A Chorus of Clean Water Voices: October Update
You might recall that back in July we celebrated the Coalition members and partners who raised their voice for clean water in the pages of their local opinion newspapers. We’re delighted to share that several more organizations and partners, including a farmer and small business leader, have published op-eds making the case for recommitting to the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort. These pieces showcase the wide array of perspectives with compelling narratives on the need for clean water in our communities.
As the Coalition has discussed at length, the effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers and streams is facing a critical juncture. For several months, we have closely followed discussions on the future of the Bay restoration effort as it approaches an important deadline—what lies beyond 2025.
For all the relevant background information on the status of the Bay restoration effort and the “Beyond 2025” campaign, please see below.
Stay tuned in the weeks ahead as we continue updating this blog with additional op-eds.
Charleston Gazette-Mail
On September 21, West Virginia Rivers Coalition and Chesapeake Bay Foundation published an op-ed detailing the importance of the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort to protecting and restoring West Virginia’s rivers and streams.
In the Eastern Panhandle's remaining stronghold of native brook trout, a landowner in the Lost River watershed is restoring a tributary on his property where he caught West Virginia's beloved state fish as a boy. In addition to the stream restoration, the landowner's conservation easement will ensure the land remains preserved for future generations.
Over in Jefferson County, a cattle farmer has adopted more efficient grazing methods and planted trees along groundwater-fed springs to prevent his topsoil from washing away. He's also saving money on fertilizer, animal feed, and other expenses.
These are just two examples of the folks helping to ensure that Potomac River headwaters in the Eastern Panhandle flow from West Virginia as cold and clean as when they emerged from the mountains and limestone aquifers to their ultimate destination, the Chesapeake Bay.
Local conservation projects such as these that improve the headwaters of the Potomac, and ultimately the Bay, have gotten crucial funding and technical support since West Virginia joined the six-state Bay restoration effort more than two decades ago.
Today, those restoration efforts are at a crossroads. The 2025 deadline is fast approaching to achieve the goals the Bay states set in a 2014 agreement to improve water quality, recover fish and wildlife habitat, conserve forests and farmland and increase resiliency.
Maryland Matters
On September 20, Liam O’Meara, friend of the Coalition, published an op-ed in the Maryland Matters, discussing the many benefits to local economies provided by the Bay restoration effort. As the President of Environmental Quality Resources LLC, a well-known and respected environmental restoration firm, O’Meara’s provides the valuable perspective of how investing in clean water supports small businesses.
There is a fact so indisputable that it stands with the laws of thermodynamics: Marylanders love the Chesapeake Bay. Case in point, we willingly identify with a crustacean, the blue crab, so closely that just its silhouette means Maryland! Our motto might as well be “callinectes sapidus.”
It's also a fact that the Bay needs a lot more than just love to thrive.
Since the first major wave of colonists settled here hundreds of years ago, humans have drastically impacted the landscape. By the early 19th century, thousands of acres of forest were stripped to make way for tobacco, pasture and lumber. Today, less than one percent of our forests are considered old growth. The scale of deforestation was so massive that it caused the erosion of hundreds of millions of tons of topsoil, burying streams and rivers under feet of sediment.
The ghosts of our ancestors still haunt us today. More than 80 percent of suspended sediment in our waterways comes from streambank erosion, as flowing water carves channels ever deeper and wider through this unnaturally located sediment. As storms become more frequent and intense under climate change, stream erosion could continue to accelerate for centuries.
That's the bad news. The good news is that thousands of Marylanders wake up every day and turn their love for the Bay into action. In fact, our tiny state is a world leader in the ecological restoration sector, which employs more than 53,000 Americans nationally.
Those companies, like many in Maryland, tackle projects every day such as constructing living shorelines, planting native plants and wildlife habitat, and building green infrastructure that slows the flow of polluted runoff entering our waterways from our streets, roofs, and parking lots.
Dozens of nonprofit and for-profit businesses employ your neighbors to do this difficult work year-round in all conditions. These are high skill, rewarding careers that cannot be outsourced. The resulting projects bring real, permanent benefits to local communities.
Sunbury Daily Item
On August 30, Gary Truckenmiller, the owner and operator of Dry Run Dairy in Watsontown, Pennsylvania, published an op-ed discussing the evolution of his farm installing conservation practices. Truckenmiller details the many benefits to installing these practices and how the Chesapeake Bay restoration effort is inextricably connected to the work on his Pennsylvania dairy farm.
It’s For six generations, my family has tended to our dairy farm near Dry Run by Watsontown. Over the past nearly 200 years, the way we farm has changed drastically. While the rapid advance of technology has greatly influenced our farming, perhaps the most seismic change occurred in the 1950s as the conservation movement began to take hold in Pennsylvania.
Slowly but surely, my father began implementing conservation practices on our farm such as converting from strip farming to no-till. My conservation journey began when I witnessed the positive impact of no-till. I built on that legacy by adding cover crops to our farm. Typically grown in the offseason, cover crops provide many benefits to the land such as improving soil health, reducing erosion, and suppressing weeds. And cover crops don't only feed the soil, they also help my bottom line by providing forage for my cows, increasing my crop yield, and reducing the need for pesticides.
Today, our farm has a wide array of conservation projects, including efficient and sustainable manure storage pits, fencing for rotational grazing, and plans this fall to install fencing to keep our cows out of Dry Run and plant trees on streambanks to reduce erosion. It took decades to restore, but we now have more productive soil throughout our land.
Baltimore Sun
On August 20, the Coalition’s own Kristin Reilly published an op-ed sharing the story of her connection to the Chesapeake Bay, the status of the decades-long effort to protect and restore the Bay’s rivers and streams, and how it’s crucial for state and federal leaders to recommit to the Bay restoration effort and refresh the goals and outcomes of the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement.
As a born-and-raised Marylander, I share in the state’s obsession with blue crabs, our state flag and lacrosse. I spend summer vacations in Ocean City, and we served the famous Smith Island cake at my wedding. And to top it off, I have spent most of my professional career working to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay. But while I may have been born with a love of crabcakes, my passion for the Chesapeake isn’t something that was instilled in me from a young age.
Growing up in Gaithersburg, the shores of the bay were a little over an hour away. My only early memories of the bay were crossing over it heading to our annual beach vacation. It was big; sometimes blue. But that was my only connection to this estuary that has now become the center of my personal and professional world.
What I do remember are the critters found in my parent’s front yard, the woods I walked through to get to my elementary school, and the aquatic life I saw wading barefoot in the stream down the street. It is only natural that a person’s priorities center on where they live, what they can see, and the impact it has on themselves and their families. The Choose Clean Water Coalition recognized this when it was created 15 years ago. While the coalition is focused on ensuring progress toward the bay’s clean water goals, our more than 300 nonprofit member organizations understand that a clean bay is not achievable unless the rivers, streams and communities throughout the Chesapeake's 64,000-square-mile watershed are clean as well. This means focusing on the issues that matter to the people who live there.
In 2014, the six states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed; Washington, D.C.; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Chesapeake Bay Commission signed the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement. With 10 goals linked to 31 outcomes, it focuses on priorities facing every community in the watershed, from water quality and wildlife habitat to fisheries and public access. Its goals were ambitious, included milestones and progress reports, and set the target of having all conservation practices in place for bay water-quality goals by 2025.
And we’ve seen progress. Of the 31 outcomes, we’re on track to meet 18 by the end of this year. But much has changed in the past 10 years. Those woods I walked through to school are long gone, replaced with new neighborhoods and shopping centers, and they reflect the growing land-conversion challenges we face across the region.
For those out of the loop, here’s a quick recap on the status of the Bay restoration effort:
In 2014, the six states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, the District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Chesapeake Bay Commission signed the 2014 Chesapeake Watershed Agreement. With ten goals and 31 outcomes, it focuses on priorities facing every community in the watershed, from water quality and wildlife habitat to fisheries and public access. Its goals were ambitious, included milestones and progress reports, and set the target of having all conservation practices in place for Bay water quality goals by 2025. While we have made great progress, out of the 31 outcomes, 13 are off track or have an unknown status.
The Chesapeake Bay Program partnership convened a Beyond 2025 Steering Committee to discuss and created the Beyond 2025 recommendations to be presented to the Program’s Executive Council at their December 2024 meeting. There are 29 members of the steering committee filled by federal and state agency representatives and two non-voting seats for public members filled by the Coalition and the Chesapeake Bay Trust. The committee received a deluge of comments during the public feedback period. Last week, the committee voted on the final draft of the plan, approving a plan that adopts several changes recommended from the comments received. Notably, this includes the suggestion to review the status of the next series of recommendations for the Bay cleanup plan at the end of 2025, as opposed to 2026.
The Coalition will continue to closely follow events related to the future of the Bay restoration effort. With the support of our member organizations, we will continue to advocate for the policies and practices that will allow us to leave a legacy of clean water to future generations.
