RIP: Bernie Fowler

Bay Journal, Bernie Fowler, tireless Maryland advocate for clean water, dies

Those sneakers are going to be hard to fill.

Clyde Bernard Fowler, tireless champion and agitator for cleaning up his beloved Patuxent River and the rest of the Chesapeake Bay, died Sunday at the age of 97.

Over five decades of public and private life, the former Maryland state senator known to everyone simply as “Bernie” never gave up trying to curb the pollution he saw threatening the region’s once-vibrant waterways. He pressed for legislative remedies and even joined in bringing a pair of lawsuits when nothing else seemed to be working. He also took his case directly to the public in a way that proved contagious.

Starting in 1988, Fowler led an annual “wade in” from the banks of the Patuxent, where he had netted for soft crabs as a young man in the 1940s and ‘50s, to dramatize the need to restore its clarity and vitality. He frequently recalled that in those days he could wade out into the river and still see his sneaker-clad toes when the water was chest deep on his lanky 6-foot frame.

 

The wade-ins drew media coverage and politicians, and the “sneaker index” — the water depth at which point Fowler lost sight of his feet — became an informal but important yardstick for judging progress or its lack in restoring the Patuxent.

“We’ve lost a real titan of the Bay community,” said Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. Fowler sat on that tri-state legislative advisory body for 37 years, she said, first as a state senator, then as a citizen member and finally as an emeritus.

“The wade-in was just a beautiful example where Bernie combined science with community involvement,” Swanson said. “He made his sneakers a scientific tool, a Secchi disk. And then he combined it with politicians and music and floats and picnics. Because he knew if you’re going to accomplish environmental protection it has to be fun.”

Bernie has been a fixture in the Bay community from the day I arrived in 1985.  Shockingly, to many, this environmentalist/politician was also a marina owner (in nearby Broomes Island) and a local land developer.

His "index" was, of course, largely BS. The transparency of the water in a place like Broomes Island, where his "official" wade ins were carried out, varies daily, indeed, hourly, depending on wind and currents. Any trend would take years to emerge from the noise in the data. But it attracted attention, and that was what mattered;

A photo of Bernie et al at a supplemental wade in at SERC in 2009.