I have to be honest, I was not very impressed with our fall break destination. I’ve lived by the Potomac my entire life, driven by enumerable times, and heard more depressing statistics about it’s condition than I care to remember. All in all, I made the mistake of assuming that I knew everything I needed to know about the Potomac and the Chesapeake Bay. While my knowledge of the area was a great starting point for the trip, I was far from all-knowing. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is very well-known in the Potomac area, which speaks to how well their initiatives have worked. However, I never realized just how much of their operations involve education efforts within the community. I certainly had never been out on the Bay with them on any field trip, so the two days we spent with them were a completely new experience. I had always heard snippets of the dire conditions in the Potomac watershed, but the trip shed new light on the details.
I had always assumed that the majority of the pollution in the Potomac came from D.C. and its suburbs and that the majority of pollution in the Chesapeake came from the Potomac. Not once did I really stop and think about what was upstream of D.C. or of the many other rivers flowing into the Bay. I suppose we all like to think of ourselves as the center of everything. Imagine my shock when I found out that the second worst pollutant in both of those watersheds is nutrients from agricultural runoff. I felt the overwhelming need to bang my head on something until I gained some perspective. The 35+ ppm of nitrates in the Chesapeake Bay where we tested on Monday was staggering. This sort of pollution from nitrates and phosphates can only come from large scale agricultural runoff, and in all my time in the area, my blame for the water’s condition never budged an inch from urban pollutants. This trip taught me that it is always important to widen the scope of our perspective. I have always considered the Potomac and the Chesapeake to be solely the property of the D.C. area, and I now realize that I have recently been thinking of the James as the property of Richmond. With that punch to the gut, I now have something to remind me that nothing is caused by just one thing, especially when it comes to the environment.