We live in a Chesapeake Bay watershed moment. The future of the Bay as a home for sea creatures and a play pool for human recreation is at risk. The Chesapeake Bay environment is in sharp decline. We can fix it, perhaps. But we have to act fast.
Is the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment (in the British sense of the word) a thin line between health and unwholesomeness? Not really. The Chesapeake Bay's watershed moment, in the North American sense of the word, is a basin where many watershed moments are held. The Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment occurred when a bolide fractured the Earth’s shell and the glaciers dripped down the ancient Susquehannah Valley. It occurred as the Age of Mammals dawned and around the time when early humans settled and planted crops. In 1607, when 104 English settlers arrived, sailed up its James River tributary, and settled at Jamestown, the Bay experienced another watershed moment. It was a watershed moment when tobacco was first planted by John Rolfe in Virginia and several years later when Godiah Spray and hundreds of others planted the weed in Maryland. We cross the watershed line at various points 100, 200, or 300 year later, when the Chesapeake became integral to the Triangle Trade, when the colonies rebelled, and when the internal combustion engine roared onto the scene. A true watershed moment occurred the day 400 years later, when the watershed’s population surpassed 16 million people.
For billions of years, the land and water have danced around on this place we call the Chesapeake Bay. Life forms have ebbed and flowed. For hundreds of years, from John Smith to me, this 64,000 square mile American-style watershed has gathered in lots of humans who love the land because of the water. We’re newcomers: history doesn’t start with man. Nevertheless, when we talk about the watershed and its moments in this blog, we are usually talking about the people and the moments on land, even though the Chesapeake Bay’s watershed moment is really all about the water that sustains both seamen and landlubbers. Abundant Chesapeake water highways brought ease of access and accessible food. Even in recent years, since motor replaced sail and Costco replaced fishing for dinner, we love nothing better than to putter and paddle around the Chesapeake Bay and its 11,684 miles of shoreline.
About the time of the 400 anniversary of Jamestown, words like “global warming” and “go green” entered everyday figurative language. People around the world had watershed moments: humans are part of nature and have to play nice in order to continue as a species. The big picture is global, but the Chesapeake Bay is our local example. Abundant pollution, especially nitrogen and phosphorus, have set in motion a chain reaction that leads to grassless and oxygen-starved waters. The Bay’s keystone species was once the big cog in the natural wheel of life that kept the protein factory clean and full of itself. Oysters can’t survive and thrive. Is it too late for them to be revived, even if the Bay could come back from the brink?
Too many were harvested to feed us. The biological relationships built around keystone species are changing because too many people need natural resources like oysters. The rapid and uneven withdrawal of resources like trees and water is causing the patient, our planet and our Bay, to gasp and tilt. Modern human life requires coal and gas and beef. Too much burning and farting alters the atmosphere and traps heat which melts ice and expands water to send worldwide sea level high and the subsiding Chesapeake’s shoreline farther inland.
A damaged ecosystem doesn’t have what it takes to fight back against the alien plants and animals that we track in on our shoes and ballast water. The aliens, finding none of their natural enemies here, multiply exponentially.
Is it too late to do anything? Is it too late to care? Have we crossed the watershed (in the British sense of the word) line? The experts say no. If we do the right thing IMMEDIATELY, if not sooner. Just you watch! In about three years, it will bubble its way right back to normal. With some limited experience, I see that this is true, but since I am not a scientist I have to take it on faith.
When I took up kayaking about 10 years ago, I had a watershed moment. I realized how much the Bay had changed since I was a kid. The water was really murky. I started reading and listening and understanding why the Bay had changed so much since I was a child in the 1960s.
I’ve wanted to do something to Save the Bay, something more than sending my annual check to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Beyond supporting them financially, I Clean the Bay. I took their VoiCeS (Volunteer Chesapeake Steward) course. I raise oysters for the Chesapeake habitat restoration program. I have changed my over-consumptive ways. I am a vegetarian. I buy Energy Star appliances. I lead kayaking tours.
And I am writing this blog. It’s not much, but I’ve heard those scientists say that if we could just get people to understand that the condition of the Chesapeake Bay comes from upstream, that it might help. So I decided that I’d write about the streams and the land in the tributary portion of the Chesapeake Bay. It’s the part of the Chesapeake Bay, the Chesapeake Bay watershed, which we drive around in every day. It is lots of little streams and the stream and the land beside it that we love and call home. Let’s Save the Bay one stream-scape at a time. You save yours and I’ll save mine because ... don’t we really all want the same thing? Health, happy kids, and peace on earth.
This blog is intended to get readers who live and travel all across the great big Chesapeake Bay watershed to see, really see the bit of the Bay that they can see. Perhaps then, they ... you ... will have a watershed moment when seeing, thinking, and caring. Ah, ha! The Chesapeake Bay’s health is inextricably tied to our health. Our health, and the health of us all.
