Customer Reviews

Chesapeake Bay Blues: Science, Politics, and the Struggle to Save the Bay (American Political Challenges)

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This book does not only talk about the politics that affect the bay but also breifly explains its other problems. However, it is mostly focused on politics, and that's great considering that every single other book has only dealt with enviornmental problems. It sheds light on topics that are usually not thought about and explains them thoroughly, with detail, and a precise, impacting style. It's good. Buy it, even if you don't need it.

Chesapeake Bay Blues, a book that addresses the Bay as a political problem and reveals how the political process has worked against the interests of science, the public, and environmental advocates all at once. Author Howard Ernst provides a political roadmap for the future, suggesting how a different course of policy action is needed to "Save the Bay."[]

This book is a must-read for those concerned about the Chesapeake Bay and those interested in environmental politics. Highly recommended.

"`Our Expectations have collapsed, along with the Chesapeake Bay.'"

In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, Dr. Speth took us to the core "operating systems" of the corporation and globalizing capitalism. In Chesapeake Bay Blues, published in 2003, Dr. Howard Ernst takes us for an exploration of how the American political system operates, especially as it works on one difficult environmental problem. In seeing how this has played out since 1980, when the non-regulatory Chesapeake Bay Commission was set up to give guidance to the states (MD and VA and later PA) and Congress in the execution of plans for the Bay, Ernst wants to get at "the forces that drive and constrain public policy" and to create an "environmental policy theory, rather than applying a general public policy explanation to environmental politics." (Page 33). Of course, the driving force behind his work is the plunging health of the Bay itself, despite the increasingly detailed Bay restoration "Agreements" put forth in 1983, 1987 and 2000. As measured by the 13 parameter index developed by the well known non-profit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, with the health of the Bay in the "pristine" year 1600 given a score of 100, the Bay has shown marked decline since the 1950's, falling to around 20 in the mid-1980's and hovering in the 27-28 range over the past five years. Give credit to Ernst for bringing the reality of a faltering restoration plan to the public's attention well in advance of the official recognition which came in early 2007 when the federal EPA said that the programs would not achieve their goals for reduction in nutrient levels of 40% by 2010. At the 25th anniversary mark in December of 2008, the political leaders of the efforts, and EPA, announced that they would not be setting any more explicit long term goals. Gerald Winegrad, a former state senator and one of the driving forces in the Maryland legislature for early efforts to save the Bay, summed it up pretty well when he said: "`Our expectations have collapsed, along with the Chesapeake Bay...'" ("Scientists Urge More Aggressive Cleanup," by David A. Fahrenhold, The Washington Post, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2008, Page B2.)

So how does Dr. Ernest explain it?

The problem with enacting sound environmental public policy is not that it is unattainable from a technological or resource perspective; it is that the normal policy climate is generally hostile to the types of environmentally sound public policies that are necessary to restore a complex ecosystem like the Chesapeake Bay. The environmental policies that tend to emerge from this political climate tend to be reactionary, voluntary, and generally insufficient to meet the considerable challenges. (Page 33). {My emphasis}.

And what are the governing factors that make the normal climate so hostile to enacting effective environmental policy? He list four main ones, and then spends a good part of Chapter Two, "The Chesapeake Bay as a Political Dilemma" in elaborating their implications. They are economic primacy, America's "fragmented political system" (with its added state and local "race to the bottom"), industry's advantage over environmental groups seen through the dynamics of "interest group formation and maintenance," and the limited positive "windows of opportunity" which events and good leaders can use to temporarily overcome the negative vector forces of the first three.
Primacy for "Economic Primacy"
Having spent more than a dozen years in the environmental trenches in New Jersey, and being intensely focused on the economics/financial system over the past two years, I just thoroughly enjoyed every word and nuance of this chapter. Space doesn't permit me to due full justice to it, but I'll try to give you the most important and striking aspects for the floundering politics of "saving the Bay." Of course, we should give "primacy" to the first factor, economic primacy. In the vast majority of cases, good environmental policy will burden industries with additional costs which will not be welcomed, especially where direct physical pollution clean-up is on the table, as it certainly is here. Watermen and commercial fishing industries over-harvest the bay's resources, from rock fish (striped bass in NJ) which have recovered nicely after catch restrictions, to oysters which haven't, and blue crabs which are currently going down and are at the center of controversy at the moment, with Maryland proposing to require even the one day-trip summer crabber to get a license - that's how desperate things have gotten. The idea that Maryland is ready to take on the 13 year old crabber with a "chicken neck on a string" but not the powerhouses of "Big Chicken" (Perdue, Allen Family Foods... whose output of nutrient and pollution producing manure from hundreds of thousands of their birds is one of the bays chief obstacles to recovery - leaves me speechless. More on that later. But these lines speak to economic primacy, for sure. These economic actors push back hard in the legislatures, and for the fisheries, in the regional and federal regulatory forums where such restrictions are thrashed out.

...and humble farmers...
And then there is agricultural, a very important economic player in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. Agriculture of all sorts, from the traditional crop growers with their fertilizer and soil erosion contributions to big poultry, pork and cattle growers, especially the later two in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, whose main rivers flow north to empty into the Potomac at Harpers Ferry, and Lancaster County in Pennsylvania whose nutrient saturated streams eventually flow into the mighty Susquehanna, the largest source of fresh water for the entire bay. Farmers and their supporting civic and economic organizations are feisty, formidable foes of regulations everywhere and from all angles, whether it is over best management practices to keep cows out of streams, (fencing), buffer strips and forests planted between crop rows and waterways, keeping manure piles contained - and out of the rain - to protective land use zoning (say one house per 20-40 acres) which would preserve farmland from development. That is my take and my experience. To be fair, and Ernst treats them very respectfully, the costs imposed by some of the much needed regulations would substantially slice their annual income - like the costs of full chicken manure control on many operations. So the public is going to have to step up big time with direct financial help. As well as the missing big industry players. And that turns the public, in the form of taxpayers, into citizens facing economic primacy of a different sort, staring at a price tag for implementing watershed-wide best management practices for agriculture, aimed mainly but not exclusively at nutrient control, of a low-ball 1995 figure of $372 million, but which this writer thinks would be closer, in 2009 to the $500 million to $750 million range to be fully effective.

Cleaning bill for the Bay: $20-$28 Billion
And then there are the economic costs of upgrading 288 major sewage treatment works, only 65 of which had been improved as of Bay Blues publication time, and the woefully neglected realm of septic system modernization, 50,000 of which are waiting in Maryland alone, with funds for only about 650 according to a December Washington Post story. In Rhode Island, the banks "enforce" a septic upgrade policy; they won't approve a closing without inspection proof of the new technology - so the seller carries the burden and the cost. Talk to the real estate industry in Maryland on that one. Right now, the general taxpayer pays and the state pays the homeowner - all voluntary, by the way. So what's the total bill for Bay clean-up? Estimates are from $20-28 billion: VA for $9, MD for $7 and PA for $4. However, in January of 2009, the billions talk is about state budget deficits, not Bay clean-up appropriations.

The power of economics to limit environmental policy ambitions doesn't just operate at the direct cost imposition/push-back level from specific business and farming interests, it also operates in the sense of a climate of cost perceptions measured against a general "how much pain is there today" economic weather outlook. So the generic polls may show citizens willing to pay higher taxes and lose some jobs if that's what it takes to get the job done, but when the recession hits, like the Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980's or the 2000 stock market high tech bubble burst, the leverage of specific anti-regulatory business forces goes up, the arguments sharpen, and the legislative purses snap shut. Try even the perception of a slight cost imposition on the real estate industry in Maryland under today's stark economic outlook. Based on the sea level rise I see coming, and Maryland heights barely above existing sea level, the Critical Areas Act ought to ban any non-water dependent construction within ¼-1/2 mile of tidal waters; that's to save future lives, and help the Bay but also to prevent these new homeowners and businesses from asking the state to pick up their storm and flood insurance and rebuild costs - which are not so far away. Just visit Florida insurance politics for the reality check. Compared to what's really needed in Bay protection land-use measures, and not just right next to the water, the fiddling with the Critical Areas Act this year was mere playing with the punctuation marks. That's the reality of "economic primacy" - most of the time.

Six states, the District, the 1,650 local governments and the very map of the Chesapeake watershed itself show that a unified and effective environmental policy will be very hard to achieve. Pennsylvania, which has no direct bay shorefront (New York and West Virginia the same - well upstream), still comprises 35% of the watershed drainage and contributes a large chunk of the pollution due to its intense agricultural areas, like Lancaster County. It's been quite a laggard in regulating agricultural nutrient pollution - not that MD, DE or VA has been exactly zealous or effective. Readers who are familiar with the difficulties of coordinating growth and transportation policies among just the greater DC Metro area's adjacent counties - can easily appreciate the "fragmentation" effects from divided government for the entire Bay watershed. The major chicken producers have distributed their processing and rendering plants with a keen eye to "easy migration" between Delaware, Maryland and Virginia if the conditions they would prefer don't materialize in a given state. They employ thousands, in some of the poorest areas of the region. And they've pretty much had their way - but not on behalf of the Bay.

"Mr. Rogers'" Bay Neighborhood
When Professor Ernst does his cross-comparison of environmental vs. industry effectiveness in influencing politics, it's not much of a contest at all. Politely, with all due respect, he pays homage to the Bay's oldest advocate and their impressive membership and fund raising numbers - the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, of course - and then proceeds to explain why they haven't been able to get the job done. They don't have nearly the lobbying force to cover six governors and six legislatures, plus Congress, plus multiple federal agencies. They have one to three full time, depending on how one perceives several staff roles - at least that was in 2003. They don't have a separate political arm like the national Sierra Club and some other non-profits (like the PIRGs and Clean Water Action do) and no formal legal defense fund, even though they are presently taking legal action against EPA. In essence, they are just not political enough for the mission. I concur, but I'm not sure they can change their stripes and be effective. Their chosen style, it seems to me, is to be everyone's friend, and to bring no close scrutiny to bear for any prolonged period on the major foot dragging economic interests of the Bay. Least of all farmers. Meanwhile, industry groups intensely defend against any incursions, regulatory or financial, upon their economic primacy, and their business associations have a cohesion and commitment not matched by the large dues paying membership of environmental groups. I would add my own observation that business lobbies also enjoy the civilian equivalent of what military strategists call the advantage of "interior lines" when playing defense: they seem to know all the legislators on a better basis than their environmental counterparts and to have "gotten there" ahead of us. Now how could that be?

To do the Right Thing: A Little Street $
Could it be due in part that in 1998 real estate gave $1.591 million, construction $1.586 million, transportation $623,00; agriculture $448,000 all to candidates running for statewide office in Maryland, the grand total being $34 million, while pro-environment/conservation groups gave $5,396; and of course, the author informs us that "most of the industry groups mentioned ...maintain full-time lobbying operations. (Data is from the National Institute on Money in State Politics; Page 43).

Policy Stuck at "Cost Realization, Prolonged Limbo?"
And to further enrich our understanding of environmental politics, he introduces readers to Anthony Down's 1972 essay "Up and Down with Ecology," with its by now well known five stage "policy cycle," consisting of:

* The pre-problem stage
* The alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm stage
* The cost realization stage
* The decline of intense public interest stage
* The post-problem stage. In this stage, public attention moves `into a prolonged limbo - a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interests (Pages 44-45).

Now I would say that efforts to "Save the Bay" are arguably stuck somewhere between the "cost realization stage and the "post-problem stage," with the 1997 Pfiesteria "event" (a toxic organism whose "outbursts" are linked to nutrient enriched waters) played about as skillfully as it could be to help the bay by the Glendening administration and conservation groups. One could argue too that it was just a "spasmodic recurrence of interest" in that twilight realm of "the post-problem stage," because it really didn't lead to effective regulation of the chicken waste-nutrient problem. Legislation was passed, but, as we'll see below, it was effectively smothered in implementation. While these categories may appear to have a bit too glib and cynical air about them, for anyone who has done intense policy work they have more the ring of truth than falsehood. If you've followed Global Warming since Dr. James Hansen's congressional testimony in 1988, you'll know that most of the subsequent years were spent in the "pre-problem stage," and only were moved into the "alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm stage" circa 2005, thanks to Katrina and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Whether it can remain there in the face of our current economic Katrina remains to be seen.

"WANTED for Pollution: Ag Nutrients"
After bringing the best insights of political science to bear on the Bay's broad political dilemma's, Chapter Three of Bay Blues rightly zeroes in on the heart of the matter: nutrient overloading. Here's the macro picture: phosphorus and nitrogen are the two main culprits. For phosphorus, 9% of it falls out of the sky from combustion sources, 25% comes out of pipes, like sewage treatment plant outfalls, and a whopping 65% comes from the diffuse "nonpoint sources," including septic systems, paved surfaces/lawn run-off and agricultural sources. We get 21% of our nitrogen pollution out of tailpipes and coal burning plants, 22% out of those municipal treatment plants, and 57% from the nonpoint sources listed above for the phosphorus. But we can pinpoint the problem even further, and this focuses our attention on where we should be getting the most clean-up for our taxpayer dollars: "...agricultural runoff from cropland, pastureland, and animal waste has been identified as the single largest source of these pollutants. The Chesapeake Bay Program estimates that 58 percent of the nonpoint source nitrogen and 82% of the nonpoint source phosphorus that pollutes the Bay are the by-products of agriculture production. This level of nutrient loading is even more remarkable considering that agricultural land comprises only 29 percent of the Chesapeake Bay drainage basin." (Page 71). Ernst zooms in even further to compare Ag's loadings to other competing sources, something which needs to be kept in mind as various culpable parties play the "blame-shift" game when the legislation is looning: "It has been estimated that agricultural waste is responsible for more of the Bays phosphorus and nitrogen load than the combined nutrient loads from urban runoff, all point sources, septic systems, and the atmosphere- contributing more than 110 million pounds of nitrogen and 9 million pounds of phosphorus to the Bay per hear...It is now clear that unless the problem of agricultural waste is adequately addressed, the overall effort to restore the Bay is unlikely to succeed." (Page 72). (My Emphasis.)

The 1998 MD Bill: Big Flaunt, Big Flop
The early state efforts to act on these facts led to agricultural remedies that were basically educational and voluntary, not regulatory, in their approach. To its credit, the Chesapeake Bay Commission and several of its specialized committees were skeptical that this approach would work in getting to a 1987 announced goal of a 40% reduction in "controllable" nutrients reaching the Bay by 2000. Pennsylvania was the first state to mandate agricultural management plans to get at the problem in 1993. But it had an unhappy life after that with delays and weakening changes prompted by the fierce opposition of farming interests so that by 1997 environmental groups were walking away from the legislation and implementation efforts. Maryland's attempt for similar mandatory farm management plans was defeated in Annapolis in 1992, 1993 and 1994. Not until given the boost by the 1997 Pfiesteria outbreak was a bill passed, in 1998, called the Water Quality Improvement Act, a bill which was "widely touted as the most comprehensive agricultural nutrient management legislation in the country..." giving Maryland farmers "until the end of 2001 to develop mandatory nitrogen management plans..." and requiring "that they comply ...by the end of 2002." (Pages 77-78).

The results, as announced in early 2002 from data supplied by the Maryland Department of Agricultural, the supervising and implementing agency, were that "...only 20 percent of Maryland's 1.7 million acres of farmland were under nutrient management plans." And only 2152 out of more than 7,000 farms had even bothered to submit plans. "Quite simply, the majority of the farm operations had either ignored the law or grown frustrated with Maryland's agricultural bureaucracy, which remains inadequate to meet its growing responsibilities." (Page 78).

Humble farmers: ...and where did the $ go?
And that's some bureaucracy: apparently, it has no idea where the funds it did get, state and federal, were spent according to a December 8, 2008 news release from the Environmental Working Group on the 25th Anniversary of the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement, headlined "Historic Date, Historic Mess: A new review of Maryland's farm conservation programs by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) uncovered a lack of targeting or accounting of critical environmental expenditures. More than $180 million in state and federal conservation funds have been spent in Maryland over the past 14 years, yet neither state nor federal authorities could identify specific locations where the majority of the money was spent or site-specific pollution problems that the spending addressed." But how could that be? Federal EPA spent years on a "massive scientific exercise" in mapping 78 subsections of the Bay to help pinpoint water quality problems, and goals, and states then "mapped out `tributary strategies' to comply with the new goals (according to the two-part Washington Post series in December of 2008, "Broken Promises on the Bay," - more on it below). Is Maryland's Department of Agriculture saying they had no idea where the most impaired waters were, and the farms closest to them, after all these studies, and if they didn't, surely the Maryland Dept. of the Environment did - so were the two departments incommunicado? This is unbelievable, and Governor O'Malley is right to bring his BayStat technique of accountability to bear...but 14 years of unaccountability? And by the way, notice that Maryland's new, and still too weak regulations to get at nutrient run-off from poultry farms removes the duties for promulgation and enforcement from Ag and places it with the Dept. of the Environment. More on these regulations below when we talk about the power of Big Chicken.

Epitaph for the Bay...and for An Era
The concluding paragraph to the political "framing chapter" of Chesapeake Bay Blues, entitled "The Chesapeake Bay as a Political Dilemma," stands on its own as a first rate summary of both the process and "the feel" of what has happened in the long run-up to the failure to clean up the Bay. But it has far greater significance to this reviewer. It could as well stand as an epitaph for an era, the anti-regulatory era, one which we have also called "The Age of Market Utopianism." So here it is, word for word:

The Bay's greatest danger is the emergence of a cozy political partnership that provides plenty of opportunities for `success,' but that produces few tangible environmental accomplishments. In such a situation, well-intentioned policy makers take credit for producing a steady flow of agreements, reports, and voluntary programs. Funding for environmental programs incrementally increases with each passing year. The scientific community is kept active researching and monitoring the health of the ecosystem. Collaborative programs provide countless opportunities for environmental groups and industry representatives to participate in the ongoing public policy debate. And occasionally, even hard-hitting regulatory actions make their way through the system. Collectively, the restoration effort is billed as the nation's premier watershed restoration program and is promoted as a model for estuarine restoration programs worldwide. All the while, decades pass and the Bay's most basic environmental indicators suggest little if any sustained improvement. (Page 49).

This is simply the best book ever written on the problems of cleaning up The Bay. It should be on the reading list for each and every scientist, politician, and user of The Bay. Sadly, not many people know about it. Most of the public gets their information from media snippets. Anyone who has read this book should recommend it to as many people as are interested in the problem. I can't wait to read the authors' new book which I am purchasing now.

Capt. Jim Brincefield
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