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For our readers who have joined us in recent years-and also for those who have been following PL for the two decades of our life, we’ll be sharing some of the stories that appeared in previous issues of PL. A bit of River Country history for your enjoyment. The following story appeared in Summer 1989.
Bill Parks kept a small crab shed on the Rappahannock River in Lancaster County’s Morattico since 1945. Hurricane Hazel took away the first one that stood over the water. A second shed was built in the 1960s, and today, stands on supports facing downriver. In five shallow floats inside, crabs swim, huddle, and bask in an ideal environment for shedding. Parks remembers when softcrabs thrived in grasses around the shore. “Kids waded around in those grasses and picked up softcrabs all the time,” he said. A tall man in a straw hat, Parks smiles ironically from under his brim.
“The crabs aren’t there anymore. No place for them to hide.” He’s hard put to explain exactly why the shore grass has disappeared. “Maybe it’s all the chemicals,” he says.
Driving along the shore that gently curves towards Belle Isle, the land is clear from the front porches to the water’s edge. Well-kept piers jut out into the river, and riprap lines the shore. The view to the water is unrestricted, neat, man-made.
A map or aerial view reveals the intricate web of the region's rivers, creeks, and coves and the random waterfront development spreading at all points. The perspective by highway and backroad is different, deceptive. Along the almost virginal Ball’s Creek in Northumberland County, just over half a mile from its mouth, the hardwoods conceal the creek and where just uphill from the water, Bob Hess, a Yorktown resident, is building a small boathouse. His intention is to camp there, enjoy boating, and keep the land close to its natural state. “I'm waiting for the land to heal itself,” he says, pointing towards the clearing where his tent platform is planned. Along with his black dog, he settles in on weekends, his refrigerator under protective cover, and works alone.
Along with others, Bob Hess is concerned about Ball’s Creek. Tiper’s Landing, a proposed 230-unit housing development which was to include condominiums, homes, a motel, a restaurant and clubhouse, shops, and an 18-hole golf course threatened the serenity and health of this slow-moving creek, one of the most beautiful in Northumberland. If the development hadn’t been denied by the Wetlands Board and Virginia Marine Resources Commission, the motel would have stood just 245 feet from the water’s edge, with fifty slips to project 350 feet into a 500-foot creek. Ball’s Creek would have swarmed with boats, people, and waste. Tom Stevens, a biologist who lives just across from the proposed site, adamantly opposes the project. Another development is likely, he says, but a housing development properly done would bring no objection from him. “The creek is going to be developed, there’s no doubt,” he says. “My objection was entirely to the marina, knowing as a biologist what it would do to the life of the creek.”
An aerial perspective on Windmill Point (photo by Ron Ingram)
From Kinsale to Yorktown, the contour of the rivers and Bay landscape has been radically transformed. Wildlife and water quality, forest and shorelines are at risk. Safeguarding miles of shorelines, marsh, wetland, and wildlife in delicate areas by designating them as preservation areas is part of the purpose of the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act, a bill passed by the General Assembly in 1988. After lengthy discussion and study, a group of developers, farmers, local officials, businessmen, citizens, and conservationists, collectively known as the Chesapeake Bay Land use Roundtable, reached a consensus in 1987 that the Bay’s survival is indeed threatened. They joined in recommending stronger land-use planning and decision-making measures for Tidewater Virginia in order to protect water quality and preserve the health of the Bay watershed. The act is based on these recommendations.
Designed to address the interests and concerns of homeowners, developers, and conservationists, the act has nevertheless stirred fevered reaction at public hearings in the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula during recent months.
It is a complex measure, confusing to many, and raised highly ethical questions regarding the role each of us should play in safekeeping our environment. The most fervent reactions to the act have been predictable. Factions established for decades have spoken. The environmentalists stand at one pole, the developers at the other. The homeowner, although he or she may have sympathies for both extremes, waits, bewildered, in the middle.
Mr. Morhard of Heathsville is representative of many who are confronting a dilemma. “There are thousands off people in this area who bought lands in good faith, knowing that it perked at the time. Now the state is getting so tough that thousands of people are going to lose their investment,” he said. A member of the Chesapeake Foundation himself, he nevertheless thinks the foundation is ill-advised on this issue. The condition of the Bay isn’t the result of septic waste, he claims; it comes from other sources—from agriculture, the boating industry, the big, wieldy industrial centers upriver. Along with many others, Morhard isn’t convinced that septic waste is a strong contributor to the problem.
Pinpointing the single most cause of the Bay and our waterways current condition is like asking a social critic to define the single cause of society’s moral decay. Causes multiply daily. The potential for environmental degradation here continues to grow. Development and discharges from municipal and industrial sources (“point source” pollution) head most lists; too heavy traffic river traffic, sediment, toxins, nutrients, pesticide poisoning, solid waste, extinct species, potential oil spills. The list reads like a death warrant. We are faced with an unavoidable question. What’s in store if we continue doing what we are doing right now?
The Chesapeake Bay Program’s “Agreement Commitment Report” (January 1989) and “The Year 2020 Panel Report” (December 1988) point out the population projections that indicate increases of more than 2.6 million new residents in the Bay watershed over the next thirty years. Housing, power, waste treatment, and other needs for these new residents will bring radical change to the landscape, and according to the Commitment Report, infrastructure to accommodate this growth, “must be accomplished with far greater sensitivity to the environment than has been the case in recent decades.” If we choose to ignore this advice, the report tells us, our air, land, water, and wildlife will degenerate further, and our costs will grow.
Some say it is incongruous that as land and homeowners we fight with the fury of Roman gladiators to protect our financial interests, yet passively accept the degradation of the water and land that feed us. Environmentalists say it is shortsightedness, not having vision enough to see the less than preferable future that lies ahead if we continue our present course—a future where waterfront property may be worthless, where populations en masse will move inland to escape the poisoning stench of creeks and rivers. Others blame the problem on our inability to see the whole global picture, or even a regional one, that our vision is limited too much to the here and now. The less critical realists accept change more easily. It is not so urgent they say. There is more than enough land to go around in such a vast place. It is natural progress and change.
It has indeed become a matter of personal ethics. That our waterways have changed dramatically over recent decades is not debatable. As one waterfront owner said, driving down backroads here, it looks like the 18th or 19th century; from the water, the perspective is very different. It’s Miami Beach, 21st century. The environment is at risk as a result. But when we ask who is responsible, we cannot unquestionably point our finger at one single group or cause. The need to build, develop, and seduce the environment to our ends is too random, too widespread, and built into our culture. Aren’t we all responsible?
Hobart Beane, 86, now of Miskimon, grew up on the Great Wicomico River in Northumberland County where the steamboat stopped before churning up to Baltimore. A few weeks ago, he sat in a porch swing packing his pipe and talked about what it w was like growing up on the river in the 1930s. He remembered when the oysters were fat and plentiful, when it was commonplace to walk along the shore and pick them up by the dozen, and when the shore grasses were healthy and grew high. As a boy he swam the river, diving to touch the oyster beds at fifteen feet in clear water, then popping back up “like a cork.” Blackwell’s Mill Creek across from where the steamboat docked was rich with aquatic life. He’s seen disturbing changes over the half a century since. The oyster bed he tried to grow a few years ago died of disease. The luxury of catching fish without much effort has become a rare occurrence. “If Mother didn’t have much to cook, I’d go out and catch a mess of fish for supper…you can’t do that now. There aren’t any fish out there to catch,” he said.
According to Jack Travelstead, Chief, fisheries Management division, Virginia Marine Resources Commission, the dramatic declines in fin and shellfish landings cannot be attributed to any one cause. A combination of overharvesting, climatic changes, and chemical change in the water have together contributed to the declines. Loss of SAV (submerged aquatic vegetation) has also influenced these declines. Over the past twenty-one years, over half of these grasses have disappeared from Chesapeake waters, in part due to the excessive nutrients and sediments, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. This is still another example of the ambiguity surrounding this issue.
“There are lots of unknowns,” says Frank Pleva, Mathews County Administrator, referring to the Preservation Act and its potential effects. New questions arise daily. Many local watermen attribute the drop in catches to various factors, not any single cause, he says. And clarification of how the act is going to specifically affect land and homeowners is still uncertain. Pleva believes in the basic purpose underlying the act. His concern lies in the implementation, cost, and enforcement of its regulations. He supports what the Bay Foundation is trying to do, but they are an advocate, an educational, not an implementation body, he says.
Talking with home and landowners, real estate agents, politicians, environmentalists, and watermen from Fredericksburg to Williamsburg, we have heard the concerned and indifferent, the keepers of the rivers and Bay, and its users. Most agree that when natural resources are threatened, the problem is democratic. We are ultimately all affected. But as Fred Williams, President of the Save the ’Ol Piankatank River environmental group pointed out, “there’s a risk of oversimplification to point the finger at any one group or cause of the Bay's current condition.” It is indeed the “People’s Bay,” and, therefore, the people’s problem.
The precise effects of the act on individual home and landowners may be cloudy, but the link between our land and water is clear. What is on land will eventually enter our water unless we make provisions to inhibit runoff by way of barriers and filters. When land is developed and cleared, protective vegetation is often stripped from the surface which affects the ability of the soil to absorb toxins and other damaging runoff. Over time, it reaches the water table and Bay.
The Preservation Act isn’t an oversimplified solution but only a part of a whole mechanism designed to encourage more thoughtful, cautious, and ethical land use. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s extensive educational and research programs are in touch with the most urgent problems. We, the people who live near the Bay, are the key solution. Without our backing and our ethical action, nothing will work.
 The dire consequences of careless land use are real but avoidable. There are methods developers, farmers, homeowners—all of us—can employ to reduce damage to water quality and sensitive wildlife habitats, without completely putting a stop to growth and change in this region. Development is as inevitable as winter freezing, and necessary, but it must be done with integrity and care so that we can create a more preferable environment. The Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act’s basic premise is that “some areas are more conducive to development than others and some lands are not conducive to development at all.” It is critical that the transformation of our landscape take place only in suitable locations. Through our grassroots concern here and with the assistance of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and others who have carefully studied the crucial link between the land, water, and our quality of life, we can preserve what is rightfully ours: the privilege of living in an environment where land and water are sacred and where individual and corporate ethics play a crucial role in helping us see the whole picture, not just our own backyards. pl
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