The effort to restore the Chesapeake Bay is a big undertaking: The Chesapeake Bay watershed is huge, which means that what happens on land drives what we see in the water. Therefore, we need to clean up the Bay on land too, not just in the water.
Adding to the complexity, about 90% of the land is privately owned. Restoring natural resources on private property can be tricky: Often, you have to convince people to allow the restoration activities, which generally means offering them some incentive (aesthetic improvement, money, functional benefit like reduction of flooding or erosion). Examples are funds for cover crops for farmers, tax credits for conservation easements for forest owners, and incentives for shoreline owners to use living shorelines (good habitat for fish and crabs) instead of hard armor for shoreline protection.
For this reason, the Chesapeake Bay Trust was created by the Maryland General Assembly in the 1980s specifically to enlist humanity in helping restore the Bay. They recognized that government can’t do it all, so if we don’t get everyday people to lead their own projects, we won’t restore the Bay watershed. And we have to reach people where they are: in their communities.
From its inception 40 years ago, the Bay Trust has funded community-based projects on properties of faith-based institutions, schools, homeowners’ associations, civic associations, local governments, boy and girl scouts, other nonprofits, and more. Places that people love and are meaningful to them. Places that will get them talking to their neighbors and friends to inspire the same kinds of work elsewhere. Like plant trees or wetland grasses or install rain barrels or rain gardens or living shorelines on their own properties.
Sometimes people feel we shouldn’t be providing resources for projects on private properties, like homeowners’ associations or faith-based organizations, because they aren’t always open for public access. Unfortunately, for various reasons like safety or liability, private landowners often cannot allow the general public to visit. Some public properties, like schools, also do not allow general access either for those reasons.
If we could put enough practices on public lands to fully restore the Bay, we wouldn’t need to venture onto private lands. But with about 90% of the land held privately, that “public lands-only” approach is not an option.
Consider our desire to restore fish and crab populations. We know that most fish, crabs, and other iconic Chesapeake wildlife live in shallow waters at the land-water interface. If we don’t improve habitat on private property, we won’t have enough good habitat to boost the crab and fish populations that we all enjoy in areas to which we DO have public access.
The community accepts that because most Chesapeake tidal shoreline is privately owned, public access points are too few. The Chesapeake Bay Program has a goal to increase access because people won’t love and want to protect what they can’t see. And access to natural resources helps everyone – our own human health is linked to it.
However, public access and where we do our restoration work are two separate issues: We cannot wait for public access to improve to restore our fish, crabs, streams, rivers, urban parks, and forests.
So we consider projects that each reach large audiences. We know not everyone can be reached with every individual project, but ideally ALL people in the region are reached when these projects are considered as a whole (4,180 awards in the past 10 years engaging 845,918 people who roughly match the demographics of the region). Yes, we care about fish and crabs, so we fund living shorelines on HOA property used by residents of the HOAs, but we also care about urban green spaces, so we fund urban agriculture projects that sometimes only allow use by local residents. And we care about getting students outdoors, so we fund school nature play spaces for use only by the school community. We care about stormwater, so we fund rain gardens on faith institutions for use by members of the congregations. We care about stream buffers, so we fund projects on agricultural lands where individuals can’t always visit. While ALL people might not be able to use every project, ALL people have the ability to apply to do projects in their communities through open calls for proposals, and ALL people benefit by having these projects done.
Many of the projects are publicly accessible or can be visited for learning purposes. See the full portfolio of urban, suburban, and rural community-led projects at www.cbtrust.org/impact.
If we were to limit investment in resources to only fully publicly accessible public lands, there would be very few places – not nearly enough – to keep our fish, crabs, waters, forests, parks, and communities healthy.
