It might prove an impossible task for any one human, but if I had to elect a "czar" to restore the Chesapeake Bay's health, Don Boesch would be a leading candidate.
The president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science knows the estuary from the ground up - he began his scientific career nearly 40 years ago studying the worms and other organisms populating the bay's bottom.
Today Boesch's perspective on coastal water quality issues, and the politics of them, runs as broad and deep as anyone's in the world.
He's overseen the university's environmental research for the past 15 years, only the fifth director in the school's 80-year history of Chesapeake Bay science.
He's also closely involved with major environmental restorations in Florida's Everglades, his native Louisiana's wetlands, San Francisco Bay, Alaska and the Baltic Sea that embraces Scandinavia, Europe and former Soviet republics.
Around the Chesapeake, Boesch is a leader in an era woefully short on leadership from both the political and science communities.
He's active on the boards of major bay environmental groups. After the Pfiesteria crisis he was key in reaching a scientific consensus that moved agricultural pollution control forward.
He was also a key player in slowing Maryland's rush to judgment on throwing the exotic ariakensis oyster in the bay without proper research.
Most recently he wrested a consensus from squabbling University of Maryland scientists on the need to proceed more cautiously with power dredging of the bay's scarce oysters.
He continues to raise cautions about current programs pumping money into crab hatcheries and planting underwater grasses: "We can't grow our way out of these problems without more attention to water quality," Boesch says.
He's also transformed the university's remote Appalachian Environmental Laboratory in Frostburg from an old-time wildlife study center to a place doing cutting-edge research on how large-scale landscapes far upstream of the bay influence its water quality.
So what does our hypothetical "bay czar" think about the Chesapeake's chances for recovery to the healthy system he encountered as a graduate student in the 1960s?
Boesch is neither cheerleader nor doomsayer, but always the realist. "What it would take is not that difficult to do, but I don't know if it's likely to happen," he says.
