Monday, May 21, 2018

BECAUSE IT ALL FLOWS DOWNSTREAM


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.



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).


“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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