<-- <---->
MENU

Sections

More

January 26, 2022

The Talbot Spy

The nonprofit e-newspaper for the Talbot County Community

Ecosystem Eco Homepage Ecosystem Eco Portal Lead

Headed for Hurlock: The Rhythm of Chesapeake Migrations by Tom Horton

by 9 Comments

Because I hail from nearby Federalsburg, I can confidently describe the little village of Hurlock on the Eastern Shore of Maryland as unprepossessing, nothing remarkable, special for nothing much.

No reason, it would seem, ever to head for Hurlock.

Even within Dorchester County, which contains it, Hurlock’s flat farmscapes pale before the untrammeled gorgeousness of the great Blackwater marshes and the Choptank, Transquaking, Chicamacomico, Honga and Nanticoke rivers that lavish voluptuous meanderings on other county towns.

And yet, it is to Hurlock — specifically to the sprawling impoundments of its sewage plant — that every late autumn I head with my university classes around sunset to experience one of the great festivals of the Chesapeake Bay.

Gathering there nightly to rest, after foraging far-flung fields and wetlands, are hundreds of tundra swans, thousands of snow geese and Canada geese, squadrons of assorted ducks — all of it a delight for the eye and the ear. And that’s just for starters, I tell the class.

From 4,000 miles away, from across Alaska’s North Slope, the Bering Sea and the Yukon Territory the swans have come; the geese arrive from Labrador and Hudson Bay, and the ducks from prairie potholes as far off as Saskatchewan in Canada.

What a grand assemblage, as the western horizon fades from deep violet to black and the mellow, haunting halloooing of swans pierces the chill: Drawn from across the continent, the swans are headed for Hurlock. Having ridden the coattails of big northwest blows, they were likely airborne for 24 hours or more on the final leg of their journey.

It’s a bit of a conceit, this “headed for Hurlock” thing, because migrating waterfowl distribute throughout the great estuary. But I love how these hemispheric processions of life grace and enliven the humblest spots of the Chesapeake watershed.

I recall decades ago, exploring with my young daughter a tidal rivulet trickling from around Hurlock to Marshyhope Creek, the main tributary of the Nanticoke River. Pushing upstream in spots no more than a few feet wide were tiny wrigglers, baby eels returning from the Sargasso Sea, far out in the Atlantic Ocean, where all eels in North America go to spawn and die.

It remains more mysterious than the moons of Jupiter just why and how the eels do that, or how their spawn return. It is a remarkable journey, Abby understood, and she asked why they traveled so far.

Well, it’s obvious, I told her: They are headed for Hurlock.

We talked about how when I was a kid, schools of alewife and blueback herring thronged these little creeks every April, and how we spent cool spring evenings, campfires lit on the streambanks, dipping the silver fish for their fine-textured roe,  salting their flesh in crocks for pickling later on.

The herring spend most of their lives in the continental seas from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas, converging annually to spawn on Chesapeake tributaries where they were born.

Headed for Hurlock. These glad phenomena of migration lend ritual and rhythm, beauty and nourishment to the most nondescript spots — shad returning in April, ospreys in March, great blue herons in February, striped bass in May, monarch butterflies passing through in October. All of these comings and goings embroider the great estuary richly, weaving it into a larger context: the Bay migration-shed.

These far travelers evoke the word synecdoche, the Greek origin of which translates as “simultaneous understanding.” Migrations imply that a returning swan or duck or osprey is more than just a lovely creature, about more than just itself.

As the presence of brook trout in a stream betokens a whole watershed in natural enough shape to foster the very cleanest, coolest water, so the return of swans to Hurlock means that any number of way stations on the birds’ long journey remain good and natural. It also means that we have a responsibility to steward our portions of the route.

So, when I head for Hurlock with my students, we are looking not just for waterfowl but also for annual proof that wider webs of habitat along their way remain intact. The mellifluous swans, the raucous gaggles of geese, the sassing ducks, all of these are mere entry points, entangling the Chesapeake’s 64,000 square mile watershed in a vaster realm.

These annual comings and goings conjure up fundamental rhythms of the Bay itself. Tides moving in and out daily, the constant two-layered movements of fresher, lighter river water flowing south on top as heavier, saltier oceanwater licks north along the Bay’s bottom. Geologically, the Ice Ages drew the oceans back into their basins as glaciers swelled, leaving just a river valley where the Bay was. Then there were brief flowerings of estuaries when warmer interglacials melted the ice and the seas gorged every nook and cranny of the coastlines. Deflating with the ice ages, swollen with the interglacials, our Chesapeake “migrates” to a geologic cadence, water making love to the land.

The landscape joins in, too, autumnally inhaling swans and geese and ducks from across the continent and exhaling them back every spring, and beckoning spawning fish from the coastal seas to thrust up every river, celebrating spring, jazzing the watershed with new life.

So, apologies for having a little fun with Hurlock, where I’m headed this very afternoon. It is not just Hurlock, but a synecdoche, both a humble glimmer in the vaster Chesapeake scheme of things and a critical nexus in the ensorcelling web of life.

By Tom Horton

After Two Years, Consensus on Oyster Policy Still Elusive in Maryland

by Leave a Comment

It’s hard to come together over oysters in Maryland. Two years ago, seeking to get past seemingly endless conflicts between environmentalists and watermen, Maryland lawmakers ordered fisheries managers to try a more consensus-based approach to managing the state’s oyster population.

In a bill passed over Gov. Larry Hogan’s veto, the General Assembly directed the state Department of Natural Resources to work with scientists and help the DNR’s oyster advisory commission come up with ideas for rebuilding the oyster population while maintaining a sustainable harvest. Any recommendation would have to be supported by 75% of the panel’s members.

After meeting more than two dozen times, the DNR panel reported Dec. 1 that it had agreed on 19 recommendations — only one of which called for doing anything different about oyster management. That one urged the state to invest $2 million a year over the next 25 years to restore oysters in Eastern Bay, once a source of bountiful harvests, but which hasn’t been productive for the last two decades. The other recommendations called mostly for more shell or substrate to restore or replenish reefs, plus more research, data collection and evaluation of existing management practices.

“I think everybody was hoping for a little more consensus,” said Anne Arundel County Sen. Sarah Elfreth, a chief sponsor of the oyster management law and a member of the DNR advisory panel.

Hogan, in vetoing the bill, had argued that it would interfere with the oyster management plan the DNR had updated in 2019 and foil progress made in bridging disagreements. But the approach lawmakers spelled out in the 2020 law followed the format of more limited negotiations that had forged an agreement between watermen and environmentalists over oyster management in the Choptank and Little Choptank rivers on the Eastern Shore.

That effort, called Oyster Futures, produced a series of recommendations, some calling for changes in harvest rules and others proposing new restoration initiatives.

But the DNR commission’s oyster policy review was handicapped, participants agreed, by having to hold most of its meetings virtually. Some members, particularly watermen in rural areas of the Eastern Shore and Southern Maryland, had difficulty getting online or being able to participate.

“I was really disappointed in the process,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and member of the advisory panel. “We never got to the point where we could ever truly give and take — give on some harvest advancements in exchange for some ecological gain.”

The lack of in-person meetings prevented commission members from getting to know each other and understanding other points of view.

“We never ate together. We never chatted together,” Swanson said. “We’d come into a supercharged three-hour meeting, and so the conversations that you have that instill trust didn’t happen.”

The commission had plenty to talk about. A team of scientists from the DNR and the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science analyzed the likely results of more than 70 different options for adjusting oyster management and restoration policies and practices.

Michael Wilberg, a member of the UMCES team, said computer modeling of various scenarios had helped the Oyster Futures group work through their differences. But the statewide review was hampered, he said, by the meeting handicaps and a fixed deadline for delivering recommendations to the governor and legislature.

“One of the important parts of this process is for people to propose new ideas and see us go out and try them and bring them back to the group,” he said. “That gets people talking to each other rather than trying to go around each other.

“I don’t feel we got quite to that level,” he added. “The group was just trying to get there, but we just ran out of time.”

Even so, Allison Colden, fisheries scientist with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, said the computer modeling identified at least a couple of “win-win” scenarios that she thought could be the basis for agreement. But, she said, “we ended up with a result where we really didn’t come to consensus on anything with regard to making forward progress on oysters.”

A couple of the policy scenarios run through the computer model did project increases in oyster abundance and harvests alike, with more shells available to replenish worn-down reefs, Wilberg said.

“The problem I think people had … was how expensive they were,” he said. To achieve that modeled result, the state would need to invest about $20 million a year, he said, or 10 times what it spends now, to replenish reefs with recycled oyster shells and hatchery-spawned juvenile oysters.

Watermen likewise expressed frustration.

“I’m not real happy, but we’re moving,” said Robert Brown, Sr., president of the Maryland Watermen’s Association. He and others had argued that all the state needed to do was return to its longstanding practice of replenishing reefs with oyster shells and allowing watermen to transfer juvenile “seed” oysters from the Lower to the Upper Bay. Computer analysis didn’t support that, though.

Despite the commission’s near gridlock, watermen said the oyster population appears to be rebounding on its own, after two summers of good natural reproduction.

Wilberg agreed that there are signs that after decades of ups and mostly downs, the oyster population could be starting to stage a strong recovery. But oyster reproduction is uneven in Maryland’s portion of the Bay, he noted, and the ability to rebuild the stock is limited by the loss of many of the reefs that used to sustain the population.

“It’s possible that the future looks really rosy,” he said. But the model indicates that if current management practices continue unchanged, he added, “it looks like we should expect a slow decrease in the future, mainly because of the loss of [reef] habitat.”

As the last commission meeting ended, DNR Secretary Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio, who two years ago had called the legislature’s action “misguided,” strove to put the outcome in a positive light.

“I think that they did better than we expected,” she said, adding that members had worked through “incredibly hard circumstances.”

“We still have a lot of work to do,” she concluded, “but the fact that they were able to agree on some things is a great start.”

From Agnes to Now: Perspectives from 50 years of Reporting by Tom Horton

by

When the rains began pelting the Chesapeake Bay’s six-state watershed with a scope and intensity not seen for centuries, I was in my third month as a Baltimore Sun reporter, still learning how to craft a basic news article.

Tropical Storm Agnes, in June of 1972, threw me the biggest story I would cover in an environmental journalism career that’s lasted almost 50 years.

Agnes struck when the Bay’s fish, crabs, oysters and seagrass meadows were all spawning and flowering and at their most vulnerable. In a few days it smothered the estuary with more sediment and other pollution than it normally receives in decades.

I was too new at my Sun job to even get my name on the front page pieces I wrote. But Agnes lent me valuable perspective: how rare and unpredictable events can drive environmental change more than all of the day-in-day-out stuff you can spend a whole career thinking is “reality.” Some of the declines ushered in by Agnes persist to this day.

If our human watch is puny in nature’s grand schemes, it’s still long enough to draw useful observations. Here are some things that seem notable to me, looking back over a half a century of chronicling the Bay.

Pollution

The visible pollution from industrial discharge pipes and smokestacks has been largely controlled. Bay rivers look cleaner than when I was growing up.

Largely invisible, the Bay’s current, biggest pollutant, nitrogen, was not even recognized as a problem by state and federal environmental agencies until the 1980s. It took a lawsuit by citizens, and scientists who risked their jobs, to change this. And not until the 1990s was one of the major sources of nitrogen — dirty air — deemed a “controllable” source. Bottom line: Restoration means attending to every piece of the puzzle.

Sewage treatment has been a triumph of technology, drastically reducing pollution from human waste even as the population in the watershed has more than doubled. Along with similar techno-fixes for cleaner air, this accounts for most of the modest progress we’ve made in Bay restoration. But this has also masked the other impacts of more people and more cars, such as more paving, more deforestation and fewer wetlands. And there’s not that much juice left to be squeezed from the sewage and air solutions.

Seafood

Whether it is rockfish or crabs or oysters, you cannot manage what you cannot count. A survey that measured the yearly spawning success of rockfish, or striped bass, beginning in 1954 was key to alerting managers to an alarming decline in the 1980s. This led to a five-year fishing moratorium and current management that put rockfish on a relatively sustainable path.

Similarly, a Baywide blue crab survey began in 1990 picked up declines and gave Maryland and Virginia the proof needed in 2008 to take dramatic conservation steps. Crabs are managed fairly sustainably now.

For those things we did not count or invest with enough scientific effort — species like shad and oysters — the results were predictable: a shad moratorium since 1978 in Maryland and oysters reduced to around 1% of historic populations.

Survey, sample, monitor, measure — not sexy, so easy to cut in budgets. But no count, no manage.

Lands of the watershed

We all know that the Bay’s 40-million-acre watershed was green, mostly forested and the Bay was healthy before European colonists arrived.

But just as important, often overlooked, it was wet! This was courtesy of millions of beavers, damming and ponding, spreading and slowing the flows of water. There were also countless other natural wetlands, many drained long ago for development and farming. All that wetness sponsored bacteria that transformed polluting nitrogen into harmless forms.

We know this from Grace Brush, a Johns Hopkins scientist, who extracted sediment cores from the Bay’s bottom, analyzing what was washing off the land and living in the Bay going back thousands of years. The evidence is that wet-loving plants were much more dominant for most of the Bay’s history. For the Bay’s restoration we not only need greener landscapes, but wetter ones, too.

Agriculture remains a big pollution source, but farmers have proved to be capable of remarkable transformations, like a major shift from plowing to not plowing (conservation tillage, through which seeds are drilled into last season’s crop stubble.)

This minimizes erosion, sediment and chemical runoff and energy use. Add to it the fast-growing use of cover crops, planted post-harvest to suck up leftover fertilizer before it can run off to the Bay; new attention to soil’s organic content with an ability to store carbon; and innovative uses of animal manure to keep it out of polluting runoff.

Looking ahead, I don’t know if we will learn to feed ourselves without fouling the water. Looking back, it seems like we could.

We’ve protected close to a quarter of the Bay’s watershed from development, which seemed impossible in 1972. You weren’t even allowed to form a local land trust in Virginia then. It’s the clearest success we’ve had in my life. Globally and locally, we’re hearing aspirations of protecting half of our lands for nature, or at least in undeveloped status, a worthy and achievable goal.

Ecosystem services

Not sure I knew the phrase “ecosystem services” until the 1980s, but it’s developed bigtime during my watch. It means documenting the cleansing, filtering, buffering, habitat enriching values we get — for free — from wetlands, oyster reefs, forests, beavers, menhaden and mussels, etc., if we just let them do their thing.

We haven’t yet taken the next step seriously enough, which is to accord these services literal value, to act as if they are just as critical to our economy as cash and credit.

The future

There’s a humongous piece of the puzzle still missing — attention to stabilizing the human population, whose growth is a consequence of running our economy like it must grow without limit or face ruin. That’s like saying you have to become obese or starve, with no option to just be healthy. Prosperity without growth is the idea economically.

Finally: Climate change, scarcely mentioned in a book I wrote on saving the Bay as recently as 2003, will make doing everything mentioned earlier even more critical.

Tom Horton, a Bay Journal columnist, has written many articles and books about the Chesapeake Bay, including Turning the Tide and Island Out of Time. He currently teaches writing and environmental topics at Salisbury University.

Bay Ecosystem: Lawrence Wetlands Preserve Is Becoming a Reality

by

Thanks to a $250,000 grant from the National Park Service Chesapeake Gateways program, Sultana Education Foundation continues with its most complex project yet—the restoration and preservation of the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve.

Adjacent to the hiking trail and hidden from sight by a wall of phragmites, the 8.5-acre wetlands is a “pocket park” of diversity “including woodlands, non-tidal marsh, shrublands, warm grass meadows, swampland, and a freshwater pond draining into the Chester River.”

This unique environment will become a perfect watershed classroom for Sultana Education Foundations’ ongoing mission to provide students with transformative educational experiences and learn about the Chesapeake Bay watershed and its natural and human history.

President of Sultana Education Foundation Drew McMullin says that projects have already started with the planting of more than 400 trees to create a woodland buffer along with two pollinator meadows, and a network of wetland pedestrian boardwalks.

McMullin calls attention to the fact that the Preserve will also be open to the public as a walking park, an invaluable addition to the community.

In 2022 a 1200 square foot nature center building will be built for indoor classes to allow year-round educational courses.

Sultana Education Foundation has had a 20-year relationship with the National Park Service, reaching back to the Schooner Sultana initiative’s days and the maintenance of interpretative websites for the Chester River Water Trail and Sassafras River Water Trail, part of the greater Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

“We were one of the very first to become a Chesapeake Gateways Network partner and we’ve been incredibly fortunate over the last 20 years to have the support of the National Park Service and role that they have played for us is to jump start every new initiative we’ve ever done,” McMullen says.

Here, Drew McMullen and Bob Campbell, Gateway Planning and Development Manager for National Park Service, share a Zoom meeting with the Spy to discuss the future of Lawrence Wetland Preserve.

This video is approximately nine minutes in length. For more about Chesapeake Bay Gateways Network, go here. For more about Sultana Educational Foundation, go here. Credits: Still photos by Tyler Campbell and Sam Shoge.

After 45 Years, CBF’s Longtime Leader Reflects on the Chesapeake Bay at a Crossroads

by

Will Baker never intended to become an environmental activist. He studied art in college and planned to become an architect, like his older brother. Then, one hot summer day in 1976, while he was up in a tree pruning it for a little cash, the homeowner walked outside with an iced tea in hand, looked up and asked, “Will, would you like to save the Bay?”

“And I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Semans, that would be fine,’” Baker recalled. “And he said, ‘Come into the house and talk to me when you’re finished.’”

Truman Semans, a Baltimore investment executive, was on the board of trustees of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, then a small environmental nonprofit with a catchy slogan, “Save the Bay.” It was founded in 1967 by a group of well-heeled Maryland businessmen worried that pollution from industry, development and population growth would ruin the sailing, hunting and fishing they enjoyed in their spare time.

Semans sent Baker to Annapolis to see the foundation’s executive director for a job. He started as an office assistant whose duties included running out at lunchtime to pick up sandwiches.

Now, 45 years later, Baker, who recently turned 68, is retiring from CBF at the end of December after four decades as its leader, a tenure virtually unmatched in the nonprofit world. Over that time, the organization has grown into a regional environmental powerhouse, with a staff of 210 and about 300,000 members.

“It’s become a huge, impactful enterprise, and it was really built by Will Baker,” said Brian Frosh, Maryland’s attorney general who earlier served 28 years as a state lawmaker and one of the legislature’s leading environmental advocates.

“Everything that I worked on, and everything that was accomplished in the area of the environment while I was in the General Assembly,” Frosh said, “had the fingerprints of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation on it.”

Over the decades, CBF has helped to push through a series of laws — mainly in Maryland and Virginia— to protect wetlands and forests, require farmers to limit fertilizer use and curb waterfront development. It has advocated for tighter catch limits on the Bay’s striped bass, oysters, crabs and menhaden, while pressing for increased state and federal funding to upgrade sewage treatment plants and pay farmers to limit runoff from their fields. It has sued polluting industries and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Water Act, and it has taught legions of youngsters and adults about the Bay.

Through it all, Will Baker has been there, insisting with seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm that the Bay can be saved and, lately, that this is its best and maybe last chance, if only political leaders can muster the will.

Yet after all this time, the Bay is still not saved. In some important ways, it’s in better shape than it was 45 years ago. But it’s not back to anything like the natural bounty that English explorer John Smith found in the early 1600s.

The Bay restoration effort is at a crossroads, some say. The Bay watershed states, District of Columbia and federal government have failed three times to achieve cleanup goals they set for themselves, and they’re falling short as the 2025 deadline looms for their latest effort. An internal review by the state-federal Bay Program earlier this year warned that the region will likely fail to achieve seven restoration outcomes by the 2025 deadline. Among the efforts in deep trouble is CBF’s main focus, reducing nutrient pollution.

CBF, too, is at a crossroads, facing a generational change in its leadership at a time when environmental groups are reckoning with a legacy of White privilege and the need to diversify their makeup and broaden their mission to address the disparate impacts of pollution.

On-the-job training

That CBF would even survive, much less grow, was by no means assured when Baker took the helm in 1981. He’d been on staff barely five years when the board made him interim executive director while it searched for a new leader. After a few months, Baker decided to make a bid for the job himself. He got the nod, though some on the board wanted someone with more experience. At the time, Baker said, he had no particular environmental awareness or training for taking over a nonprofit like CBF.

“I learned on the job,” he said.

He had to learn quickly. When he took the reins, CBF was in dire straits, he said, with “a huge deficit.” Over the years, both Baker and CBF have become prolific fundraisers. Its 2020 annual report lists $38 million in revenues, more than 80% from membership contributions, gifts and grants. It boasts endowments totaling $46 million and net assets of around $120 million, according to its financial statements.

Such fundraising prowess has allowed CBF to expand its activities and establish a presence in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia. It’s also underwritten construction of its LEED platinum headquarters overlooking the Bay in Annapolis and a similarly green education center near the Lynnhaven Inlet in Virginia Beach.

CBF president Will Baker participates in 2012 Bayfest, celebrating CBF’s members. (Janice Wagner Photography/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Education has been a big part of CBF’s work since its early days, when Arthur Sherwood bought a workboat, then a fleet of canoes to get schoolchildren out on the Bay so they could learn to love it. By CBF’s count, more than 1.5 million students, teachers and other adults have passed through the 15 education centers the group established in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

He said he’s been told by many people now in government, business and academia that their interest in the environment was first sparked by going on a CBF field trip.

Baker calls CBF’s education program its “best long-term investment in the future of the Bay.”

Choosing its battles

CBF’s other core activities have been lobbying for environmental protections and litigating to punish polluters or stop harmful projects.

In the early 1970s, it successfully argued that the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland shouldn’t get licensed without a federally mandated review of the facility’s environmental impacts. The foundation also sued to block an oil refinery in Hampton Roads VA, and it went after big industrial corporations like Bethlehem Steel, Gwaltney of Smithfield and Phillip Morris for violating federal and state pollution laws.

CBF has also deployed staff to lobby state legislators and members of Congress for more funding for Bay restoration, and it has pressed the case for imposing enforceable pollution reduction targets on the states through the EPA-imposed cleanup plan CBF now dubs the Clean Water Blueprint. More recently, CBF has branched out into restoring vital Bay resources that have been lost, including streamside forests, wetlands and oysters.

Baker acknowledged that he is frustrated that the Bay isn’t closer to recovery. Some Bay advocates are suggesting that it’s time to publicly acknowledge the restoration effort is going to come up short again and begin discussing a new agreement to carry on beyond 2025.

“We’ve got to look at new tools and ways of doing things,” said Roy Hoagland, who spent 22 years on CBF’s staff, seven of it as vice president for environmental protection and restoration. He and others suggest the restoration effort needs to “broaden back out” from its focus on nutrient pollution to attack other largely unaddressed problems, like climate change, growth and toxic contaminants.

But Baker contends that admitting failure now would be a “huge mistake, because to say that takes all the pressure off.”

Instead, CBF has again gone to court, joining with three Bay states and the District of Columbia last year in suing the EPA for not taking more aggressive action to make Pennsylvania do its part to clean up the Bay.

“We’re not giving up,” he said. “Every month, [meeting the 2025 goal is] less likely, but there’s no reason to give up and to say, ‘Let’s just start thinking about moving the goalposts again.’ I’m so sick of that, you know?”

The biggest challenge to fulfilling the Bay cleanup, Baker contends, has been Pennsylvania. The state’s House of Representatives has repeatedly balked at proposals for raising revenues to pay farmers to install runoff-limiting practices on their fields and feedlots. Baker calls the Pennsylvania House “as fiscally conservative as any legislative body I’ve ever worked with.”

CBF also has scrapped with commercial fishing interests as it pressed for tighter controls on harvests of striped bass, blue crabs, oysters and menhaden. Its advocacy in the 1990s for tighter limits on crabbing angered watermen, who erected a billboard on Smith Island criticizing CBF. A storage building CBF owned there was torched amid the controversy.

Conflicts with watermen have continued, at least in Maryland, where CBF successfully lobbied state lawmakers against reopening some of the state’s oyster sanctuaries for commercial harvest. CBF also pressed for legislation requiring scientific and consensus-based management of oysters to identify and curb overharvesting. That earned the group a public rebuke from Gov. Larry Hogan, who promised to look out for watermen when he was first elected in 2014.

Yet some environmentalists, particularly in Maryland, contend that CBF has gone easy on the agricultural industry, even though farm runoff is the leading source of nutrients fouling the Bay.

“What we have tried to do that some of our colleague organizations haven’t always bought in on is we have tried to get funding for agriculture,” Baker countered. CBF has “raised millions of dollars to put best management practices on farmland. And to do that you have to gain the trust of the farmer to go in and start working with him.”

Will Baker, retiring president of CBF, walks near the organization’s Annapolis headquarters with incoming president Hilary Harp Falk. Photo by Dave Harp, Bay Journal

Rethink and retool?

A growing number of Bay advocates say CBF, like many organizations of its kind, needs to address the lack of diversity within its ranks and focus more on environmental inequities. Communities of color will continue to disproportionally suffer from environmental health hazards if advocacy groups fail to call attention to it, they say.

Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman, a vocal CBF critic, contends the foundation’s size and reliance on corporate financial support keep it from pursuing the social justice needed to address environmental inequities.

“I think it has its heart in the right place,” he said, “but no concept of the stakes on the ground … If you want to clean up the Bay, you have to right some wrongs.”

Baker counters such criticism by pointing out that CBF has hired an attorney to focus on environmental justice cases. But CBF’s top management is all White, and its staff is nearly 90% White. Only 4% of the staff identify as Black. The board of trustees is more diverse, with 19% of its members identifying as Black.

“Our numbers are not where we want them to be,” Baker acknowledged. “We’re working like crazy,” he added, to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce.

Andres Jimenez, executive director of Green 2.0, a group that monitors diversity at nonprofit organizations, said that CBF is at least acknowledging it has a problem.

“Could they be doing better? Yes,” Jimenez said. “Could they be working faster? Yes.” But he credited CBF and Baker with being up front about the problem and seeking his advice and help in addressing it.

Change of command

On Jan. 2, CBF will have a new leader. Hillary Harp Falk, announced as Baker’s successor in late October, interned at CBF and after college worked for three years teaching students about the Bay at CBF’s Port Isabel Island center. Her budding career in conservation then took her to the National Wildlife Federation, where she advanced to become chief program officer. (She is the daughter of Bay Journal staff photographer Dave Harp.)

Many say she’s a good choice to build on what Baker accomplished and take it in new directions.

“She’s a coalition builder, a very strong communicator,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission and a former CBF staffer. “In hiring Hillary, they’ve reached another generation that was really raised understanding more about diversity, equity and inclusion … and the strength of power sharing.” Whether she can woo the big donors Baker did remains to be seen, Swanson said.

Baker said that he’s doing more fundraising in his final weeks to ensure his successor can start out on a firm financial footing.

After New Year’s Day, Baker said, he plans to “sleep, read a book, you know, smell the roses.” He said his wife once told him he’s a workaholic, which he acknowledges with some chagrin. “I’ve got a couple of things on the drawing board,” he said, but he wasn’t ready to share them just yet.

Looking back, the only regret he was willing to share is that the job he signed up for is not finished. He recalled running into former Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer in downtown Annapolis shortly after the governor left office in 1995. After exchanging pleasantries, Baker said he was walking away when Schaefer called out to him. “‘I thought it would be easier,’” Baker heard him say. ‘I said, ‘Governor, what was that?’ He said, ‘Saving the Bay.’”

By Timothy B. Wheeler

National Park Service Awards $250,000 for Sultana’s Lawrence Wetlands Preserve & Center 

by

The Sultana Education Foundation (SEF)  announced that the National Park Service Chesapeake Gateways program has provided $200,000  in funding in support of the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve – a new urban nature center the  Foundation is developing in Chestertown, Maryland. This award brings the National Park Service’s  investment in the project to $250,000, as well as the contribution of considerable technical and  planning support. When open to the public in 2023, the Lawrence Preserve will function, in  association with the Holt Education Center, as a National Park Service partner visitor contact  station on Maryland’s Upper Eastern Shore for information, education, and to get official  Chesapeake passports stamped.  

Photo by Sam Shoge

Established with the help of a $1 million lead gift from philanthropist Michael Lawrence, the 8.5- acre Lawrence Wetlands Preserve is centrally located in walking distance to Chestertown’s historic  downtown and Sultana’s LEED Platinum Holt Education Center. While diminutive in size, the  Lawrence Preserve boasts diverse habitats, including woodlands, non-tidal marsh, shrublands,  warm grass meadows, swampland, and a freshwater pond draining into the Chester River. The  Preserve’s “watershed in miniature” will provide an ideal setting for students to learn how land use  impacts the health of the Chesapeake Bay. The Preserve will also be accessible to the public,  providing a new natural space in Chestertown’s growing downtown. 

“We are honored by the NPS Chesapeake Gateways’ support and commitment and are proud to  have the Park Service as a partner for the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve,” said Sultana Education  Foundation President, Drew McMullen. ‘Our relationship with the National Park Service spans two  decades, and they have provided initial support for many of our core public and educational  programs.”

Photo by Tyler Campbell

“NPS Chesapeake Gateways applauds Sultana Education Foundation’s vision to create a new  outdoor Chesapeake watershed classroom for students that also serves as an oasis of green space for the Chestertown and surrounding community,” said Wendy O’Sullivan, Superintendent of the  NPS Chesapeake Office. “The Lawrence Preserve is the latest example of how the Sultana team is a  leader and model for place-based environmental education and Chesapeake storytelling on  upper Eastern Shore.” 

“We are fortunate to have the Sultana Education Foundation in our community and we eagerly  await the completion of the Lawrence Wetlands Preserve. We see this new facility as a tremendous asset for young people in our area and for our community as a whole,” commented  Chestertown Mayor, David Foster.  

Photo by Tyler Campbell

The Park Service is one of several major organizational partners supporting the Lawrence Preserve,  including the Stories of the Chesapeake Heritage Area, the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority, the  John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, the Indian Point Foundation, the Shared Earth Foundation, the  Gosnell Foundation, and the Schumann Charitable Trust. 

Work on Sultana’s Lawrence Preserve began in June with the installation of a site-wide trail  network and extensive landscape engineering. This fall, the Foundation planted 400+ trees to  create a woodland buffer around the property’s border, as well as two warm grass pollinator  meadows. Development of the property will continue in 2022 with the construction of a 1,200  square foot nature center building allowing the Preserve to operate on a year-round basis, as well  as a system of wetland pedestrian boardwalks. 

 

Study: Tangier’s Imminent Climate Change Demise ‘Should Alarm Us All’

by

Tangier Island, in Virginia’s portion of the Chesapeake Bay, once had eight ridges, with distinct towns on each. But with every heavy storm, the once-sturdy island lost more ground. By the 1930s, only three communities remained, all on ridges separated by bridges over a marsh. Photo by Dave Harp

Rising seas are engulfing Tangier Island so quickly that most of its remaining residents may be forced to flee the low-lying Chesapeake Bay community during the next decade, according to a bleak new assessment published Nov. 8 in Frontiers of Climate.

The rest won’t be too far behind — staying until 2053, it predicts.

“The town of Tangier’s citizens will join the growing numbers of humanity forced to relocate due to climate change, becoming climate change refugees,” wrote the authors of the peer-reviewed study. “That this is happening such a short distance away” — 93 miles — “from the capital of the USA in Washington, DC, and proceeding apace with little aid, despite all the media attention Tangier Island and the town have had, should alarm us all.”

Tangier’s options are few and hugely expensive, the report suggests. A large-scale effort to save the island, the paper estimates, would cost $250–$350 million. Fighting sea level rise would entail wrapping jetties around erosion-prone shorelines, raising the town’s elevation by 9 feet with sand dredged from the bottom of the Bay and upgrading the community’s plumbing and electricity networks, the report asserts.

The only other alternative — abandoning the island and relocating the town’s 400 residents to the mainland — would come with a $100–$200 million price tag.

Rising seas, land subsidence and erosion have claimed approximately two-thirds of the Tangier Island system’s land mass since 1850. Dave Harp

The study adds new urgency to the debate over the fate of the tiny island, which has shrunk to little more than a few brushstrokes of sand and marsh in Virginia’s portion of the Bay. Its primary author is David Schulte, the veteran U.S. Army Corps of Engineers marine biologist whose 2015 study helped put Tangier at the center of a political fight over the reality of climate change.

Many Tangier residents doubt that the climate is changing despite strong evidence that rising seas and stronger storms are scouring the island away at an alarming rate, or they point to erosion as a much greater concern. Many agree with former President Trump’s assertion during a famous 2017 phone call with the town’s mayor that they have nothing to worry about from sea level rise.

A boat rests in the grasses of a Tangier Island inlet. Dave Harp

Schulte’s 2015 study had suggested otherwise — in stark terms that captured headlines across the country and resounded all the way to the White House. Using historic maps and aerial photos, Schulte and his team found that two-thirds of the island had disappeared since 1850, leaving just more than 700 acres of total land. Depending on how much and how quickly seas rise, they calculated, residents would likely have to abandon the town within 25-50 years.

Schulte’s latest examination of Tangier’s climate fate accelerates that timeline slightly.

The study predicts that the West Ridge, one of the town’s three populated “ridges,” will convert to wetlands by 2033. That will be followed by the Main Ridge in 2035 and the Canton Ridge in 2051.

“It makes the situation on Tangier even more dire,” Schulte said.

Although many Tangier residents reject the scientific consensus that humans are causing the climate to change, their actions suggest they are heeding the threat nonetheless. Its population has plummeted from a peak of 1,100 people in the early 1900s to 436 as of 2020. During that span, the speed of that decline has been in almost lockstep with the loss of dry land on the island, the authors found.

Based on those trends, the report predicts that the last residents will leave Tangier by 2053, two years after its last wisps of uplands — dry enough to support homes and businesses — are projected to convert to wetlands.

The island is renowned for its soft-shell crab fishery and supports a handful of restaurants and bed and breakfasts. But its remote location 13 miles southwest of Crisfield, MD, with no road access to the mainland, has long stifled economic growth.

Cindy Wheatley is a town council member on Tangier and longtime resident. Half of her house is still without power after an Oct. 29 nor’easter caused widespread coastal flooding around the upper half of the Bay. The water rose to within inches of her elevated door sill, but lower-lying neighbors weren’t so lucky, she said.

“We’ve been living here since 1979, and we’ve never seen it that high,” Wheatley said. “This one got into people’s houses that never got in them before.”

She doesn’t put much faith in climate forecasts, she said. Powerful storms will erode the island’s shoreline, but the damage never seems to last for long as far as she can tell.

“It’s called shifting sands,” Wheatley said. “It goes away, and it comes back.”

Schulte’s new study was not under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers. He conducted the research independently, he said, as part of his doctoral work at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. It was a family affair. His son, a high school senior named Zehao Wu, is listed as the other author.

Despite the existential threat it faces from climate change, Tangier has received little state or federal help to keep itself above water. The only significant public works project in recent years — a $2.6 million jetty completed last year on the northwest side of the island — will help reduce localized erosion, Schulte said. But it won’t stop rising seas from swallowing the land, he added.

The tone of the study toggles between alarm and frustration.

“Soon,” Schulte and Wu wrote, “the rest of the Town of Tangier will be uninhabitable due to sea level rise. The question we pose for policymakers is: ‘What will it take for you to act?’”

For more on Tangier Island, listen to Chesapeake Uncharted, a Bay Journal podcast available here. 

By Jeremy Cox

ESLC Selects Steven Kline as new President

by

The Eastern Shore Land Conservancy announced the selection of their new president on Saturday at their annual fundraising event, the Party to Preserve, hosted at the historic Hermitage in Centreville. Saturday’s announcement comes as no surprise, as current President Rob Etgen announced earlier this year that he would be retiring, having served ESLC since its founding in 1990.  

Steven Kline

Steven Kline was approved as ESLC’s next president by the organization’s Board on Thursday, October 28 and will step in to the position in December. Kline built his career in conservation politics, having worked with multiple organizations dedicated to preserving natural resources, most recently serving more than 10 years with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

“My family and I feel honored to have led this great organization for 31 years,” said Etgen. “We are pleased to have contributed to the preservation of the precious quality of life on the Eastern Shore. We feel thankful to staff, donors, and board members for their incredible support.”

“We thank Rob Etgen for his incredible service to Eastern Shore Land Conservancy over the past 30 years,” said ESLC’s Chair of the Board of Directors, Bill D’Alonzo. “We welcome Steve Kline to lead ESLC, to continue and enhance the incredible legacy left by Rob.”

“I feel very humbled and grateful to be entrusted with this position with ESLC,” said Kline. “I’m excited about the opportunity to build upon the strong foundation laid out by Rob Etgen and to continue to achieve the preservation of natural land and the betterment of towns on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.”

 

Chesapeake Bay Foundation Selects Hilary Harp Falk as New CEO

by

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s (CBF) Board of Trustees has selected Hilary Harp Falk , a proven expert in large-scale ecosystem restoration, leading organizational change and coalition building, to be CBF’s next President & CEO. She will succeed William C. Baker, who began working for CBF as an intern in 1976 and has been President & CEO of the organization since 1981.

Hilary Harp Falk

Falk comes to CBF from the National Wildlife Federation (NWF), where she was their Chief Program Officer leading and integrating all national and regional programs while serving as strategic advisor to the CEO.  Previously, Falk held the position of NWF Vice President for Regional Conservation, where she was responsible for leading the organization’s seven regional offices with a focus on regional growth and strategic plan implementation.

Falk’s rise to national conservation leadership also included serving as NWF’s Regional Executive Director for the Mid-Atlantic and Director of the Choose Clean Water Coalition, creating a coalition of more than 200 advocacy organizations working together to protect and restore the Chesapeake Bay.

“Today, we stand at a crossroads for Bay restoration. Finishing the work of Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint by 2025 and leaving a restored Bay to our children and grandchildren is possible. But it is not certain,” Falk said. “I am humbled and honored to now be charged with leading this prestigious institution. Together, we will build a future that brings people together for clean water and a healthy Bay.”

CBF has been championing the science-based Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint to achieve pollution reductions necessary and ensure clean water for future generations. And it’s working. Less pollution is entering our waterways and underwater dead zones are shrinking. But the system remains dangerously out of balance and significant challenges remain including the perils of climate change and states behind schedule on necessary pollution reductions. Currently, CBF is suing EPA in federal court for not holding the states, particularly Pennsylvania, accountable for their clean water commitments.

“Hilary Falk is a proven leader. She got her start at CBF over 20 years ago, but she has had Bay water in her veins from a much earlier age.  Hilary has the experience and wisdom necessary to continue the work that CBF launched 55 years ago to save this national treasure,” said CBF President William C. Baker. “Enforcing the Clean Water Act and investing in the pollution-reduction practices that provide clean water and mitigate climate change will be paramount to CBF success going forward.”

Falk is a champion for women’s leadership and advancing equity in the conservation movement. She was a 2016-2017 fellow with the International Women’s Forum and co-chaired the National Wildlife Federation’s Women in Conservation Leadership Advisory Council. Inside NWF, Falk led the implementation of the organization’s foundational 2018 strategic plan and was a champion for a more equitable and inclusive workplace.

“Strong leadership skills, a commitment to equity in the environmental movement, and a devotion to following the science to restore the health of the Chesapeake Bay made Hilary Harp Falk the clear choice for leading CBF during this critical time,” said CBF Chair of the Board of Trustees Elizabeth Oliver-Farrow. “I look forward to working with Hilary to achieve the goals we all share – abundant wildlife, clean water, and vibrant communities enjoying the benefits of a saved Bay.”

“Our national search looked at more than a hundred candidates,” said Harry S. Gruner, the CBF Board member chairing the search committee. “Ms. Falk’s commitment and experience placed her head and shoulders above the other candidates.”

Falk began her career in environmental conservation as an intern with CBF in 1997. Upon graduation from Franklin and Marshall College in 2001, she returned to CBF and spent three years at CBF’s Port Isobel Island Education Center teaching students of all ages – children, teachers, farmers, and decision-makers – about the Bay and its ecologically sensitive island communities.

“My lifelong interest and commitment to conservation began by assisting my father, a professional photographer, on assignment. Although he took a diversity of photos, his favorite ones – and mine – were on the Chesapeake Bay trekking through soft shorelines and messing about in boats. I fell hard in love with the Bay at a young age and knew then that I would spend my life protecting the environment,” Falk said.

Falk lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband and two children. Her first day on the job at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation will be Jan. 3, 2022.

Start of Pilot Dredging Project at Conowingo Dam

by

In an important step toward understanding the role that dredging can play in mitigating the effects of upstream discharges and the lost trapping capacity of the Conowingo Dam, the Maryland Environmental Service (MES), in coordination with the Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE), today announced that the dredging portion of the Conowingo Dredging and Innovative and Beneficial Reuse Pilot Project is scheduled to begin.
The contractor will dredge approximately 1,000 cubic yards of sediment, equivalent to 100 dump truck loads, from the Conowingo Reservoir, providing dredged material for various innovative reuse testing programs, including concrete and asphalt manufacturing, cement clinker, soil blending for sport horticulture, engineered highway soil, and/or supplemental cementitious materials.
“The initiation of dredging at the Conowingo Dam is an exciting move forward for the Conowingo Dredging and Innovative and Beneficial Reuse Pilot Project,” said Dr. Charles Glass, Executive Director of MES. “The removal and dewatering, and subsequent testing of the dredged material allows us to explore new options for long term solutions for improving the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay and will provide greater insight into beneficial reuse of dredge materials.”
The Conowingo Hydroelectric Dam, constructed in 1928, and owned and operated by Exelon Generation Company, LLC, has in the past trapped sediment and nutrients that enter the Susquehanna River upstream of the dam. Scientific reports confirm that the Conowingo Dam has reached full capacity and can no longer trap sediment and nutrients, meaning that upstream pollution is now entering the Chesapeake Bay.
The Conowingo Dredging and Innovative and Beneficial Reuse Pilot Project is part of a multi-pronged approach to improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay. The state’s holistic strategy includes conditions relating to the relicensing of the dam and an agreement between MDE and Exelon that requires the company to invest more than $200 million in ecological and environmental projects and services, and operational enhancements to improve water quality in the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay. It also includes an unprecedented, multi-state Conowingo Watershed Implementation Plan specifically designed to address the additional pollution that is moving into the Chesapeake Bay as a result of the lost trapping capacity of the Conowingo Dam.
“Maryland is taking a holistic and aggressive approach to restoring the Chesapeake Bay, working with states, the federal government, and many others to reduce pollution upstream and behind the Conowingo Dam so we can clean the water, increase climate resiliency, and put sediment to productive use,” said Maryland Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles.
The dredging work should be completed in October 2021. Upon completion of the innovative reuse portion of the project, a report summarizing the findings of the demonstration projects will be issued by summer 2022.