Chesapeake Bay Blues Science, Politics, and the Struggle to Save the Bay Book

The Chesapeake Bay is an endangered estuary; everyone knows that, in theory. Yet even if you already knew that in the abstract, Chesapeake Bay Blues will make you very concretely aware of that unwelcome reality.

Author Howard R. Ernst, a political science professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, finds that any attempt to manage the health of the Bay immediately runs into a wide array of problems – some of them scientific, but many of them political in nature. Politically speaking, the Chesapeake Bay watershed encompasses six states. For two of those states, Maryland and Virginia, the Bay sits at their geographic and historic heart; but four others (Delaware, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York) have no Bay frontage at all, and therefore politicians in those states have little incentive to make the management of the Bay’s health a priority.

Moreover, the fact of politicians feeling perpetually stretched for resources, and in need of votes, means that the health of the Bay often does not become a matter of general concern until a high-profile event – like the 1997 fish kill linked to a proliferation of the micro-organism Pfiesteria, a life form associated with Bay pollutants such as runoff from farms – hits the media and creates a sense of crisis.

Because the industries that pollute the Bay are economically powerful and politically well-connected (agribusiness being a prime example), their power means that any attempt at forging a coherent environmental policy is hampered from the start. Politically, Ernst suggests, “The Bay’s greatest danger is the emergence of a cozy political partnership that provides plenty of opportunities for ‘success,’ but that produces few tangible environmental accomplishments” (p. 49).

Not one to let things get overly abstract, Ernst provides eminently practical examples of the impact of pollutants like nitrogen and phosphates entering the bay. The graphs and charts that he includes are telling, as when one graph reinforces Ernst’s point that “in recent years commercial fishermen have used more gear to catch fewer crabs than at any other time in history” (p. 94). Ernst points to the earlier collapse of the Chesapeake’s oyster industry and warns that “Without proper management and a healthy habitat, however, it may be only a matter of time before the [crab] population does in fact collapse” (p. 94). The validity of Ernst’s conclusions, as set forth in this 2003 book, were brought home to me earlier in this year of grace 2014, when, visiting a Delmarva Peninsula crab house with my wife and my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, I and my family were informed (though not until after we had sat down) that there were no hard-shell crabs available at the crab house. That experience could become more the norm than the exception, if the sensible recommendations that Ernst offers in Chapter 7, “Toward a Brighter Future for the Chesapeake Bay,” are not adopted.

The focus in Chesapeake Bay Blues is on public policy and the political process, and Ernst discusses these aspects of Chesapeake Bay preservation efforts very well. Yet I also found that Ernst provided me with a clearer sense of the science of Bay preservation than I have sometimes derived from more ostensibly scientific works.

Chesapeake Bay Blues made me think back to the year 2004, when Maryland Governor Robert Ehrlich, a Republican, worked with the state’s mainly Democratic General Assembly to pass the “flush tax,” a measure designed to upgrade the state’s sewage treatment plants. I was heartened by this example of across-the-aisle cooperation among politicians – a phenomenon that seems all too rare in 21st-century American politics. And a Baltimore Sun article from the time quoted an official of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (an organization of which Ernst is sometimes quite critical) as saying that "This was a significant piece of legislation, no doubt about it….It started out as a great bill. It ended up being an incredible bill." Ernst, by contrast, was quoted in the same article as saying of the “flush tax” that “It's 20 years too late and five states short of what's necessary.” It is disturbing to contemplate that Ernst’s assessment may, in the long run, turn out to be the more accurate one.

If you care about the welfare of the Chesapeake Bay, and particularly if you are a fellow native of the Bay watershed, read Chesapeake Bay Blues; and when you have done so, don’t be surprised if you feel that something needs to be done about the health of the Chesapeake Bay now rather than later.