Try It, It Might Work

 At the Bay Journal, Should new Chesapeake cleanup goals have a greater dose of reality?

As far as the Chesapeake Bay cleanup is concerned, Kenn Pattison was given a job in 2010 that might be labeled Mission Impossible. He had to design a plan that met Pennsylvania’s nutrient reduction goal.

Time and again, the state Department of Environmental Protection employee drafted strategies that called for an increasingly unrealistic amount of pollution controls on farmland. Time and again, his plans fell short.

Ultimately, Pattison got the job done — “on paper,” he noted. It called for farmers to voluntarily implement high-priority runoff control practices on 92% of farmland and take large tracts out of production.

“It was no longer a matter of ‘will we hit the mark?’” recalled Pattison, who retired in 2013. “It was a matter of just writing a plan.”

That plan was part of the regional effort to produce a realistic, accountable strategy for reducing nutrient pollution in the Bay that could be completed by 2025. But, as with earlier goals set for 2000 and 2010, the region will miss its 2025 goal — and by a large margin.

In large part, that is because the goal-setting process failed to fully appreciate the difficulty of reducing nutrients — nitrogen and phosphorus — from the region’s 83,000 farms, which are by far the largest source of water-fouling nutrients to the Bay.

Now, as the region stands on the brink of missing a third deadline in a quarter century, it faces questions about what comes next.

In dozens of Bay Journal interviews with current and former government officials, researchers, farmers, conservation district staff, environmentalists and others, most suggest that meeting goals on the region’s farmlands will likely take decades.

The need for patience was bolstered by a recent report from the Bay’s scientific community that said current efforts are unlikely to achieve nutrient reduction goals without significant changes.

Nearly everyone believes that goals and deadlines are essential to making progress. But many also say that seemingly unachievable objectives can have the opposite effect: They can create unrealistic public expectations, diminish participation if goals are seen as unattainable, and result in inefficient use of funding. They can also stymie innovation and alternative cleanup approaches.

Perhaps most importantly, unrealistic deadlines don’t allow enough time to build the personal engagement and connections critical to earning trust from the farmers who manage a quarter of the Bay’s water-shed and will bear the bulk of future Bay-related nutrient reductions.

So, do you want a clean Bay, or do you want to eat? Ultimately, our civilization depends on food produced in excess (great excess) of that which could be produced without added fertilizer. Use of fertilizer means that some of those nutrients are going to get wash off into streams and make their way to the rivers, estuaries and oceans downstream. On could argue that the Bay is so special that no fertilizer should be used. That would simply make farming in the Bay watershed uncompetitive, taking millions of acres out of production. What would become of the farmers? Welfare?

The problem with that is that other places in the US and world have similar issues. Nutrients from the great American heartland are causing problems in the Gulf of Mexico, and nutrients from the farms of California's Central Valley cause problems in the San Francisco Bay. We cannot fix them all and remain the breadbasket of the world. We can make them better, marginally, but major improvements will require major reductions in our overall agricultural output. The whole world can't do that and continue to eat.

As for having realistic goals, if you set realistic goals, and then attain them, there would be no need for the whole 'Bay Diet' industry, the web of government agencies, NGOs and academics whose livelihood depend on the continuation of the Bay Program (not just the EPA Bay program, but the whole shebang), and that would not be acceptable. Better set those goals to the moon, and keep the jobs.