Sometimes, it’s the most obvious things that catch you by
surprise.
Last Thursday, I was driving west through central New York,
headed up to Lake Ontario to meet with some friends and do a little freshwater
fishing before the saltwater season took over my life for the next several
months.
Somewhere past the Catskills and maybe twenty-five miles
east of Binghamton, I passed a sign that I didn’t expect. It said
“Entering the Chesapeake Bay watershed.”
Chesapeake Bay?
That borders Virginia and Maryland, not the State of New
York. A quick check on mapquest.com
revealed that there are 261 road miles between Binghamton and Baltimore, so
what does Chesapeake Bay have to do with the cow and corn country of New York’s
Southern Tier?
The answer to that question lies—or, more accurately, passes—under
the highway, in the form of a fairly small, slow-moving stream that is no
wider, and seemingly far less interesting, than the various trout streams I had passed a while before.
For what looks
like a nondescript, farm-country stream is actually the north branch of the
Susquehanna River, a waterway that flows for 464 miles from its origins near Cooperstown,
New York to its mouth at the northern end of Chesapeake Bay.
So yes, central New York is very much a part of the
Susquehanna River watershed, a watershed that
ultimately provides half of all fresh water that flows into Chesapeake Bay. From a geological perspective, the Chesapeake Bay is nothing more than the drowned channel, or “ria,” of the
Susquehanna, an ancient river that flowed before dinosaurs first walked on
Earth, and cut through shorelines far different than those we know today.
The Susquehanna’s
watershed extends far beyond New York and the river’s immediate banks; the
entire drainage basin encompasses 27,510 square miles, including parts of New York,
about half of Pennsylvania, and much of northern Maryland. Anything that occurs in that extensive watershed
that affects the health of the river will, ultimately, flow downstream and
impact the health of Chesapeake Bay.
That, in turn, matters to anglers, as Chesapeake
Bay is an important producer and nursery area for a host of fish species, most
particularly the striped bass that ultimately migrate out of the bay and
migrate up to New York and New England. The
Bay’s health can thus influence the health of fish stocks many miles away.
And the Bay’s health isn’t as good as it should be.
“The Bay’s hypoxic (low-oxygen) anoxic (oxygen-free)
zones are caused by excess nutrient pollution, primarily from human activities
such as agriculture and wastewater. The
excess nutrients stimulate an overgrowth of algae, which then sinks and
decomposes in the water. The resultant low
oxygen levels are insufficient to support most marine life and habitats in
near-bottom waters, threatening the Bay’s crabs, oysters and other fisheries.”
Rob Magnien, director
of NOAA’s Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research, notes that despite some
progress,
“more work needs to be done to address nonpoint nutrient
pollution from farms and other developed lands, to make the Bay cleaner for its
communities and economic interests.”
As a practical matter, that work can only be accomplished at
the federal level, or at least with federal coordination of state efforts. While Maryland can certainly regulate
activities that occur within the state, and try to keep them from harming the
Bay’s waters, it has no effective way to prevent farmers in Pennsylvania or municipalities
in New York from allowing pollutants to run into the Susquehanna, and then into
Chesapeake Bay.
While New York, with its long coastline and significant
commercial and recreational fishing industries, might have a real incentive to protect
its portion of the Susquehanna watershed, there is little practical reason for
essentially landlocked Pennsylvania to elevate the well-being of coastal
fisheries above the economic interests of its own farmers (and yes, Pennsylvania
does host a small striped bass fishery, but it is comprised of fish spawned in
the Delaware River, not in Chesapeake Bay).
Since
2010, efforts to control pollutants flowing into Chesapeake Bay have been
centralized within the Chesapeake Bay Program Office, which is part of the
federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Such Office has made real progress on a
number of fronts, including setting a Total Maximum Daily Load of pollutants
that can flow into the Bay, which
“identifies the necessary pollution reductions of nitrogen,
phosphorus and sediment across Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania,
Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia and sets pollution limits
necessary to meet applicable water quality standards in the Bay and its tidal
rivers and embayments. Specifically, the
TDML sets Bay watershed limits of 185.9 million pounds of nitrogen, 12.5 million
pounds of phosphorus and 6.45 billion pounds of sediment per year—a 25 percent
reduction in nitrogen, 24 percent reduction in phosphorus and 20 percent
reduction in sediment…”
In order to assure that the states hold up their part of the
bargain, the process includes measures
“to ensure accountability for reducing pollution and meeting
deadlines for progress. The TDML [was]
implemented using an accountability framework that includes [Watershed Implementation
Plans}, two-year milestones, EPA’s tracking and assessment of restoration progress
and, as necessary, specific federal contingency actions if the jurisdictions do
not meet their commitments.”
In all, the TDML plan represented a massive effort that,
while nowhere near complete, got off to a good start, and stood a fair chance
of improving the health of Chesapeake Bay.
Unfortunately, it may never get the chance to do so.
In
2017, the Trump administration proposed a budget that would have stripped all funding
from the Chesapeake Bay Program.
Fortunately, from the Bay’s point of view, that budget was never
adopted, and the continuing resolutions that kept the government funded
recognized the Bay Program’s value, and provided sufficient funding to keep it
viable.
The administration’s 2019 budget again seeks to defund the
Chesapeake Bay Program, slashing that portion of the EPA’s budget by 90%, from
nearly $73 million this year to just $7.3 million in 2019. At such a low level of funding, the
Chesapeake Bay Program Office would just barely be able to monitor Program
progress, but would not be able to make any meaningful contribution to the
effort.
That wouldn’t bode well for a host of fisheries, whether for
the depleted and sessile oyster to the migratory striped bass that spend their
first years of life in the Bay’s waters.
Other important, but troubled, water bodies on every coast,
including the
Gulf of Mexico (which has a dead zone the size of New Jersey), Long Island
Sound, San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound and the Florida Keys/Everglades region
(along with the strictly freshwater regions of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain)
would also see important funding either completely eliminated or slashed to token
amounts that would make any real progress impossible.
That’s a bad thing, for to both the fish and the fishermen
who pursue them, nothing is as important as water. For as
W.C. Fields noted, when explaining why he never drank the stuff,
“Fish [fornicate] in it.”
They swim in it, feed in it, breathe in it and grow in it
too; without water clean enough to support such activities, fish—and fishing—won’t
survive very well.
And as we all know, “stuff” flows downstream. Any pollutants that end up in the water will,
in time, end up in our bays and estuaries, the nursery areas and
feeding grounds that are critical to coastal fisheries.
That being the case, as the budget debates heat up again
this fall, anyone concerned with the health of our fisheries need to stay on
top of this issue, and let their representatives know that clean water is worth
paying for.
Yes, we usually worry about bag limits, seasons, size limits
and such.
But those things only matter if there are fish in the water,
and that means that, most of all, we need water that is fit for those fish to live in.
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