You definitely cannot be meeting-averse and work for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay ? or be shortsighted.
“The alliance tries to pullall the stakeholders together ? the business community, the development community, the farmers, the watermen, the watershed organizations, the universities and government ? to come up with consensus solutions for Chesapeake Bay restoration,” said Executive Director David Bancroft of the Baltimore-based Alliance.
A 25-employee, $2 million-a-year conservation nonprofit since 1971, the alliance is a partnering, civic empowerment, and educational organization ? rather than an advocacy or lobbying one ? which sees Bay ecology not only in terms of environmental science but also from the standpoint of what Bancroft calls “lifestyle issues.”
Both, he says, play a part ? and thus so do all within the 64,000-square-mile region (six states and the District of Columbia) that comprises the Chesapeake Bay?s watersheds ? in the degradation of the Bay, threatening its teeming blue crab, oyster, and rockfish population.
“The pollutants we?re talking about are nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment,” Bancroft said, explaining that these byproducts of industrialization, auto emissions, paving sprawl, erosion and sedimentation, wastewater treatment, and fertilization practices are “overfeeding” the Bay with unhealthy nutrients and harming sub-aquatic vegetation and marine life.
Today, almost 50 percent of Bay rockfish contain internal tumors due to oxygen-leaching pollution, though they are still edible, Bancroft explained. And though nitrogen and phosphorous have been reduced ? by about 35 and 20 percent respectively since the 1980s ? he said they must be further abated.
“So all of us play our part,” Bancroft noted. “If we drive cars, live in subdivisions or buy in commercial facilities with a lot of impervious surfaces (paving). If we buy food [the product of fertilization], we are all part of the problem that?s polluting the Bay. We believe that all restoration is local.”
That?s why the alliance networks withhundreds of public and private organizations ? including asking builders to use a more pervious form of concrete to reduce run-off ? to accomplish its educational and conservation mission, Bancroft added.
“The alliance is a great resource for a lot of local groups. They provide some technical capacity and they organize on a regional scale, something we could never do as a small local watershed group,” said Halle Vander Gaag, executive director of the Jones Falls Watershed Association, a Baltimore City civic group that helps conserve 58 square miles of an Inner Harbor/Bay tributary.
