We are still absorbing the loss of Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias, who passed away on January 25.  His legacy is one that will last a very long time.

Those of us who love the Chesapeake remember his well-publicized journey around the Bay in 1973 — a remarkable example of leadership.  It was not just that he advocated for the Bay on Capital Hill.  Mathias listened.  He traveled to small Bayside towns to hear what people had to say, including farmers and watermen.  He listened to scientists, scores of them.  And because he was a U.S. senator, he brought public attention with him.  By the end of his journey he had rallied broad support — not just from one advocacy group, but from a large swath of the region’s citizenry.  He helped us understand that something was wrong with the Bay, and that we had to do something about it.

In recognition of his pivotal role in focusing our best energies on restoring the Chesapeake, two decades ago the Sea Grant programs of Maryland and Virginia and the Chesapeake Research Consortium came together to create the Mathias Medal.  This medal honors researchers who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the Bay — special individuals whose work has affected policy as well as science. Since 1990, the award has been given only five times.

Each time it’s awarded, it honors the legacy of “Mac” Mathias.

Mathias was happy to give his name to this award.  In an interview we did with him years ago, he said he was especially pleased to see it bestowed on researchers he had come to respect.  Researchers like Eugene Cronin, a leading expert on crabs but also a general advocate for science in service of policy — called by some the Grandfather of the Chesapeake.

When we conceived of this award, we did not consider whether Senator Mathias was a Republican or a Democrat or an Independent.  Frankly, it didn’t matter.  He was a leader.  He was the person who walked the extra mile to rally all of us around the challenges that confronted us — especially civil rights and the abuse of the Chesapeake Bay.

His leadership is a reminder of a less polarized time.  A reminder of the skill it takes to cross the aisle, to get the job done.  For that skill, and for so much more, we are deeply grateful.

Recent news of a noisy hearing on a proposed oyster law brings back memories of past debates over oysters.  I remember Governor Harry Hughes telling me once of hearings where oystermen stood in the hearing room with their long sharp hand tongs at their sides.  A rather threatening image.

My uncle’s father was an oysterman.  I remember his deadrise workboat, always crisp white, swinging from a stake.  As kids we could mess around with the other skiffs and rowboats, but we weren’t allowed near that boat.  That boat was his workplace, his livelihood – at least until oyster diseases finally brought down the fishery in his area and it was hardly worth going out for oysters any more.

His name was Mr. Minor.  He was a gentle man, with that country wisdom you can’t learn in a schoolroom.  He’s been gone a long time now, but I wonder what he would think about today’s debates over oysters.

A quiet man, I don’t think he would like the tone.  Evidently when one of the state resource manager was testifying at the recent oyster hearing, people jeered.  Someone started making coo-coo bird sounds.  The oyster debate has gotten personal.  It may get worse.

There’s a reason people are tense.  These are tough times.  Watermen in particular have never been rich, at least not in financial terms.  Their wealth comes from family, from what they know about the water, from hard work.  It comes from the satisfaction that derives from independence, from working for themselves and making it on their own.

We need to find a balance between honoring that independence and protecting the public good – in this case the public oyster bars that belong to all of us.  We have to find a way to balance these values if we’re going to live in a civil society.

It’s too bad that public hearings often bring out the worst in people.  Attitudes get hardened.  Frustration turns to ridicule.  Ridicule leads to anger.

Is there a place for a better dialogue?  Or will it all come down to power politics in the end? I think we all deserve something better.

It seems that there’s a broad misunderstanding about what’s happened to the Bay’s native oyster.

I encountered an example of this recently when I was on the West Coast.  I was grilling Pacific coast oysters with my son and his wife, and speaking with one of my daughter-in-law’s cousins (turns out that he’s the son of TV personality John Tesh).  As the subject turned to comparing Chesapeake oysters with Pacific ones, he said, “Oh yes, I read that Chesapeake Bay oysters have all been killed by pollution.”

That’s a wide perception, both here and across the country.  That the Bay’s native oysters have been killed off by pollution.

Filmmaker Michael Fincham helps to dispel that assumption in a new film entitled, “Who Killed Crassostrea virginica?” Near the beginning of the movie, Fincham airs an interview clip with William Hargis, the former director of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.  Hargis, who died in 2008, headed up VIMS in the late 1950s at a critical time for the Bay’s oyster population.  “Yes, pollution is a problem,” Hargis says, leaning toward the camera, “but it’s NOT what killed the oysters.”

Fincham does a great job of carefully laying out the backdrop for this story.  He follows the Bay’s oldest skipjack captain, Art Daniels, who recalls when he first began to follow the oyster as a boy.  He trails researchers like Dr. Ken Paynter as they dive on oyster bars, trying to see what’s going on now.  And most importantly, he goes back to the late 1950s, when all the oysters started to die.

It’s an amazing story.

There is a story here, too, about Michael Fincham.  He’s been writing about the Bay and producing films for Maryland Sea Grant for 30 years.  During the 1980s he produced a documentary entitled, “Chesapeake: The Twilight Estuary.”  That film told the story of the disappearance of underwater grasses in the Bay.  At the time, many thought that “toxic pollution” (from herbicides or big industry) was the culprit.  As it turned out, it wasn’t.  “The Twilight Estuary” describes how scientists uncovered the real killer of Bay grasses:  nutrients — from farm fields, from waste treatment plants, from septic tanks and stormwater runoff.  That’s common knowledge now, but it wasn’t then.

Fincham went on to produce other award-winning films.  “Watershed for the Chesapeake,” about the launching of the regionwide Bay restoration effort.  “Alien Ocean,” about the threat of invasive species.  “The Pfiesteria Files,”  about the appearance of a strange and still mysterious phenomenon blamed for fish kills, illness, and memory loss.  (That film won a regional Emmy Award and a first place award at the New York Film Festival.)

His new film on oysters promises to be just as informative and just as entertaining.  “Who Killed Crassostrea virginica?” will premiere at the Annapolis Maritime Museum on January 21, 2010.

It was a great pleasure to take a walk in the woods with people like Nancy Ailes of the Cacapon and Lost Rivers Land Trust and Keith Eshleman of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.  I tried to give a sense of their life’s work in the article “Saving Trees for the Forest.”

Nancy Ailes is downright inspirational.  She doesn’t like being credited with what she’s done in the Cacapon watershed — so far saving 10,000 acres from development.  She prefers to give credit to the farmers and landowners who’ve established conservation easements on their land.  And it’s true that Mike Rudolf and other landowners who’ve taken this step are heroes.  On the other hand, one can imagine that without her dedication, her sincerity, her persistence, that number of acres may never have been placed under conservation easement.

Another surprise came up while working on this issue — the plight of a small patch of woods on the College Park campus called the “wooded hillock.”  Environmental researchers like Stephen Prince in the Department of Geography put me in touch with this debate, which surrounds one of the University’s last remaining woodlots along busy University Boulevard.  Campus officials want to cut down almost half the woods to move some facilities away from Route 1, an area picked for more upscale development.  I describe the conflict briefly in “A View from Above.”

Just after we went to press, the faculty senate at the University of Maryland, College Park voted to preserve the “wooded hillock.”  Now apparently the ball is in the court of campus officials.  On the one hand they have to figure out where to put a parking lot and some maintenance facilities; on the other hand they have committed to preserving the campus’s natural environment and what remains of its trees.  Perhaps there are those charged with facilities management who can come up with some creative solutions.

For the sake of the trees, I hope so.

In a recent chat with Bay author Tom Horton, he reinforced a point he’d made to me last summer.  That if he were to write his report now on overpopulation in the Bay region (Growing, Growing, Gone), he would focus less on population and more on our culture’s addiction to “growth” — not only more people, but more of everything.  More money, more cars, more houses, more highways, more gadgets.  More things.

He makes a good point.  In his Eastern Shore drawl he argues that we often forget the rewards of being better, not bigger.  Studies of happiness, he notes, often show that while people need enough money to meet basic needs, “wealth” and the ownership of material goods don’t always correlate with a sense of satisfaction, of well-being.

In Chesapeake country, it sometimes seems that money can cause as many environmental problems as it solves.  Where a modest summerhouse once graced a rural riverbank, one now finds a mini-mansion.  Perhaps even a row of mini-mansions — with piers, cars, bright lights, super-green lawns right down to the water’s edge.  Our impacts on the landscape are bigger now, because we can afford more.

Horton is a big fan of living leaner.  But at the same time, his paper on population makes another sobering point.  While we can go a long way toward reducing our footprint on the earth — by reducing our energy demands, by driving less and walking more, by eating lower on the food chain — at some point absolute numbers will overtake us.

This is especially true if we want to preserve open space and natural areas.  If we want secluded marshes and riverside forests to remain undeveloped, if we want the Bay’s ecosystem to remain in the same shape we remember from the 1950s.

Worldwide, we need to balance human population growth with our demands on this planet we call Earth.

The United Nations posits three possible scenarios for global population, from high to low.  Of course unpredictable things could happen as well.  We could witness a world war.  We could be hit by an asteroid. We could be visited by plague or famine.  All of these things have happened before.  At some level, the trajectory of human population lies in the hands of fate.

But human beings are also thinking creatures.  We can look around us and observe. We know that current population in the Chesapeake watershed is more than 16 million, with another 100,000 added each year.  The U.S. population has now topped 300,000,000.  We know that world population has more than doubled since 1960.  The human population on this round globe is now over 6.7 billion and rising.

What happens next no one knows.  (For an interesting discussion of the possibilities, see Which World? by Allen Hammond.)

It’s hard even to talk about population growth.  Discussions run right into cultural issues, religious issues, ethnic issues.  There is a chance for prejudice to raise its ugly head.  This is especially true when one considers that much of the population growth in the U.S. comes from immigration, and that most immigrants come from what have historically been minority cultures in this country — at least since the English colonies took hold in the 17^th century.  (Before that, the Spanish were here, and before that, of course, Native Americans.)

The question before us now is what kind of conversation about human population growth we can have that is not driven by nationalism or racism or exclusionary thinking but rather by a compassionate concern for the future of the human race and for the planet on which we all live.  In this region, that includes a concern for the Chesapeake Bay and for the watershed that feeds it.

These are tricky waters, and Tom Horton deserves credit for his courage in beginning to navigate them.  While his focus may shift toward our consumptive lifestyle and the myth of endless growth, the questions he raises about population shouldn’t remain unanswered.

(See more about Tom Horton’s report at Chesapeake Quarterly online , and read the report itself, published by the Abell Foundation.)

On a crisp autumn day almost exactly two years ago, we drove down the long, oyster shell driveway that leads to Avalon Farm. Flanked on either side by fields of wheat-colored grass, Jack Greer and I made our way down the gravel road toward an old farmhouse perched on the shore of Kent Narrows.

Michael Pelczar greeted us at the kitchen door, holding it open to usher two Chesapeake Bay retrievers out before welcoming us in. We entered a warm, cheery kitchen and sat down with a cup of coffee.

For Jack, it was a reunion. He’d known Michael for years, but hadn’t seen him for a while. For me, it was an introduction –– a chance to talk with a man so central to the history of Maryland Sea Grant, the University of Maryland, and to the discipline of microbiology (“Microbes to Mute Swans”).

As we talked, I glimpsed a unique lens on the passage of time. Here was a formidable scientist and passionate steward of the Chesapeake Bay who’d watched his beloved estuary change from the same vantage point on Avalon Farm over the course of more than 40 years.

He knew right from the start that it would take the expertise of various disciplines working together to promote conservation and restoration of the Bay. This was prescient –– a way of approaching the study of science that would still be struggling to be fulfilled years later.

My encounter with Michael Pelczar was only a brief morning over a cup of coffee, but it touched me deeply. Here was the very embodiment of a life fulfilled. A rich legacy of a long professional and academic career and an even richer legacy of family. His office was filled with pictures of his six children and dozens of grand- and great-grandchildren. That morning, his daughter Ann was with him at the farm, helping make us feel at home.

Upon publication of the article about Michael Pelczar in Chesapeake Quarterly, we received notes from our readers. One stood out in particular. Norman Hines was an undergraduate student under Dr. Pelczar in 1960-1961. He wrote that he still has Pelczar’s textbook, Microbiology (written in 1958), on the bookshelf in his office. He wanted to know how to contact him. He wanted to let Dr. Pelczar know that he’d left an enduring impression, and maybe even to stop by the farm when next out to visit a cousin on Kent Island.

Michael Pelczar passed away on October 13, 2009, just a few months short of his 94th birthday. His textbook Microbiology has recently been republished in India, with promises of more sales than ever. He had only weeks ago hosted a visit with his Indian colleagues who’d led the effort to bring his book up-to-date.

Michael Pelczar presented me with an autographed copy of Microbiology before I left Avalon Farm that day. When I heard of his passing, I took the book off the shelf and looked again at the quote by microbiologist Louis Pasteur in the Preface.

“Messieurs, c’est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot.”
“The microbes will have the last word.”

That was his favorite quote, he’d explained. I think it resonated so deeply for him because of his sense for the interconnectedness and intricacy of the natural world, with humans only a part of a vast ecosystem.

When we’d finished talking in the kitchen, Michael took us outside to see his elaborate garden. His peppers were ripe and Jack and I both went home with a bag full of miniature purples, yellows and reds.

From there, we wandered down the shore of the Bay. Though leaning heavily on a cane, Michael Pelczar was surefooted and strong. I will treasure the memory of that crisp, autumn morning, of a singular opportunity to meet a man with such conviction of mind and spirit, grounded by his roots on Avalon Farm and his love for the Chesapeake Bay.

This treatment system filters ballast water and then zaps it with UV light to kill remaining organisms. It underwent testing at the Maritime Environmental Resource Center in March 2009.

One thing I’ve learned lately is that ballast water tanks that ships use for stability can cause big headaches.  For one thing, when filled with water they can act like an aquarium for all kinds of critters and carry them across oceans. Those species can set up shop in a whole new spot once they get dumped overboard at the next port of call.  For another thing, swapping ballast water in mid-ocean — the technique required by the U.S. and many other governments as a way to get rid of unwanted hitchhikers — can be dangerous. One freighter literally flipped on its side when a mid-ocean ballast water exchange went wrong.

I wrote about all this in an article for Chesapeake Quarterly last June, where I noted that many were calling for a change in approach to better protect ecosystems from invasive species.  Now the beginnings of change have come.

On August 28^th, 2009, the Coast Guard published proposed rules that include standards for treating — not exchanging — ballast water. This opens the door for installing systems on board ships — things like filters, chemicals, UV rays, etc. — that kill organisms and eliminate the need for exchange.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) created standards for treatment in 2004, and technology companies have been busy developing systems to meet them, often borrowing ideas from the wastewater treatment field. But until now, the U.S. did not recognize treatment as a viable option. Ships were stuck spending time and manpower on exchange.

The Coast Guard’s new rules would change that.

Under the proposed regulations, all new ships built after January 1, 2012, must include treatment systems that meet standards regarding the number of living organisms allowed in discharged ballast water. The standards mirror the ones created by the IMO in 2004. Compliance on existing ships and those built before 2012 depends on their ballast capacity, with all ships using treatment systems by 2016. That’s Phase One.

Phase Two would require ships to comply with a standard that is about 1,000 times stricter, as of 2016.

Mario Tamburri, director of the Maritime Environmental Resource Center (MERC) in Baltimore, Maryland, calls the proposed rulemaking “a reasonable and logical way to go.” He notes that since the IMO’s 2004 convention on ballast water, only six systems have been certified as meeting the IMO — and now the U.S. — standard.

“It’s not real easy to do,” he says. He thinks the stricter Phase Two standard “should be the ultimate goal,” but that it will require innovation — “technologies or treatments that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

For this reason, he’s pleased that the Coast Guard has planned for a review process over the next several years to assess whether reaching such a high standard will be possible.

Tamburri and his team will be on the frontline testing treatment systems through their work at MERC. Before the new Coast Guard regulations, MERC primarily tested systems striving to achieve the IMO standard for use on foreign ships abroad. Now, systems could be installed on U.S. ships. He says that from now on any data collected at their test facility will also address Coast Guard needs.

The proposed regulations are available for public comment until November 27. After that, the Coast Guard and related agencies will work on addressing feedback and making necessary changes.

Tamburri doesn’t anticipate any major objections from either the environmental community or the shipping industry. Both groups are anxious for change. Given this, he’s hopeful the regulations will be finalized by early next year.

“There’s a lot of motivation to move now. To help solve the problem now.”

For all the coastal ecosystems throughout the world facing the effects of invasive species, now sounds like a good time.

To view the proposed rules visit: http://frwebgate4.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/PDFgate.cgi?WAISdocID=68878897988+0+2+0&WAISaction=retrieve

What a difference a few decades can make.

While researching a short piece for Chesapeake Quarterly on the Bay’s once popular beaches, I came across some strange reminders of the past.

There were memories of summers decades ago when rock-and-roll bands played under the stars at Mayo Beach and at other hopping Bayside spots. Listening to aging beach-goers recall those summer nights I could feel the humid dark, see sunburned bodies sway, hear crickets trill beneath crying electric guitars.

When speaking to Daryl Lofgren, I sensed an even longer history. Lofgren is manager of what is now Anne Arundel County’s Mayo Beach Park, and his enthusiasm for the place and its past stirred thoughts of lost, long-ago landscapes of Colonial mills and farms — like the one belonging to Commodore Isaac Mayo, a naval hero of the War of 1812, for whom the Mayo peninsula is named.

I was also reminded of a darker past, one of exclusion and prejudice.

During the era of segregation, African Americans and Jews were not allowed on many Bay beaches and had to look for places of their own, places like Carrs Beach or, for Jewish families out of Washington, the Captain Salem Avery House, now a watermen’s museum.

One longtime Annapolis resident described how a high school friend was turned away from a popular Bay beach for being Jewish. In fact, she wasn’t Jewish, and said so. But that didn’t matter — evidently the ticket takers didn’t believe her. In the end she was turned away simply because she looked Jewish.

That was the harsh reality of the time. You could be turned away if you belonged to the wrong race, the wrong religion. Or even if you looked like you did.

We face many political and ecological challenges in the Bay region, including rising sea level and the washing away of so much beachfront. But with our losses have come gains, and some changes have been for the better. Though we still have a long way to go, we should be thankful for how far we’ve come.

For more, see A New Day on the Bay.

While probing the topic of invasive species for an article in Chesapeake Quarterly, I was struck by the diversity of people involved in this issue in some way. There are academics, biologists, engineers, and natural resource managers — people who grapple with invasive species day in and day out. Then there are those for whom invasive species become just one small part of their job. People like Jerome Brown and his inspection team from the U.S. Coast Guard, or Captain Escoto from the freighter, Tamoyo Maiden. And Kathy Metcalf from the shipping industry.

Whenever you speak with so many different people, you hear interesting stories — stories that can appear out of context, stories you want to pass on. Kathy Metcalf has one of those stories.

There’s not much decoration on the walls of Kathy Metcalf’s office at the Chamber of Shipping of America. To get to work, she takes the Amtrak train to Washington, D.C.’s Union Station from her home in Pennsylvania. Because of the long commute, she simply hasn’t bothered to schlep many personal belongings down in her years of working in Washington. Not even her college diploma – which becomes part of the story.

Metcalf graduated from high school in Dover, Delaware in 1972. The daughter of an Air Force officer, she dreamed of attending a United States Military Academy, particularly West Point. “I just thought it was the coolest thing in the world,” she says. A top student, she received nominations from her state senator, Pete du Pont, and applied for admittance to West Point as well as the Air Force and Naval Academies.

But there was one thing wrong with her application. She was not a “he.” The military academies all rejected Metcalf, sending her letters explaining that they could not accept her because she was female.

Though disappointed, Metcalf moved on and enrolled at the University of Delaware. In the fall of her sophomore year she was hanging out in her dorm room when someone came in and told her she had a call on the hall telephone. The caller’s identity shocked her.

It was Joe Biden, the newly minted senator from Delaware.

Biden had been reviewing his predecessor’s files. He said, “I understand you’re interested in going to one of the federal academies,” Metcalf recalls. “And I just wanted you to know that the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy is opening its doors to women next year.”

Getting past the fact that a U.S. Senator was calling her in her dorm was hard enough, Metcalf remembers. Realizing that this could be her opportunity to attend a military academy was even harder. It wasn’t West Point. But it was as close to her dream as she could get at the time. She told the Senator that she was definitely interested. Visiting the campus in Kings Point, NY, with her father helped seal the deal. She fell in love with the place.

When the Merchant Marine Academy formally accepted Metcalf, she became the first woman appointed to a federal academy “by about 2 hours and 13 minutes.” But who’s counting? The Academy called Senator Biden first. He held a press conference in his office in Wilmington, complete with television crews. Metcalf, who was a bit embarrassed by the hoopla, puts the experience in perspective. “I’m not anything special. It’s a good example that it’s better to be lucky than smart any day.”

Metcalf started the Academy with 16 other women; 8 of them graduated. After graduation, she launched into a career in the shipping business and ultimately earned her law degree and began working in Washington, D.C. on issues facing the shipping industry. Issues like combating invasive species.

Years after Senator Biden helped her earn an appointment to the Merchant Marine Academy, Metcalf re-introduced herself to him on one of her Amtrak train rides into D.C. Biden was a regular on the route from Wilmington to Washington, and Metcalf would see him occasionally. She told him the story of how he had shaped her life, and he said he remembered her.

But Metcalf hasn’t seen Biden on the train recently. She thinks she knows why.

“I hear he moved,” she deadpans.

Joking aside, she says she was excited for him to get the opportunity to be vice president. She knows a few things herself about seizing opportunities.

H.G. Well’s quote that “history is a race between education and catastrophe” resonates clearly in the Chesapeake Bay. Natural history and observational science have formed the cornerstone of our understanding how the Bay has changed over time –– tracking periods of abundance and decline, holding clues to the future. But moving forward, the question still remains as to whether an understanding of history will prevent us from repeating past mistakes.

Long-term data streams abound in the Bay region. Fisheries harvest data tell the tale of declining oyster populations, of the crash and recovery of the striped bass. Some of these go back more than 100 years. Mud samples taken from the bottom of the Bay show how the abundance and diversity of bottom-dwelling creatures has changed over time, a data set that extends back some 25 years. Field sampling annual aircraft surveys of phytoplankton and aerial surveys of underwater grasses paint a long term picture of the Bay’s change in state –– declines in underwater grasses followed by recurrent population explosions of algae.

There are comparatively fewer long-term natural history data sets, rich information records that document the ebb and flow of populations of organisms over time. But like Ohio University biologist Willem Roosenburg, featured in the latest Chesapeake Quarterly, several other natural historians have helped contribute a long-term record of life and change in the Bay. Vernon Stotts, with the Maryland Wildlife Administration, studied the change in waterfowl populations for more than two decades. He was among the first to note the decline of underwater grasses in the early 1970s, when he realized that many birds had begun feeding off plants in farm fields instead of in the water. Dave Cargo, who worked at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, created a long-term record of sea nettle abundance through a daily census off the lab’s dock on the Patuxent River. Beginning in 1960, this data collection continued after Cargo’s death and now holds more than 40 years of information on population abundance, data that has provided clues to changing predator-prey relationships in the Bay.

Long-term data records of water quality, climate, river flow, and temperature also provide key information on how the Bay has changed over time. Since the creation of the E.P.A. Chesapeake Bay Program in 1984, detailed monitoring efforts have kept track of estuarine variables for water quality, such as turbidity, algal species, oxygen, anoxia, nitrogen, and phosphorus. Watershed variables, such as nutrient and sediment loading, land use, and impervious surface cover provide the raw material for making the link between human activities on land and in the water and changes in the estuary.

But will what we know about the Chesapeake’s past, guide the Chesapeake’s future? The Bay seems well poised to learn from the lessons of history, but sometimes it is hard for scientists to slow down frenetic pace of research to look back to the past for clues to the future. One of the primary recommendations from a conference on Thresholds in the Recovery of Eutrophic Coastal Ecosystems, held in 2007 and jointly sponsored by Maryland Sea Grant and the Chesapeake Bay Program Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee, was to tap into the wealth of historical data that already exists to predict how the Bay will respond to restoration efforts in the future. This means rigorously studying and synthesizing the past, while simultaneously monitoring the environmental conditions of the present. Standing on the shoulders of the vigilant natural historians and field scientists who have kept a close eye on the Bay for all of these years, maybe the time has come to take a closer look across systems, to seek signs of concurrent trends from different organisms, different time series. Only by understanding where the Bay has been, will we be able to shape where it is going.