HOW TO PROTECT THE CHESAPEAKE BAY
Saving the Chesapeake Bay is a decades-long effort that is boiling over right now in the environs of Washington D.C., specifically Fairfax County, reported in The Washington Post. Well heeled suburbanites who tuck their $1 million homes into magnificent forests and then pave a quarter acre parking lot and basketball court are squaring off with each other over EPA pollution abatement programs.
A few weeks ago when President Trump was excoriated by radical environmentalists for clarifying waters under the jurisdiction of the EPA, I'm sure most of these folks joined the opposition chorus. I did not. When a farm mud puddle can result in confiscation of our entire farm's production capacity, which is what President Obama ordered, that's overbearing oversight. I'm thrilled that Trump moved the language to its original intent and freed millions of property owners to proceed with reasonable projects sans fear.
So this most current war about water in the Chesapeake Bay watershed is just another thread in the war between reason and radicalism. As roads, parking lots, houses, and swimming pools inject impermeable acres into these landscapes, the left-over permeable landscape must somehow absorb far more water than its ecological capacity. When torrential rains fall in these suburban areas that lack underground storm water drainage systems, the extra water from impermeable acreage simply adds to the limited carrying capacity in neighborhood streams.
The government bean counters in state government, eager to please their federal slave masters and receive construction money, fill out boxes in paperwork about how many pounds of nitrogen, phosphorous or potassium could be reduced if they were filtered out of Stream X. The problem is that the engineers looking at these issues do not come from an ecology background or a holistic background. They come from a typical western Greco-Roman reductionist linear compartmentalized systems-oriented disconnected parts-based paradigm.
Simply, hydrology problems are engineering problems. An unholy alliance has developed, as a result of these sincerely-meant Bay protective measures, between government water engineers and the private excavating industry that carries out the designs. It's big money. One reported in this Post article has a $2.1 million price tag to supposedly stop a few hundred pounds of nitrogen from entering the Bay. What I'm confident most people will miss in the article--and I think the reporter missed it too based on the context--is that the fraternity of bureaucrat engineers and their excavator buddies like to place these projects way downstream where they can catch more tributaries with a single placement.
Obviously none of these folks knows about PERMACULTURE. And none thinks holistically or ecologically. Louis Bromfield, icon of early regenerative agriculture whose Malabar Farm in Ohio was THE focal point for non-chemical commercial farming, said in the 1950s that the answer to excess water was millions of small ponds in the headwaters. At that time, he pointed out the long-term folly of building dams on the Mississippi to control flooding. He advocated millions of small farm ponds to catch the water before it built up volume and velocity and to halt the flow higher on the landscape. This is also the reasonable technique espoused by PERMACULTURE.
The reasoned approach to what is now an acrimonious war ripping apart these otherwise gentrified communities is to create micro-hydration projects higher on the landscape. Catching the water within 100 yards of a house roof and parking lot is far easier, cheaper, and regenerative than trying to create one siltation basin for 50 houses a mile downstream. These small ponds could then supply water for lawns and gardens rather than well water or municipal water. That would slowly drain them before the next torrential rain event, reduce demand on municipal utilities and treatment plants, and create wildlife-enhancing riparian areas nestled into domestic living situations.
The problem with this war is that because nobody seems able or willing to look at it from a complete hydrology cycle and long-term landscape massage, the two sides are left with either or: don't do anything or do something drastic. It's a shame that conversations are forced into rigid shouting matches. Oh, one other thing. Insurance companies would love having all this water near these mcmansions in order to fight fire. Could children drown in them? Yes, but you can put a cheap fence around them. If they brought mosquitoes, bats would also come. Goodness, before you knew it, you'd have a functional ecosystem. Imagine that.
Would you like to see thousands of swimming-pool sized ponds dotting suburbia?