Contemplating Global Warming on the Chesapeake Bay

April 22, 2008 | Global Warming, Stormwater & Sewage

Betsy Otto
Vice President, Strategic Partnerships

I spent this past weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore near the historic town of St. Michaels, in a lovely place called Tilghman Island. It's an old-fashioned place, where older fellows hang out in rockers at the combination gas pump and general store. They greeted me genially, never batting an eye at my city slicker bike shorts and fluorescent shirt.

The history of this entire area of the Eastern Shore is inextricably linked to the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay. Sitting on Adirondack chairs overlooking the channel from the Tilghman Island marina, I saw osprey building nests, a loon diving over and over again for dinner, and so many species of ducks I lost count. There was also a steady stream of boats, kayakers paddling through the marsh grass, fancy new fishing boats, and hard-working watermen's craft heading through the channel out to the bay.

Saturday night, I ate three of the best oysters on the half shell I've even had. They were cultured nearby in the Choptank River. Oyster harvests are a proud tradition and were a mainstay of the local economy, along with the Chesapeake's famous blue crabs, for hundreds of years. But pollution and development pressures have hurt the natural oyster production and the blue crab harvest is in real trouble this year.

The struggles to Saving a National Treasure and make it cleaner are well-known. But you get a different picture of that when you actually visit a place whose people have directly depended on this ecosystem for many hundreds of years. I saw a whole lot of second home development around St. Michael's and on Tilghman Island. While that brings in new property tax revenue and customers for shops and restaurants, it can also cause damage unless that new development is carefully managed.

American Rivers has talked with local leaders in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, and we've been working around the country, especially in the Great Lakes region, to help leaders understand the impacts of development and to take steps to reduce the harm from stormwater runoff. At the Maritime Museum in St. Michaels a plaque at the water's edge noted that the Bay's waters had risen one foot over the past 100 years due to a warming climate and natural land subsidence since the last ice age. This land is flat, dead flat. I started to think about what would happen to this place if sea levels continue to rise as scientists predict they will over the next century from global warming. What will happen to the marshes and countless small creeks and inlets on the Chesapeake that are the oyster and crab and rockfish nurseries, that feed and shelter the ducks and other birds, and what will happen to the way of life that depends on all that?

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