Let Us Get Our Feet Wet

I live near the Chesapeake Bay on a river that feeds into it.  Five major rivers flow into this bay and numerous tributaries also dump water into this largest estuary in the United States.  Two theories hold strong for the formation of this bay.  One an asteroid collision or two a giant glacier.  If you are a numbers person, the Chesapeake Bay is 200 miles long. fed by 48 major rivers, and fills from 100 tributaries that drain across a 64,000-square-mile watershed.  These are rivers that run by highways, cities (including the Nation's Capital), subdivisions, and farms.  These are rivers that collect lawn fertilizer, farm pesticides, and runoff from highway oils on their rush to the sea.  The fertilizers from farms are one of the worst pollutants creating huge algae blooms and eventual die-offs falling to the bay bottom and resulting in dead zones where oxygen does not exist.  And the average depth of the bay is 21 feet..not very deep at all.  In fairness to farmers, they have reduced their use of fertilizers over the years through better practices.

Cow poop and pee plus packing of the shoreline...not so good for the river.

Two thousand seven hundred plant and animal species attempt to live in and near the Bay.  At one time there were so many oysters in this Bay that the water was completely filtered, ALL OF IT, in a week!  One Algonquin Indian translation of the word Chesapeake is "great shellfish bay."  That was when you could wade into the water and see your feet---I am guessing if you did not cut your foot on the many oysters shells.  "Such huge numbers of shellfish had a major impact on the environment.  Oysters are filter feeders, which means that they remove nutrients from the water as they siphon it through their gill system.  This filtering process removes the phytoplankton and other small organisms that grow in the water.  In essence, each oyster is a small, water-treatment plant that cleans the water passing through it as it feeds.  The cumulative effect of millions and millions of oysters feeding each day was to keep the waters of the Chesapeake clear and pristine.  Biologists have estimated that when the English settlers reached Virginia and Maryland in the 1600s, oysters were filtering the entire Chesapeake Bay once a week.  The result was waters of remarkable clarity, even down to depths of twenty feet or more."  Those days are past as we have less than 2% of the number of oysters growing in the Bay.  They have died off due to disease from pollution stress and also disappeared from over-harvesting.  Work is ongoing to restore oysters to the Bay... a slow, but perhaps ultimately successful process if we get a handle on the pollution and get better cooperation from the oyster fishermen which is a different species than the oyster farmer.

We have a former state senator, Bernie Fowler, who was an avid fisherman as a young man, and noticed the declining clarity of the water on the Patuxent River when he would wade in each spring just north of where I live and try to see his feet.  In 1988 this 'wade-in" became an annual tradition to remind people of the declining clarity of our waters and also gave energy to a movement where then Senator Fowler sued the Environmental Protection Agency for its lack of enforcement of pollution laws.  The Bay is no where near healthy, but at least has stabilized in its decline and Senator Fowler has brought it to the public attention.  He is now 89, but still does his wade-in.

Pinkney Island, South Carolina, protected shoreline

Since we live in the 'critical area' I only fertilize my flowers and perennials with a slow release food and I am super conservative with pesticides and fungicides.  I am removing those plants that require too much spray to survive.  We still keep a few fruit trees that are demanding.  We no longer fertilize or herbicide our lawn so it can look like a golf course.  It does look like mowed weeds and we have allowed more clover to take over.  The clover is good for the soil and rabbits like clover to eat instead of my flowers.  If you live in a first world nation and fertilize your lawn, allow run-off from your roof, are not careful when you fill your lawn mower with gas or any endless number of things that hurt our water quality...remember that like fossil fuels clean water is also is a finite resource.  (My next post is on drinking dinosaur pee...really)