We'll admit there are times that efforts to preserve and protect the health of the Chesapeake Bay feel a bit like mythology's Sisyphus and his rock. Just when you think the job is tough but possible, it all rolls back down the hill — another fish kill, another sewage spill, another protest staged by people opposed to curbing polluted runoff from streets or farm fields.
But then there are also those moments when it's clear that the Chesapeake Bay is not beyond salvation and the efforts to date are not in vain. Such is the all-too-fleeting joy of a "C" on the latest report card from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
That may not sound like a reason to rejoice — many high schoolers with similar grades for 2015 likely faced somewhat less happy conversations with their guardians — but in this context, it actually is a hopeful sign. Recent report cards have hovered in the "D" range. The bay hasn't scored this high in 13 years. Only twice — in 1992 and 2002 — has it fared as well in the 30-year history of the report card, and those were years of drought.
That last bit is rather an important point to make. Sometimes, the traditional measures of water quality in the Chesapeake — levels of water clarity and the presence of excess nutrients or a lack of beneficial submerged aquatic vegetation — are greatly affected by rainfall. Stormy weather can destroy underwater grass beds (witness the devastation wrought by the floods raised by Tropical Storm Agnes in the 1972) and bog down streams with polluted runoff.
But 2015 was fairly typical for precipitation in the watershed, and that has given hope to scientists that what we are witnessing is a sign of recovery — or perhaps an increased resiliency. It also helps that the last two years have revealed steady, if modest, improvement, making 2015 part of a larger pattern — a 45 percent score in 2013, a 50 percent in 2014 and now a 53 percent in 2015.
Not every portion of the Chesapeake Bay is advancing at the same pace, of course, but the pattern of improvement was widespread. Conditions were judged healthiest in Virginia's tidal portion of the bay (nearest the diluting effects of the Atlantic) and worst in urban tributaries like the Baltimore region's own Patapsco and Patuxent rivers. But the differential is not as great as one might imagine.
It's not hard to see where these improved numbers — lower levels of nitrogen, improved benthic activity on the bay floor or increasingly clear water — are coming from. They are born of changing patterns of human behavior. Marylanders have paid to upgrade sewage treatment plants, imposed regulations to reduce polluted runoff, invested more in cover crops and attempted to moderate the worst effects of development.
Often, these changes have been imposed by government — federal, state and local — and they have faced resistance, like the hue and cry over "flush" taxes or "rain" taxes. Yet this report card is hardly the first example of how effective such programs can be — and how the "sacrifices" eventually don't feel like sacrifices at all. Does anyone still miss phosphates in their laundry detergent?
That's not to suggest it's time to break open the champagne and toast the improving fortunes of the nation's largest estuary. There are still too many serious issues facing the region, including those who would love nothing more than to see the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency dismantled and its Total Maximum Daily Load — the "pollution diet" for the Chesapeake Bay that expects ever greater water quality advances in the years ahead — tossed into the ash can.
Still, maybe the achievement deserves a sip or two. Let's take a tip from various public school systems and celebrate an improved performance if not an actual "A" or "B." After all, the punishment handed to Sisyphus was not simply hard labor, it was for him to see that all his efforts were useless. That's clearly not the case with the Chesapeake Bay, and it does no harm to remind ourselves of that hopeful reality once in a while.