The Chesapeake Bay Watershed

a sermon by Reverend Lynn Thomas Strauss

Unitarian Universalist Church of Rockville, April 23, 2006

It is easy to take water for granted.
It is easy to take grass and flowering trees for granted.
It is easy to take the air we breathe for granted.
Earth Day is intended to remind us of our connection, our dependence, our responsibilities to the earth.

It is a sacred connection….we feel between ourselves and nature. We feel it in this room this morning. The sacred quality of all life.

When we sit in this sanctuary, we will not be able to take the beauty of this spot of earth for granted. We will live as part of it each Sunday.

To be good steward of our earth and of our water, we must pay closer attention. We need to be more aware of our dependence. We need to feel that we truly are part of an interdependent web of life.

Contemporary Creek Indian poet, Joy Harjo writes in a poem… “We are relatives of deep water”

Environmentalist Tom Horton, of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation writes: “The bay connect us…the bay reflects us.”

The water of our region is a mirror of our communal soul. The sotry of any people is also the story of the waters of those people. Our story as Marylanders is, in part, the story of the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers. It is our souls mirrored in these waters. Without water we would die, this is our water. Water is life, this is our life.

I grew up in the Great Lakes region of the Midwest, an inheritor of those beautiful shores, on Friday, I sat at the edge of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, wherever we go, wherever we live; we are drawn to the water.

I have come to love the waters which bless this part of our homeland. The Potomac, the Severon, The Sequehanna, the Shenedoah, St. Mary’s River and the most awesome, most breathtaking…Chesapeake Bay.

I am always intimidated when I must drive across the Bay bridge. It is a daunting sight…I always want to look down at the water, out at the bay instead of watching my lane…Once I was traveling back from Bethany beach and crossing the bridge in the evening…the sun began to set, with amazing reds and pinks and oranges…over the water…reaching the far side I turned around for one last glimpse of the red sky over the bay and I fell speechless as I saw the almost full moon rising over the bay. What an amazing beautiful sight! What a miracle of nature!

How many of you will cross the Bay Bridge this summer?

How many of you have sailed or canoed or fished on the bay or one of its tributaries? Proximity to water, to the beach, to the grand view and beauty of the bay is one of the reasons that people are flocking to our Delmarva area. Everyone, it seems, wants t olive on or near the shore. We live in the wake of the history of the bay , we live linked to the generations that have lived on this land before us and to those who will come after.

I encourage each of us to look at the bay with the eyes of the past as well as the eyes of the future. Like any natural wonder, the bay reaches out to claim us, it calls us not merely to relish its beauty or enjoy its opportunities for play or to eat its crabs or oysters or to drive back and forth over it thoughtlessly, The Chesapeake Bay is not merely a beautiful body of water, no, the Bay and the life at it sedges is the last major green space of consequence on the Eastern Seaboard between Richmond and Boston.

It is the last great gift of land and sea that Captain John Smith called the beneficence of heaven and earth. We are inheritors of that great gift. To those to whom much is given, much is expected. As my personal identity as a Marylander grows, my sense of appreciation and responsibility for the bay grows as well.

We who live here have a special responsibility for the care of the bay. We who live here have a moral obligation to pay attention to political and economic decisions that affect the health of the bay. We who live here need t practice an environmental ethic and make personal decisions that honor the river of life and its shallow, ever-changing container, the Cheasapeake Bay.

I’m sure many of you have been involved over the years in efforts to “Save the Bay”. I’m sure many of you are contributing members of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. I’m sure many of you practice a green lifestyle and ethical decision making regarding water sustainability. Today is a good time to re-look at some of those continuing issues.

For the work of saving the bay is not over.

Are you still turning the water off when you brush your teeth?
Are you taking one minute, rather than five minute showers?
Are you washing dishes just once a day?
Doing laundry just once a week? Watering lawns almost never?

Last year a congressional committee held a hearing on the state of the bay. The news was not good. The year 2000 goals for cleaner waters were not met…and new goals for 2010 are far from realistic. By some measures there has been modest progress on bay pollution, but since the landmark alliance of the Federal Government, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia governments in 1987 and their promise to reduce the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous in the bay, the nutrient loading numbers remain about the same as the mid-1980s.

Computer measurements have proven to be misleading and when numbers are taken manually, oxygen depletion levels are at about 35% in the river tributaries as well as in the bay…that means only 65% of the water has oxygen enough to sustain living fish, crabs, oysters, etc. Only 65%.

The greatest oxygen depletion occurs at the deepest places in the bay, places where the algae is unwittingly fertilized by nutrient pollutants, consequently the algae cuts off the sunlight to the deeper waters, sunlight needed for oxygenation, for life.

One Washington Post article titled “Dead Zones” told of the effect of oxygen depletion on the lives of the watermen and their families who rely on the harvest of crabs and fish for their livihood.

Waterman, Buddy Evans, said, it’s like a fog. It rolls in, it rolls out. Bad water, some days there no sign of it, other days I pull up my crab pots and find only dead crabs inside. The Waterman’s Association is considering a class action suit against the polluters. Today there are 7,000 registered watermen in MD and 3,000 in Virginia.

Why worry about life in the bay? Won’t nature take care of itself? Isn’t there a natural ebb and flow? Better questions might be; what kind of bay do we want? Whose bay is it? Is there still hope? What does the bay reflect about us?

My care and concern for the bay are deepened by learning about its geologic and environmental history. 500 million years ago the Blue Ridge Mountains were a volcanic island chain and the underwater hills and valleys of the western Chesapeake were created by lava flow.

One hundred million years ago this was a tropical area with dinosaurs, mastodons and sabor-toothed tigers. 20,000 years ago an ice sheet extended to the headwaters of the Susquehanna. The ocean waters rose each century and the bay as we know it was formed 3000 years ago amidst dense forests.

Todays’ bay has 5000 miles of shoreline and a watershed of 64,000 square miles. The Susquehanna is the largest tributary discharging 40 thousand cubic feet per second of fresh water into the bay. And today’s bay is being filled in by sediment deposit of rivers and by run off, dredging is already necessary in Baltimore harbor to keep the waterways open. Eventually, in a few thousand years or so, the ocean will cover todays’ Eastern shore. In ten thousand years, perhaps only a marsh will commemorate where the Chesapeake Bay once existed.

The bay is an estuary, a place where salt water from the ocean collides with fresh water from the rivers…the river water pushing to the sea and ocean water pushing inland with the tide. This is the good news, for estuaries are among the most lively ecosystems of the planet. Where changes of temperature, depth and motion and continuous. There are 850 estuaries across N. America from Long Island Sound to the San Francisco Bay, but none is so large and potentially bountiful as the Chesapeake.

The essential nature of an estuary is transition, constant change, it is an unstable environment, hard to monitor, it is also a system capable of sustaining more life, more productivity for its size than virtually any other place on earth.

The social history of the bay is fascinating as well. Did you know that at the time of the first English settlement in 1608 this area was thickly settled by Indian tribes who left hills of oyster shells as proof o how they too exhausted the bays resources.

Did you know that Chesapeake tobacco was shipped to England in the 1600s as a significant part of the early colonial economy. And that de-forestation was common along the James and Susquahanna rivers causing floods and erosion in the 1700s. That Maryland and Virginia debated colonial boundaries on land and on seashore. That the C&O canals were built by Irish immigrants and these canals were used during the civil war. And that in 1875 800 boats annually left Georgetown for the long ride up the Potomac valley. Did you know there were oysters wars, oyster pirates, and oyster police ..all this in the late 19th c.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds of books on every aspect of the Chesapeake, I recommend two; “The Chesapeake: An Environmental Biography” by John Wennersten and “Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake By “ by Tom Horton. Both authors write from an historical perspective and starkly realistic, yet hopeful.

So how to save the bay?
The state of the bay depends on three factors:

1. The pollution factor, how much nutrient and phosphorus pollutants are poured in.
2. the harvest factor, how much fish and shellfish are taken out
3. the resilience factor, the amazing ability of the bay to bounce back, if given the change.

What we can do , is consider our own footprint, as an individual, as a family , as communities. Because pollution from manufacturing sources and sewage treatment plants have been regulated, the most out of control pollution today comes from lawn pesticide run off, manure run off from dairy and beef farming, electric energy plants and automobile air pollution and erosion from development sprawl.

What we can do to help save the Chesapeake Bay is:

• Buy fuel efficient cars and drive less
• Eat less meat and dairy products
• Buy already built homes on smaller pieces of land
• Use less energy in the home
• Stop using pesticides or fertilizers on our lawns
• Have smaller families
• Support smart growth in our communities.

If you can only do one thing; stop using chemicals and fertilizers on your lawn. Live small, not large.

Love the bay, but love it and use it wisely. If enough of all the millions of us who love the bay express that love through an environmental ethic, through an understanding of our connection to the very light and exygen in the water, there is still a change that the bay will not die.

We hve the information, the truth, the wisdom of science and the lessons of history to guide us, but we must lead against the tide of greed and excess consumption.

We do not need to sacrifice, we only need to imagine how our lives and the lives of furture generations will be happier and healthier by revitalizing existing twons, protecting the forests that remain, reducing our dependence on gasoline, giving ourselves and the waters of our rivers and bay more breathing room.

The environmental crisis is a moral crisis. That so much has been lost is a tragedy. We must act now to save the bay we love.

This is really a sermon about love, about how we care for what we love.
Let us not take the Chesapeake Bay for granted.
Let us save it for future generations.
Does it really matter how quickly global warming will harm our planet, we know the danger is real, however slowly or quickly the waters heat and rise, however slowly or quickly species of fish or plants or oysters die out, we know the danger is real.

Let us save the earth and its waters for future generations.

Let us not love the coasts to death with development and overuse…
Let us love them to life, with conservation and wise management.

Let us be reminded by the beauty of our small part of the world, to care for what we love.

To do what we can to save our soul, to save our bay.