Chesapeake Bay, EPA and agriculture

In late July, Washington Post reporter Darryl Fears wrote an article, “Alarming ‘dead zone’ grows in Chesapeake” (http://tinyurl.com/kjrktvo), that summarized the concern of Virginia and Maryland officials who “said the expanding area of oxygen-starved water is on track to become the bay’s largest ever.”

A dead zone is created when excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus enter a waterway in quantities sufficient to lead to the rapid growth of algae, competing with other aquatic life for the available oxygen. As Fears puts it, “dead zones suck out oxygen from deep waters and kill any marine life that can’t get out of the way.”

The water quality problems in the Chesapeake Bay have a long history. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) June 2014 Economic Research Report Number 166, “An Economic Assessment of Policy Options To Reduce Agricultural Pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay” (http://tinyurl.com/p6ejayv) by Marc Ribaudo, Jeffrey Savage, and Marcel Aillery, the situation in 1976 was such that “Congress directed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to undertake a comprehensive study of the Bay’s condition and what measures would be necessary to restore it to its former health.”

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