Tom Weaver's a charter boat captain.
He's been fishing these waters for more than 30 years.
It's one of the best fishing spots in the world.
It's one of the nicest places to live in the world.
The Chesapeake Bay is the country's largest estuary.
It spans over 4,500 square miles,
more than double the size of Delaware.
And it's home to 10 million people and 3,600 species
of marine life.
It is also an economic powerhouse, producing
more than $33 billion in seafood,
shipping and tourism each year.
But in the last decade, Weaver says finding fish
for clients has become tougher than ever.
Yeah, it's it's it's harder.
We're burning more fuel.
I've seen a rapid decline in the overall population
from the smaller size fish to the full breeding females.
A genuine concern for me is
are we going
to have enough fish to run a successful business?
I can't do this if there's not any fish around.
The fish in the bay are dying or moving,
forced out by farm and city runoff,
wastewater pollution and climate change.
This body of water is fed by the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
It spans 64,000 square miles across six states and D.C.
73% of this area is public land.
But the watershed is also flanked by heavy polluters:
factories, water treatment plants and big farms.
You can always kind of tell redhead from the others
because of its distinctive leaves.
Ellie Bassett, a conservationist, says
70% of the watershed she monitored
when she worked at the nonprofit
ShoreRivers was used for agriculture.
Predominantly here in the Eastern shore,
we have row crop, so that would be corn, soybean.
We also have a large amount of chicken
farms here on the eastern shore,
particularly in the Delmarva area.
And with that comes chicken litter,
which is chicken poop,
which is extremely high in nutrients as well.
According to a 2021 report from the Environmental
Integrity Project, a watchdog group,
about 300 million chickens are raised
on Maryland's eastern shore every year.
Nitrogen and phosphorus are the main chemicals
found in chicken manure and fertilizer.
When heavy rains fall on farmlands,
these nutrients wash into the bay. In 2021,
according to ChesapeakeProgress,
a group that monitors the bay's cleanup.
260 million pounds of nitrogen and 50 million pounds
of phosphorus poured into the bay.
Nearly half were from farms.
When we have excess nutrients
entering our waterways, that nitrogen and phosphorus,
it fuels the growth
of those microscopic plants of that algae.
And then what happens is you have this floating
mat of green, brown, red, mahogany,
different types of algae that are then
floating on the surface and multiplying.
The algae eventually die and sink to the bottom of the bay.
As they decompose, they starve the water of oxygen.
This creates dead zones, which can lead to massive die
offs of marine creatures
that are unable to escape these areas.
In 2021,
the dead zone was 7% larger than the yearly average,
and it lasted a month and a half longer.
The bay is the primary spawning and nursing ground
for up to 90% of Atlantic striped bass,
according to the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administration,
striped bass numbers are below sustainable levels here.
In 2022,
The number of blue crabs in the bay
plummeted - a third year in a row of steep decline.
In 2019, there were almost 600 million blue crabs.
In 2022,
there were less than 230 million, the lowest number
in 33 years of tracking blue crab populations.
But agricultural pollution isn't the only problem
on the Western Shore.
Stormwater runoff and pollution from wastewater
treatment plants are feeding the bay's dead zones.
The Back River
and Patapsco River
wastewater treatment plants are the
two biggest in Maryland,
but system wide failures have caused these plants
to spew even more nutrients and sewage into the bay.
Based on our bacteria monitoring,
we know that it is sometimes unsafe
to come into contact with the water in the back river.
Alice Volpitta
is a water quality scientist at Blue Water Baltimore.
She says these treatment plants
have discharged dangerous levels
of nutrients, oils and bacteria since 2014.
One of the ways that we test how healthy or sick
the water is is with
this little instrument called a hydro lab.
And so this instrument has different probes on it
that tell us measurements of things like chlorophyl
content, dissolved, oxygen, temperature,
all of the different
measurements of chemistry that tell us “Is this waterway
achieving water quality standards?”
In 2021, Blue Water Baltimore and the Chesapeake
Legal Alliance Sue Baltimore City
under the Clean Water Act.
It spurred Maryland to take over the Back River plant.
The case is ongoing.
Since the 1960s, there have been several cleanup
efforts across the bay, but none have been successful.
It is really difficult
to make change when thinking about just the Chesapeake Bay.
You have six states and D.C.
that's six different leaders, seven different leaders,
all trying to think about solutions to the same problem.
The most recent plan
is the 2010 Clean Water Blueprint, a guide
for each state to reduce nutrient pollution by 2025.
In October of 2022, the EPA confirmed
that none of the bay states are on track
to meet these pollution reduction goals.
The EPA is considering pushing back the blueprint deadline.
Our job is to keep everybody together in a partnership
and to hold each other accountable
to the extent that we can
to make sure that we're doing our part,
to make sure that the water is clean.
We're seeing a chronic lack
of enforcement of these clean water laws.
And that's a huge problem.
A good law without proper enforcement
is a lion with no teeth.
Without a way to stop nutrient pollution at the source.
Some organizations are trying to catch it
once it enters the bay.
A lot of people in the Chesapeake
region will say, “If we can bring back the grasses,
we can bring back the Chesapeake Bay.”
Not only do they provide habitat, food,
shelter, oxygen, but they also uptake nutrients.
At ShoreRivers, Elle Bassett harvested and replanted
underwater seagrasses yearly.
We use volunteers to go out
and scout for SAV beds.
SAV stands for submerged aquatic vegetation.
If it's a healthy, robust, thick bed,
then what we'll do is we'll harvest
the seeds from that bed.
So we're just going to mix
these seeds in with the dry sand
so that the seeds are evenly distributed.
But time is running out.
Climate change means wetter,
more frequent storms are hitting the area,
flushing more nutrients off of farmlands and urban areas.
Stormwater runoff
transports 17%
of the nitrogen and phosphorus that enters the bay.
Another problem, water temperatures are rising.
The Virginia Institute of Marine Science
says summer temperatures in the bay
have increased by two degrees
Fahrenheit since the late 1980s.
Hot water holds less oxygen than cool water.
We're stressing out our environment.
We are causing more dead zones.
And that's not just we,
I mean, climate change is having that impact.
It's no surprise to any of us that restoring any water
body, especially one as large and complicated
as the Chesapeake Bay, is tough.
It is unquestionably tougher with the
challenges of climate change.
This is a public resource.
You, me, every person here has equal rights to the access
to this bay and everything in it.
Managing that resource
is our responsibility as a group.
But the Chesapeake Bay is definitely savable.
I mean, whether we'll get it back to 400 years ago,
unlikely, but it's definitely we can bring that back and
100% worth it.