Bay Region

It's getting to be an unwelcome sign of spring in the communities in Maryland's upper Chesapeake Bay region -- the clotting of beaches and waterways with logs, tree stumps, tires, plastic foam junk and occasional needles.The floating debris, washed in from as far away as Cooperstown, N.Y., is released into bay-bound waterways during winter months when floodgates are opened on dams along the Susquehanna River to reduce dangerously high water levels.The price of averting flooding is the accumulated garbage of northeastern states landing hundreds of miles away on the shores of the bay and on local beaches.

In 1865, people in the North set out to help educate the many former slaves. In Connecticut, the Hartford Freedmen's Aid Society sent Rebecca Primus, 29, to Royal Oak, in Talbot County, Maryland. This bright young African-American teacher went home after four years, the sponsors having disbanded -- but not before building a schoolhouse. Grateful townspeople named her frame building the Primus Institute.Starting before the Civil War, Primus had been friends with Addie Brown, a housemaid (she worked a while at Miss Porter's School in Farmington)

On the first Earth Day in 1970, in an issue dedicated to environment that remains pertinent reading, Fortune magazine concluded: "What we still don't know is whether a high-technology society can achieve a safe, durable and improving relationship with its environment."And 27 years later, we still don't know.In 1987, in the first of five books I've written on the Chesapeake Bay, I concluded:"Will we save the bay? I know that we will always be trying; but 'saving the bay' can become almost a state of grace, like tithing, allowing us to proceed comfortably with business as usual "Ten years later, the words don't seem overly pessimistic or nearly as outdated as I hoped they would.

I ALMOST WISH I had not waded into this column, a revisit to "Chesapeake," the 1978 novel of 859 pages by James A. Michener, who died last week at the age of 90.I read it avidly almost two decades ago. This time, the urge to skim large portions was irrepressible.What place do you assign a book that is not memorable literature, but sold more copies than anything written since on our bay region (including William Warner's 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner, "Beautiful Swimmers")?Michener's fame, dating to his 1948 Pulitzer for "Tales of the South Pacific," was such that his name covered more of the "Chesapeake" book jacket than the title.

WASHINGTON -- In a study that could have worldwide applications, scientists are using supercomputers to identify the sources of air and water pollution in the Chesapeake Bay region and to test cleanup options.The technology has confirmed what scientists have long suspected: Much of the bay's pollution comes from an airshed that extends as far west as Ohio and Kentucky and as far north as Ontario, Canada.But as far as they have come, scientists estimate they are at least a few years away from being able to use the technology to answer the question most often asked by policy-makers and the public: "Who is responsible?"

CHOOSE ONE:Chesapeake Bay in 2000 -- a national and international model of environmental restoration.Chesapeake Bay in 2000 -- Hey, it could have been a lot worse.A bit more than a decade into the unprecedented, multistate effort to save the bay, we are on a slippery slope, downhill from the first statement, coming in sight of the second.Plenty has been achieved but the forces that launched the Chesapeake's restoration are running out of steam, desperate for leadership.It was a small incident that crystallized this for me recently.

Industries and municipalities in the Chesapeake Bay region would be asked to reduce releases of toxic chemicals by up to 75 percent over the next six years under a multistate plan to be adopted Friday.But the Chesapeake Bay Foundation warned yesterday that state and federal governments would be "backpedaling" on their commitment to restore the bay if the plan is adopted, waiting "until fish start dying and people become sick" before acting.The Annapolis-based environmental group called on the political leaders of the bay region, including Gov. William Donald Schaefer, to "stand firm against the recommendations of state and federal bureaucrats . . . to weaken efforts to reduce toxic pollution of the bay."

Saving Chesapeake Bay will require greater community cooperation to preserve the bay region's rapidly vanishing rural landscape, a group of international planning experts said yesterday.Speaking at the Maritime Institute in Fells Point, visiting teams of planners from abroad and elsewhere in this country urged environmentalists, developers and farmers in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia to find common ground on ways to accommodate growth and development without destroying the bay region's remaining forests, wetlands and wide open spaces.

Africans and Asians are not the only ones who must worry about the limits to population growth. The same concern looms among Marylanders and others who care about restoring the Chesapeake Bay.About 15 million people live on the 64,000 square miles of land that drain into the bay, which includes almost all of Maryland, major portions of Pennsylvania and Virginia and even chunks of New York and West Virginia.Within the next 25 years, and quite likely sooner, planners project the population of the bay watershed will grow by at least another 2.6 million people.

If the oyster once was king of Chesapeake Bay, the shad was queen. For centuries, residents of the bay region - first native Americans, then European colonists - celebrated the arrival of spring by feasting on the bony but succulent fish and the roe, or eggs, produced by spawning females.During the Revolutionary War, salted shad helped save George Washington's troops from starvation as they wintered at Valley Forge, some accounts say.In the 1800s, shad were so abundant and cheap that farmers along the Susquehanna River used them to fertilize crops.

The Chesapeake Bay Protection and Restoration executive order recently signed by President Barack Obama is the most assertive act a president has yet taken to protect and restore the bay. It is remarkable for another reason as well: It puts the conservation of landscapes and ecosystems on an equal footing with restoring water quality and recognizes the immense cultural and ecological value of the Chesapeake's landscapes. President Obama and Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar understand that we must conserve the watershed's intact ecosystems and restore others for the Chesapeake Bay to fully recover.

MOUNT VERNON, Va. - -Buoyed by a pledge of federal help from President Barack Obama, state and local leaders across the Chesapeake Bay region vowed Tuesday to accelerate their cleanup of the beleaguered estuary. But some environmentalists said the promised pollution reductions fall far short of what is needed and called for more aggressive federal action. Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley and other leaders called their commitments announced here on the banks of the Potomac River a "turning point" and "a new day" in the long-running struggle to bring back the Chesapeake, which has missed two previous cleanup deadlines in the past 26 years.

With its cities, industry and traffic congestion, the Chesapeake Bay region is known more for its energy consumption than energy production. But that could change, perhaps within a decade or so, if officials in Maryland and neighboring states are willing to invest in cellulosic ethanol. In layman's terms, that's the production of alcohol from the fermentation of stalks, stems and wood chips that contain glucose. Cellulosic ethanol is one of the most promising technologies within the field of biofuel production.

We know that the average water temperature of the Chesapeake Bay has increased by nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1960. If global warming continues unabated, it is likely to rise by an additional 5 or more degrees by the end of this century. We know that the bay's sea level has risen by a foot and a half since the 1930s. Climate science tells us that we should prepare for an additional 2 feet to 4 feet before the next century. We know that over the last four centuries, the bay has lost about 10 inhabited islands to erosion and a rising sea level.

With all due respect to polar bears and melting ice caps, the Chesapeake Bay region is likely to be among the nation's most vulnerable to global warming because of its grossly polluted state. Rising water temperatures threaten fragile fisheries, including crabs that depend on vanishing eelgrass. Rising water levels are swallowing islands and can easily overwhelm shoreline communities that have lost storm protection. Warming the smoggy air in Baltimore can quickly lead to heat-related deaths.

Ethanol could fuel corn-farming growth The national boom in ethanol production could spark as much as a 50 percent growth in corn farming in the Chesapeake Bay region - and perhaps a 5 percent increase in nitrogen pollution from runoff, according to a new report. The additional pollution in the bay is a reason for Congress to include more money in the Farm Bill for cover crops and other runoff control programs, said Beth McGee, a senior scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and an author of the report.

Maryland farmers could be poised to receive more money to help pay for conservation practices that reduce the amount of pollution making its way into the Chesapeake Bay. A version of the 2007 federal Farm Bill drafted by Rep. Collin C. Peterson, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, would direct $150 million to farmers in bay-region states for conservation programs. Environmentalists in Maryland are applauding the Minnesota Democrat's proposal as a potential major step in the restoration of the bay. "The region's farmers have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to implement conservation measures, but they can't foot the bill alone," said Doug Siglin, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's federal affairs director.

Gathered in the back room of a St. Mary's County restaurant the other day, an aging collection of folks whose families have been farming in Southern Maryland for generations, even centuries, worried about how many will be the last of the line. Estate taxes, low profits, labor and equipment costs, the decline of tobacco, the sheer drudgery of working the land and - most dangerous of all - the siren call of developers eager to pay handsomely to buy them out have drastically thinned the ranks of Maryland farmers and spell further losses.

Maryland farmers are not getting their fair share of the money that the federal government hands out each year in farm production payments. That's a major complaint of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which says that if bay region growers received as much funding as their Corn Belt counterparts, the bay could be a lot cleaner. An analysis by the environmental group shows that for every dollar of food produced in Maryland, farmers receive 4.8 cents in federal support money. This is well below the national average of 9 cents per state.

This is the last of these columns, of which I've been privileged to write some 600 during the past 13 years. From the start I was never writing just about the Chesapeake Bay. The bay's a model for the planet - a world-class natural resource that we screwed up big time, then mounted an internationally unprecedented effort to restore. It's a lofty and noble goal: to reverse 50 years of environmental degradation, even as population has doubled and a million more people move into the watershed each decade.