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By SEN. JOSEPH GARTLAN
Rappahannock News Contributing: Writer
The governments and the people of Virginia, Maryland. Pennsylvania •and the District of Columbia must now get eyeball to eyeball with some • .tough issues about the future of the t ^Chesapeake Bay. And they had better not blink. Decisions must now be \ *rjiade that are absolutely critical to \ rtjhe Bay and the quality of life in Bay j'eountry. •*> By the year 2020, the population of the Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania parts of the watershed will increase by nearly 20 per cent. Of those people, 832,000 will be residents of Virginia.
The number of automobiles registered in the area will grow faster than the population. We will devour fields and forests so that the amount , of land under development will ini' crease by 67 percent by the year 2020, according to planning projections.
We face a twentieth century ver- Sion of the “tragedy of the commons." Intense grazing of cattle on seventeenth century English village “commons” depleted the grass and made the soil erode. All the villagers suffered as a result.
As the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay puts it, “the Bay, as well as our ‘quality of life,’ are the new ‘commons’ we are trying to protect...” The land, water and air of the Bay Region are finite resources, and the impact of what happens on our private lands threatens to deny (hem to everyone.
But there is cause for hope. Proc
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