Suffocating the Bay 

EDITORIAL / Washington Post 10aug03

IN THE 20 YEARS since scientists began monitoring the quality of water in the Chesapeake Bay, they have never seen a catastrophe like the one that has visited the nation's largest estuary this summer. In an enormous, 100-mile stretch of the bay, oxygen levels in the water have dropped too low to sustain marine life. Fish are dying, oysters are disappearing, oxygen-starved crabs are climbing out of the water and algae blooms cover the bay surface. This happens to some degree every year, but a combination of unusual conditions—last year's drought, this year's heavy rainfall—has made it much worse this summer. The culprit, though, is not the weather, but rather pollution caused by the 16 million people who live in the bay's watershed and their farms, lawns and sewage plants, which generate the nitrogen and other pollutants that flow into the water. The many efforts to "Save the Bay," in other words, aren't working fast enough.

A portion of the pollution is coming from identifiable sources—wastewater treatment plants and other facilities that dump chemicals directly into the bay. Politicians all around the bay area have promised to improve these plants, but with mixed results. Notably, Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. came to office promising to make a cleaner Chesapeake Bay a priority, but sewage plant upgrades cost money, a scarce commodity in Maryland at the moment.

But runoff—from city streets, suburban lawns and above all from farms—is a far bigger problem requiring more complex solutions. Maryland poultry farmers are often held out as the main culprits of farm pollution, but Pennsylvania dairy operations and Shenandoah chicken farms are also at fault. Clearly, two decades' worth of sometimes halfhearted, semi-voluntary regulation have not had the effects they should have. Farmers in most states around the area are required to produce plans showing how they would reduce the use of fertilizer. But one poll in Pennsylvania showed that less than a third of them stuck to their plans, and Maryland farmers, who operate under a more rigid system, complained at a farm "summit" last week that they found it hard to work with the system. Perhaps it is time to start thinking more creatively—and not merely to talk vaguely about more "voluntary" efforts, as Mr. Ehrlich is wont to do. There may, for example, be a role for other kinds of incentives, such as encouraging farmers to plant trees around their fields to slow runoff or giving them incentives to burn or convert manure into fertilizer, as Perdue Farms is doing. It is also important to involve the owners of large lawns, whose fertilizer is no less harmful by the time it reaches the bay.

Finally, it may be time to revisit the whole issue of Chesapeake Bay governance. In many ways, the semiformal arrangements that have bound together concerned states and the Environmental Protection Agency serve the area well. Still, no single government agency is ultimately responsible for making sure that the Chesapeake Bay really is clean by 2010, as the Chesapeake Executive Council—a body consisting of the governors of Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the mayor of the District, and the EPA administrator—has demanded. The bay is important not merely for its own sake and for the sake of its marine life but for the region's economy: The fishing industry, the tourist industry and many others depend on the Chesapeake Bay's not running out of oxygen.