank Dawson, assistant secretary of aquatic resources for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who points out that the population of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed is increasing by more than 100,000 people per year. Growth of this proportion puts increased pressure on factors such as water quality, and reduces the chances of re-creating some of the wetlands, forests and fisheries the Chesapeake has lost.

There are also problems with disease, which has devastated the oyster population. The outbreak of two primary viruses, Dermo and MSX, has hurt the watermen, whose livelihood has depended for generations on harvesting the tasty mollusks. Additionally, the viruses have had a negative impact on the bay itself, because oysters act as important filters, each one pumping some 30 gallons of water through its shell a day.

The spread of disease shows how aspects of bay life are interrelated: When oysters are killed off, this in turn hurts water quality, which makes it difficult for wild grasses to grow in the water, so the waterfowl and fish that feed on those grasses must go elsewhere or die. The increasing encroachment of humankind compounds the problem.

Still, despite the obstacles, many government and nonprofit organizations have made tremendous progress in taking care of and restoring the bay, especially in the past 30 years or so.

Since 2000, the Oyster Recovery Partnership has planted more than 1 billion disease-free spat, or young oysters, on 60 large oyster bars in the Chesapeake, many of them sanctuaries, giving the shellfish a real chance at recovery.

In 1985, Maryland fishery experts put a moratorium on catching rockfish, or stripers, for sport or commercial purposes. Once the ban ended in 1990, the state introduced strict regulations on when the fish could be caught. Size restrictions and quotas on the amount that could be harvested were also imposed. “The result was that we went from having perhaps 6 million rockfish along the East Coast in 1985 to more than 65 million today,” says Howard King, the former director, now retired, of the Maryland Fisheries Service for the state’s natural resources department.

Thanks to monies provided by the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund, workers in Maryland are in the process of upgrading 66 major sewage treatment plants by 2010. Even more encouraging, a program designed to establish 210 miles of streamside buffers by 2010, with the hope of reducing amounts of agricultural and residential runoff, has already achieved its goal. A new target of 1,000 miles has been set.

One of the largest and most successful advocates of this magnificent estuary is the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The seeds for its founding were sown in 1964 when a group of Baltimore businessmen, all of whom enjoyed hunting, fishing and sailing, had lunch with a Maryland congressman named Rogers C.B. Morton. The men asked Morton for help dealing with the bay’s environmental issues. Knowing that the federal government could not solve all the bay’s problems, the congressman replied that the best way to help was through the private sector. The foundation was formed by the late Arthur Sherwood and chartered in 1967. Today, the group “fights for strong and effective laws and regulations” to arrest the bay’s decline and aid in its recovery.

These are but a few of the bay restoration efforts demonstrating that progress is possible. And if federal, state and local grass-roots organizations continue to work in concert, perhaps heaven and Earth will agree once again.