Keeping Chesapeake Bay Clean Is in Everyone’s Interest
For quite some time now, the Coalition and many of our member organizations have circled 2025 as we chart the future of the Bay restoration effort. In this op-ed published today in The Baltimore Sun, Coalition Director Kristin Reilly shares 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.
Stay tuned in the weeks and months ahead for updates on events related to the future of the Bay restoration effort. The Coalition will continue to coordinate our amazing member organizations to advocate for the policies and practices that will allow us to leave a legacy of clean water to future generations.
