“If the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth won't restore a waterway that shines on the doorstep of its own capital, what chance do other waters have?”
Tom Pelton, writing for the Baltimore Sun.
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in North America, with more than 150 major rivers and streams flowing into its basin, extended into six states. Its name may derive from the Algonquin Chesepioc, which refers to a village at a “big river,” or from the native Chesepians or Chesapeakes, who inhabited the area now known as South Hampton Roads in Virginia.
The Bay is a prime tourist attraction for fishing, sailing, swimming, kayaking, and is well-known for its seafood production, mainly blue crabs, clams and oysters. As a major link in the Intracoastal Waterway of inlets, rivers, bays and sounds that form a navigable route down the Eastern seaboard, it contributes mightily to the commerce as well as the ecology of the region. Its preservation should be a point of pride for all Americans who care about this country’s natural beauty.
But as beautiful as it is, the Bay has had its problems. Just six years ago nearly one-third of the Bay was afflicted with a springtime “dead zone” of oxygen-starved water resulting from fertilizer and chemical runoff. The damage to aquatic life was staggering—96% of the oyster harvest disappeared along with over half of the crab harvest, as huge areas of the bay entered into a human-induced “death spiral.”
To save the Bay, the EPA under President Obama intervened, imposing a fifteen-year clean up mandate among the six states that impact it as well as the District of Columbia. The plan called for a “pollution diet” to be imposed on these states and the District, and required them to strictly monitor and regulate the amount of chemical and agricultural runoff --nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment-- that their local industries and municipalities were pouring into the Bay. The regulations covered the largest target area in the EPA’s history, the 64,000 square mile Chesapeake Bay, and reduced pollution on the order of 20-25% across the board.
And it worked. The Bay was getting measurably and significantly cleaner. The clarity of its water, the reduction of nitrogen pollution and algae blooms, and populations of bottom-dwelling marine life showed improvement after only one year.
Then came Donald Trump and his anti-environment, anti-science EPA head, Scott Pruitt, bent on wiping out any environmental progress that had been made by the Obama Administration. The budgeted funding for the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort was reduced, with a stroke of Trump’s tiny fingers, to nearly zero. As a consequence, the entire Chesapeake Bay area, whose watershed supports eighteen million people, is now on a kind of death watch:
The Trump administration’s mindless attempt to scrap federal funding to clean up the Chesapeake Bay is a stroll down memory-impaired lane. Heedless of recent history, the administration’s proposed budget would, at a swipe, reopen the door to the degradation of the United States’ largest estuary and reverse important recent progress in restoring the water, fish, oysters, crabs and tourism that make the bay so vibrant.
The yearly cost for the EPA’s cleanup was $73 million dollars. Other than sheer spite and perhaps a bizarre, innate hatred of nature it is impossible to fathom why any Administration would trade the preservation of the nation’s iconic Chesapeake Bay for less than the cost of a single U.S. fighter plane. But that is exactly what this President did. Organizations that have worked to save the Bay for decades are in a state of stunned disbelief:
“Very basically, this just makes no sense. And to be absolutely frank, we are in disbelief,” Chesapeake Bay Foundation President William C. Baker told reporters in a conference call Thursday. “The EPA role in the cleanup of the bay is nothing less than fundamental.”
The money was intended to assist local communities in controlling the runoff into the Bay caused by poor sewage treatment and inadequate municipal planning for runoff from coastal agriculture—the very cause of the pollution problem to begin with:
Now, by zeroing out the EPA’s planned $73 million for the cleanup next year, the administration’s budget would mark a pollution binge even as the pollution diet’s manifest benefits were working to revive a body of water that was becoming a lifeless soup.
Some industrial farms, home builders and municipalities have resisted the EPA cleanup, regarding it as bureaucratic overreach…[.]
Those interests prevailed in the administration’s budget, which would hinder efforts to upgrade sewage treatment plants with new technology and develop tighter standards to control storm water in both urban and suburban neighborhoods. But make no mistake: If the EPA program dies, so will the bay, and a precious natural resource will be despoiled for future generations.
The word the Washington Post uses is “mindless,” but that’s a mistake. There is a mindset at work here, though it’s not clear that it’s Trump’s, Steve Bannon’s, or someone else’s. Scott Pruitt, now Trump’s EPA head, opposed the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort when he was Oklahoma’s Attorney General because he feared a similar plan would eventually be applied to the Mississippi river, which carries the same agricultural pollutants straight into the Gulf of Mexico, creating “dead zones” devoid of aquatic life just like those experienced by the Chesapeake. These same agricultural conglomerates contributed heavily to Pruitt’s campaign, and it is their interests, not those of American people, that he represents.
Pruitt claims the EPA’s role in the Bay cleanup should be “informational” only, and that the job of cleaning up the Bay should be left to the individual states. The glaring problem with that “philosophy “is that no single state has the power or authority to control another’s pollution, which flows across state lines.
Environmental groups dedicated to the preservation of the Chesapeake are mobilizing to pressure their Congressional representatives to reject Trump’s cuts:
Stripping the federal funding, Baker said, could mean the bay could “revert to a national disgrace.”
“Clean water is not a luxury; it is a right that no American should have to fight to achieve,” he said. “We will fight with every fiber in our bodies to see that Congress rejects this bay budget.”
The callous abandonment of the Chesapeake Bay is not something that simply can be reversed with a stroke of the pen by the next Administration. That’s not the way environmental cleanup works—it can only be achieved through long-term care and attention. Failure to follow through and clean up the Bay will have consequences for generations, even if the people currently inhabiting the White House don’t care one whit about what kind of country they leave behind for the rest of us.