Anyone who listens to the new Congress has heard of "unfunded mandates," whereby supposedly evil federal regulators force states to pay for things they may not even need or want -- like an environment.
But how about a "funded nonmandate"?
Mike Hirshfield thinks we've got a dandy example right here on the Chesapeake Bay -- an example legislators could learn from in their zeal to slash regulations and budgets.
I had asked Hirshfield, until recently the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's senior scientist, to reflect on his experience spanning 14 years with CBF, in state government and doing academic bay research.
He is one of those rare Ph.D.s who are able and willing to trans
late between the technical and the popular.
I always liked his "back of the envelope" calculation, converting the nitrogen (a key bay pollutant) of the chicken manure produced on Delmarva into its human sewage equivalent. It came out to a potential impact on the order of every person in Maryland taking up residence on the Eastern Shore; and it focused attention on a poorly controlled problem.
When we spoke, Hirshfield was bravely coping with leaving the Chesapeake -- he was just back from checking coral reefs in the Florida Keys as the new director of ecosystems projects for the Washington-based Center for Marine Conservation. Soon he would have to leave again for a Caribbean bay where humpback whales winter. These forays into far-flung waters, he says, have given him a renewed appreciation for what he has left.
Marine sanctuaries like the coral reefs in the Keys were until very recently dealt with as discrete environments, much like the Chesapeake proper was at one time.
Now, just as our cleanup has embraced the bay's mammoth, six-state watershed, the reefs' salvation increasingly is understood as linked to a wider web: Sediment and nutrients washing into Florida Bay and even from the Mississippi; disruptions in freshwater flows from the Everglades; stresses from overfishing -- all can affect the coral.
"I was reading a scientific paper this morning discussing the declines of underwater grasses in Florida Bay, and it cites the Chesapeake Bay Program studies -- the stuff we've done up here is being used everywhere," Hirshfield says.
In trying to be comprehensive, the Chesapeake restoration assumes a daunting load -- farms, sewage, toxics, air pollution, fisheries and development spread from New York nearly to North Carolina.
"It is easy to be cynical about all we haven't achieved, and I have my periods of that," Hirshfield says.
But still, he feels there is a certain genius to how the bay program has pushed well beyond what government ever mandated, or likely could have mandated.
No law has held Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Washington, together with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies, in a working cooperative arrangement since 1983.
Progress since then in reducing pollution from farms and sewage treatment plants well exceeds anything in law or regulation.
Shared goals, like the return of sea grasses and other bay natural resources to levels of decades ago, are setting a standard for other regions. "I call it a funded nonmandate," Hirshfield says.
The funds from Congress for the Chesapeake Bay Program are modest given the bay effort's scope -- about $20 million appropriated annually in recent years.
But the money has been critical in maintaining a small EPA staff in Annapolis that oversees the restoration, and in attracting farmers' participation as far away as the New York border and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
Hirshfield agrees, too, that without the backup of numerous state and federal environmental laws, the nonmandatory achievements of the bay program would have been less.
Two other things have also been key to any success such a program has enjoyed, he says:
* Leadership is critical. Individual governors "who all paid more attention to the bay than they had to made a huge difference." Hirshfield particularly cites Harry Hughes and William Donald Schaefer of Maryland, Gerald Baliles of Virginia, Pennsylvania's Robert Casey and Dick Thornburgh.
I told him I always felt that the most critical of these may actually have been Thornburgh. He surprised almost everyone by bringing his state into the program at its inception, when ignoring it would have been very easy.
* The public must be educated and motivated to stay interested for the long haul. "I think that's been done better around Chesapeake Bay than maybe anywhere else in the world," Hirshfield says.
And what is he concerned about? Where have we gone awry? Some of Hirshfield's observations:
* With such a premium on leadership to make nonmandates work, we are at a critical juncture, with untested new governors in all three states and a reconstituted Marion Barry (an original signer of the 1983 bay agreement).
* "I'm nervous about the late start we've gotten in fisheries management, which was sort of tacked on in recent years.
"When CBF called for an oyster moratorium [in 1991], I told critics that we just didn't want to be sitting around five years from now saying we told you so.
"And look at what happened [harvests have fallen to 20 to 30 percent of the 1990-1991 winter, when they were 418,000 bushels]."
Hirshfield also said he had a gut feeling we have overdone it on crabs (a few days later The Sun would report a serious decline in the state's index that measures winter crab populations).
"Lots of people say you can't overfish crabs, and you can't prove they're wrong; but . . . history tells you we've been able to overfish anything we go after."
* Agriculture, he says, is moving impressively toward reducing its pollution, but still too slowly and without accountability.
"I'm convinced the majority want to do the right thing, but Maryland's program badly needs some way of auditing what's actually being done."
The poultry industry, "if it's going to maintain itself long-term on the Shore, needs to make sure there is adequate land to dispose of the manure every time it sets up another new chicken house."
* Growth management: "I wish we could go back to the day [in 1992] when we tried to pass 2020 [an aggressive plan to restrict sprawl development].
"It was too much to sell all at once, and it failed. With a more deliberate path, in hindsight, we might have been better off today."
A few days after the interview, Hirshfield is on the phone. He wants it known that he has not totally forsaken the Chesapeake. His new employer has an office in Hampton, Va. He will drop in from time to time.