Chesapeake Almanac Moving Forward

Moving Forward

There is good news about our Bay.

by Capt. John Page Williams

“Lord, take me back and leave me there.”

—Written by Herb Campbell & Ronnie Bowman, sung by Dailey & Vincent

I’ve heard people say they’d like to return to the Chesapeake as it was in the 1950s. That’s not a great goal, though. Anybody who was around the James River at Richmond, the Elizabeth River between Norfolk and Portsmouth, the Potomac between Alexandria and Washington, D.C., or Baltimore Harbor in those days remembers how filthy those waters were. Besides, ecosystems don’t go backwards, any more than human history does. They—and we— move forward.

After 40 years of effort and expenditure, is the Chesapeake actually improving? The short answer is unequivocally yes, by a number of important metrics. For example, those urban waterways of the Chesapeake system are now healthier than they have been for a century. We are slowly learning to live with it more effectively. It will, however, be a different Bay from what we have known before.

The groundbreaking Clean Water Act of 1972 and subsequent amendments have required huge improvements in discharges of industrial and municipal wastewater (sewage). The states of Virginia and Maryland, along with the District of Columbia, have responded vigorously with increasingly advanced treatment systems that have greatly reduced discharges of polluting nitrogen and phosphorus, even as the Chesapeake watershed’s population has ballooned from 12 million to 18 million people. (Editor’s note: Meaning there are 30 million more toilet flushes per day

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After 40 years of effort and expenditure, is the Chesapeake actually improving? The short answer is unequivocally yes, by a number of important metrics.

Water quality in the James River has improved through streamside buffer plantings, stream restoration projects, living shorelines and more.

than 40 years ago.) Making progress in spite of that increase has been like running up a down escalator.

It turns out that the worst systemwide pollutants in the system have been fertilizer and dirt. The former— primarily nitrogen and phosphorus— have come not just from farms and lawns but also from many, many other human activities. Nitrogen and phosphorus are good for ecosystems in the same way that food is good for humans—in the right amount. It turns out that in the 1960s, we were feeding the Chesapeake a junk food diet of nitrogen and phosphorus roughly equivalent to a human on 15,000 calories per day.

The initial success stories for the Chesapeake’s “pollution diet” have been the Elizabeth River between Norfolk and Portsmouth, the reaches of the James below Richmond and below Lynchburg, and the Potomac around Washington, D.C. Smaller cities like Easton, Md., on the Choptank and Fredericksburg, Va., on the Rappahannock, along with populous counties like Fairfax and Anne Arundel, have also made significant progress.

The folks who operate the treatment plants are Bay restoration heroes who do their jobs every day. Is there more to be done in wastewater? Of course there is, as long as we keep living here, and Baltimore especially continues to struggle with chronic problems at its plants, even under heavy regulatory and legal pressure to fix them. Even so, we’ll gladly accept the progress and keep going with cleanup of problems like the remaining combined sewer overflows in Richmond and Alexandria. And the pressure stays hard on Baltimore.

The greater challenge today lies in the degree to which we humans have spread ourselves out across virtually all 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake/ Susquehanna drainage basin over the past four centuries. We are absolutely the most invasive species in this watershed. Remember Pogo, the comic strip possum’s immortal quote, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

We have not always considered the long-range effects of actions like clearing original old-growth forests for agriculture and housing, paving surfaces for roadways (both of which greatly accelerate the way water runs off our land instead of soaking into soil) and laying intricate networks of pipes for drinking water, sewage and storm runoff. Now, pipes laid three

It turns out that in the 1960s, we were feeding the Chesapeake a junk food diet of nitrogen and phosphorus roughly equivalent to a human on 15,000 calories per day.

Investments in the region’s wastewater treatments plants have dramatically improved Potomac River water quality.

generations ago and largely forgotten are reaching the end of their useful lives. Replacing them costs a lot and disrupts busy communities.

Bay scientists have been working for 40 years to understand the ecosystem features that have made the Chesapeake so valuable to us, and to learn how to conserve and restore them. That challenge includes not only the obvious habitat values of oyster reefs and underwater seagrass meadows but also the water treatment and resilience values of forests, stream buffers, wetlands and natural shorelines that do water-treatment work for us without imposing operating costs.

We’re just beginning to make progress through conservation practices like fencing livestock (and their manure) out of streams, practicing precision no-till agriculture to calibrate fertilizer applications to the specific needs of crops, regenerating soils in farm fields and pastures, and installing “green

infrastructure” like bio-retention basins in cities and suburbs. All of those practices restore the ability of the Chesapeake watershed to “catch rain,” filter it and grow trees before releasing it into surface waterways. In other words, they restore some of the natural systems that helped the Bay ecosystem function before we began changing it so radically. We won’t get back to 95% oldgrowth timber in the watershed, but more greenery will make a serious difference. Another joker in the deck comes from the air we breathe. Yes, clean air is important for the health of our lungs, but it’s also critical for healthy waterways. In particular, oxides of nitrogen (NOx) from combustion of carbon-based fuels (think vehicle exhaust and power plant stacks) are heavier than air and highly soluble in water. Have you ever noticed how clean the air feels after a hard rain? Where did all of that

Norfolk’s Elizabeth River is now fishable.

Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel “stuff” go when the water scrubbed the atmosphere? Overboard, into stormwater pipes or swept out over the Bay, to fall and dissolve there. Reductions in NOx under the Clean Air Act have produced substantial declines of nitrogen pollution over the past 30 years. Shifting away from carbonbased energy sources will help even more. It’s a win-win for our lungs and our Chesapeake.

Note that dealing with runoff pollution from land-use changes, power generation and transportation broadens the scope of the Bay cleanup considerably. For better or for worse, anyone looking for simple answers has come to the wrong estuary, and watershed. This ecosystem is just too large, stretching from Otsego Lake around Cooperstown, N.Y., to Hampton Roads, Va. We now have to think about not only the tidal Bay and the huge Chesapeake/Susquehanna

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watershed but also now the “airshed,” which extends to an area some six times greater than the watershed.

Even more complex, we’re now faced not just with specific, immediately lethal poisons but the cumulative effects of multi-sourced, sub-lethal stresses. One ugly example is the combination of overly warm summertime water and pollutiondriven depletion of dissolved oxygen that squeezes our rockfish into tight schools in which waterborne diseases like Mycobacteriosis can infect their skin and disrupt their growth, shortening their lives. Such complex problems require sophisticated 21stcentury scientific detective work and state-of-the-art environmental cures.

The Chesapeake faces direct habitat issues like loss of “live bottom” (oyster reefs and grass beds), hardened shorelines (bulkheads and riprap) and siltation of channels, all complicated by rising sea levels and subsidence (sinking) of land. After 50 years of learning, we’re making real progress on oyster reef restoration, and we are actively developing effective techniques to build living shorelines that stabilize valuable waterfront while restoring habitat necessary for many Bay creatures. Improvements in water quality lead to better water clarity, which helps the seagrasses.

Dealing with rising sea levels (also known as building coastal resilience) is another area of active development, especially in Hampton Roads, Tangier and Smith Islands, and Annapolis.

What does a “saved Bay” look like? It’s not easy to say, because what

we are doing is groundbreaking. No society has ever restored the health of an ecosystem as large as the Chesapeake/Susquehanna watershed before, especially one with a constantly growing population. We don’t know how long the process will take, though imposing deadlines and serious accountability measures are helping us make the hard decisions that No society has ever move the cleanup forward. If this job restored the health of were easy, we’d have completed it an ecosystem as 20 years ago. large as the We know, though, from

Chesapeake/ at least one

Susquehanna peer-reviewed economic study, watershed before, that the benefits especially one with a of a healthier Chesapeake constantly growing ecosystem population. greatly outweigh the increasing costs of failure. And we know that what we are all doing—together—is working. The improvements are subtle and gradual, but we’re turning around damage that is at least two centuries old. And the heavy human footprint will continue to press down as long as 18 million of us live our busy lives here. But make no mistake, we are helping our Chesapeake/Susquehanna ecosystem move forward. Let’s celebrate the progress, but keep the cleanup going. If you’d like to learn more about scientific evidence of cleanup results, a good place to start is the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Chesapeake Progress website, chesapeakeprogress.com. CBM Editor-at-Large John Page Williams is a fishing guide, educator, author and naturalist, saving the Bay since 1973.

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