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Our View
Cleaning up the
Chesapeake
High-stakes games of political poker — the pot
is the water quality of the Chesapeake Bay
watershed — are being played in Richmond and Washington.
The watershed includes rivers such as the Shenandoah, Potomac, Rappahannock and Rapidan. In 2006 the Shenandoah was listed as one of the 10 most endangered rivers in the United States. Mystifying fish kills in the Potomac and Rappahannock are being studied by a special task force. All of the rivers carry levels of pollution that scientists consider significant threats.
Each river is the source of drinking water for residents who live everywhere from tiny, mountain hamlets to the megalopolis of Northern Virginia.
The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a group committed to seeing the Chesapeake Bay is returned to some semblance of historical health, is knee-deep in both games.
The Richmond game involves a document named the Chesapeake Bay Agreement. The agreement — the latest version was signed at the dawning of this century — is the pledge of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, the Chesapeake Bay Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency to rehabilitate the bay.
This is one of the pledges:
By 2010, work with local governments, community groups and watershed organizations to develop and implement locally supported watershed management plans in two-thirds of the Bay watershed covered by this Agreement. These plans would address the protection, conservation and restoration of stream corridors, riparian forest buffers and wetlands for the purposes of improving habitat and water quality, with collateral benefits for optimizing stream flow and water supply.
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