William G. Thomas III, The Chesapeake Bay

Regulation of the resources in the Bay region is certainly not new. Virginia passed legislation in 1669 closing the white-tail deer hunting season and a few years later closed deer hunting to commercial hunters. In the early 1800s Virginia banned dredging for oysters by schooners to prevent the Connecticut boats that had recently arrived from Long Island Sound where they had over-fished the oyster beds there near extinction. When these boats moved up the Bay into Maryland waters, that state responded with regulations prohibiting dredging and requiring in-state registration of vessels. In the late nineteenth century Maryland and Virginia passed numerous regulatory measures concerning oysters, pound nets, and fisheries. Finally, in 1918 Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act which outlawed the killing of whistling swans and set hunting seasons and bag limits for migratory waterfowl, such as Canada geese, ducks, and rail.

More recently, the Bay has been the subject of one of the largest, most complex intergovernmental cooperative efforts at environmental regulation in American history. In 1965 the Army Corps of Engineers began a long evaluation of the Chesapeake and in 1973 issued its sweeping, multivolume Existing Conditions Report. The report issued some specific results, finding, for example, that industry was by far the largest water user in the Bay Area with a daily use of 1,600 million gallons, nearly double the use for agriculture or the public, and that water quality varied in the region with most of the pollution and problems occurring in the estuaries of the Bay's tributaries rather than in the Bay proper. In its epilogue the report concluded that the Bay's troubles were accompanied by an extraordinarily high standard of living for the residents along its shores and that the harm caused to the Bay has not been "malicious" but instead a result of normal human activity--living, working, and playing in the watershed. The report frankly admitted the paradox that the beauty of the Bay region's watershed and its natural resources and advantages were responsible in large part for the doubling of its population in the 30 years between 1940 and 1970. Finally, the report called for "a regional land and water management plan" and for political cooperation to achieve it.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation began in 1967 and started to advocate and lobby for, as well as study and research, the Bay and its environment. Its motto, "Save the Bay," evoked the danger that these early environmentalists foresaw for the region and its resources, and it helped persuade citizens of the idea of the Bay as a living entity, something to be rescued from death, not just a reservoir to be managed or conserved. In 1977 William Warner's Pulitzer Prize-winning account, Beautiful Swimmers, of the life and culture of the Bay's waterman and their prized quarry, the blue crab, drew further attention to the changing natural and human patterns in the Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has grown to over 100,000 members and employs a staff of 175 people dedicated to defending the Bay and its resources from pollution, encroachment, and unrestrained development.

Finally, in 1983 a regional effort to address the Bay's ecosystem started. The cooperative Chesapeake Bay Program partnership includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the states of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia, as well as the tri-state legislative advisory board, the Chesapeake Bay Commission. The 1983 Agreement began with an important recognition among the partners: "an historical decline in the living resources of the Chesapeake Bay and that a cooperative approach is needed." A 1987 revision of the agreement went further in its language, calling the Bay "a national treasure and a resource of worldwide significance" and admitting that "man's use and abuse of its bounty" along with "growth and development" have "taken a toll on the Bay system." The partners recognized that the Bay "transcends regional boundaries" and committed themselves to manage the Bay as "an integrated ecosystem." Finally, in 2000 these partners signed another agreement to work toward restoration and protection through improving water quality in the Bay. The partners in these agreements overcame significant political barriers to intrastate and federal agency cooperation, but there are still critics who argue that not enough has been done to "save the Bay," that the regional cooperation while laudable has been ineffective in too many areas, and that politicians in the region are all too glad to take credit for doing something without being held accountable for results.