Bay Cleanup

While we've made progress on plans to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland still needs to get serious about reducing pollution from farm runoff ("Scientists criticize tracking of Chesapeake Bay cleanup," May 5). Manure runoff is a major pollutant, and our current system allows too much phosphorus-rich manure to be applied to farmlands. If soil becomes saturated with phosphorus, a bay-killing pollutant, and then still more manure is applied, it becomes easier for the phosphorus to get into nearby waterways, leading to algae blooms that choke the bay of life.

When William Donald Schaefer was elected governor 25 years ago, Maryland's environmentalists braced for the worst. During his run for statewide office, the longtime mayor of Baltimore had talked about rolling back moves by his predecessor to save a dying Chesapeake Bay. But by the time Schaefer ran for re-election in 1990, he won the endorsement of the state's leading green activists for what he'd done as governor to push the bay cleanup forward and...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's effort to put Chesapeake Bay states on a "pollution diet" represents the most hopeful effort toward cleaning up the estuary in a generation. So why are House Republicans so invested in sabotaging it? That the GOP would like to thwart the EPA on any number of fronts is clear enough. The House attempted to block funding of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) restrictions on nutrients and sediment earlier this year, and only opposition from the Senate has prevented a general evisceration of the agency's budget.

A federal study assessing how much farmers are doing to clean up the Chesapeake Bay credits them with making progress in reducing their pollution but says the vast majority need to do more to help the troubled estuary. Conservation practices adopted by farmers in Maryland and the other five states draining into the bay have cut erosion by more than half and curtailed runoff of fertilizer by 40 percent, according to the study released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The struggle to save the Chesapeake Bay is hitting home, quite literally, as lawmakers in Annapolis eye new regulation of lawn fertilizer — and how and when it can be applied. Homeowners and lawn-care companies alike could face new rules on fertilizing lawns under state legislation aimed at enlisting city dwellers and suburbanites in the bay cleanup. Bills heard Tuesday by a Senate committee would require reductions in the amount of plant nutrients in lawn fertilizer and tighten regulation of commercial lawn-care businesses.

For 150 years, the technology of the septic system has been little changed. It remains a large tank where household waste is deposited; sediments accumulate at the bottom while liquids are allowed to slowly drain into the soil. When working properly, septic systems protect human health from pathogens and allow rural areas to support housing and other types of development. But tanks and drainage fields do little to prevent nitrogen from leaching into the groundwater. The environmental consequences on local streams and rivers of that shortcoming can be significant — septic systems account for an estimated 3.6 million pounds of nitrogen poured into the Chesapeake Bay each year.

For more than a generation, efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay have treated the family farmer as gently as one might a friend or relative. Where other industries have been forced to meet more stringent rules and taxpayers have shelled out billions of dollars for better sewage treatment plants and the like, agriculture has been given more subsidies and incentives and offered more voluntary regulations than any other major polluter. And make no mistake — agriculture is a major polluter.

A major farmers group filed a federal lawsuit on Monday to block the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most aggressive effort yet to clean the polluted Chesapeake Bay watershed, saying the costs of the cleanup will devastate farms and possibly drive them from the region. The complaint filed by the American Farm Bureau Federation and one of its members, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, in a federal court in Harrisburg said EPA's plan cannot be legally enforced because its methods of determining the bay's pollution from nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment are flawed.

Maryland officials released their latest plan Friday for accelerating cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay, calling for a series of ambitious pollution reduction measures affecting farmers, city dwellers and suburbanites that would cost $10 billion or more — about twice what's now being spent to restore the troubled estuary. The 234-page document , presented four days after a federal deadline for bay states to submit final cleanup plans, spells out steps state officials pledge to take over the next seven years to achieve 70 percent of the pollution reductions needed.