If wishes were fishes...

I sure wish Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania had been able to get something done -- anything -- to show that we can turn around the slow suffocating death of our Chesapeake Bay. If we had made any real progress at all in the last 25 years, we would now be able to build on that success in ways that protect our local constituencies (i.e. farmers, citizens, municipalities, and even developers).

Instead, we now have the Federal government stepping in like a bull in a china shop. I can hear the complaining already: Its socialism! It's fascism! It's a conspiracy! It's __(insert ignorant, ugly and false claim here)______!

I don't care what your politics, no one wants the Feds coming in and splitting our baby in half.

None of this is new -- we saw it coming a long time ago. In fact, did you know it was President Reagan who essentially created the Chesapeake Bay Program with funds committed in his State of the Union address in 1984?

We saw how that worked out -- no one wanted to make any hard decisions. Every constituency protected itself and waited. Farmers lost ground every step of the way because their run-off was an easy and obvious target and they were busy trying to justify not selling their land and retiring semi-rich to somewhere else. Developers made a bundle of cash. People -- native and immigrant -- were able to buy plenty of cheap houses for cheap. Municipalities collected more and more taxes (which allowed them to defer other hard choices which are showing up now). The States -- also flush with tax income -- pointed fat fingers at each other.

The Bay kept dying.

I hate that we can now look forward to the Environmental Protection Agency deciding who does what and when. I hate it. But I hate the death of the Chesapeake Bay more.

The Big Squeeze. Where do we go from here?

Part of success -- with sustainability like everything else -- is staying engaged even when there seems to be no answer. When things get really hard, its easy to let your mind step back from the problem and kind of give up. It's very frustrating to have no answer while the problem stares you in the face. It feels like something has to give -- its just not going to be the unsolved problem.

It's times like these that people disengage -- and it's times like these we can't disengage, or we lose. This is the lesson we learn when we see real life heroes doing the mundane heroic work of raising their children, of getting the job done, of continuing the conversation even when every cell in the body wants to scream, holler and leave.

Here are two sides of one of those frustrating impasses: farms and farming vs. the growth and development of Frederick County.



This article by Ike Wilson in the Frederick News Post captures some of the issues that might be best summed up by the opening line, "A merger of city dwellers with rural living continues to impose problems for agriculture..."

Development has put the squeeze on our farmland, and Wilson touches on several of the conflict points. I suggest you read it and understand that this conflict won't go away until it's solved. Sit with the tension.

Here are a few points I don't think get made well enough in our stilted public dialogue:

--- Our population is growing and everytime we put in a new toilet or sink we are adding burden to our over-burdened wastewater system, which in turn burdens the Chesapake Bay with death. Maryland and the U.S. EPA are very industrious when it comes to regulating farms, but they are not so industrious when it comes to asking all those builders and flushers to carry their fair burden.

-- Economies of scale are forcing farmers to expand into what are known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation -- CAFOs. With regard to pollution, CAFOs are like farms on steroids. But to a farmer trying to run a business, scaling up is one of few options.

-- Many people from urban backgrounds want to live in the country and many from rural areas want to live nearer to work. This should be a strength for Frederick County! People want to live here and whether they know it or not they want to preserve the natural and agricultural aesthetic of our land. (Slipping into a mini-rant: I just wish these suburbanites who fancy themselves nature lovers would preserve our natural aesthetic, instead of living in ugly developments that seem to sprout like cancerous weeds on our hills and dales. I also want them to understand that living in the semi-rural comes with the earthy reality of living next to farms. Oh, and one more thing -- what are these folks going to do when their ugly development is surrounded by 50 other ugly developments? Move to Pennsylvania or West Virgina and muck them up, I guess.)

We need farms. We need land on which people can live. Neither of these facts are going to change. Stay engaged. Don't give up.

Poking along:

I don't mind the killing off of the newest "new" analysis -- good God, we have been analyzing for far too long -- but then say what you ARE going to do, please.

Too Depressing For Me Right Now.

Hope is essential.

With that frame of mind I posited that the answer is thinking of yourself as better, and then living up to your thoughts. No matter how low we are, we can imagine better and we can strive to achieve the better; as long as we have hope. I am pointing towards inspiration and aspiration, which is a grand and joyous place from which to work in the world, and what I say is also true in a life that is overwhelmingly bleak and mean. Thinking ourself better isn't just about the grand and joyous. It's also about continuing in the face of overwhelming everyday challenges. It's about getting out of bed to feed our family in the face of depression, it's about overcoming substance abuse, and sometimes it's about just not quitting.

A comment I received on that post (thanks, Maeke!) points to the reality of a different frame of mind. What if you don't live up to your thinking -- in other words, what if you aren't as good as you think? Setting your sights high and failing is tough and can kill hope. From this perspective, starting with "thinking ourselves better" is irrational. You are what you are, and thinking yourself as better than you are is delusional.

I find this argument to also be true and I also say that one person's delusion has always been another's inspiration. In fact, Jesus and Gandhi and the others all faced being called delusional and worse, and all went through times when they almost gave up -- and then they went and did what they did anyway.

So, I stand by the hopeful mindframe. When we fail and feel the darkness of despair murking up our mind, we must have hope and set ourselves on that course towards better.

And here is where I am failing at that right now: The Chesapeake Bay is dying.

We are choking it to death. Our sewage and the run-off from our farms and lawns is pumping nitrogen and phosphorous at toxic rates into our streams and rivers and then the Bay which leads to blooms of algae and other guck which suck all of the oxygen from the water -- creating miles of lifeless underwater Mars-scape.

We aren't alone of this of course, as a huge zone of death dances around in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River, too.

We, the people who live around the Bay, and our governments have so far proven impotent against this threat. Every few years the powers that be decide the goals that were set a few years ago were just too ambitious, and they re-issue new goals that being more "realistic" are also more like worthless. Meanwhile, very little changes and less progress is made.

You'd think people who love the Bay as much as we do would see what is happening -- everyone does -- and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. But that hasn't happened yet.

This is where I feel like maybe we can't do it. Maybe we just don't have the perspective and the political will to change what we do so we don't kill the Bay. Maybe we shouldn't try to be better than we have been. Maybe we are just flawed to such a degree that we should just try for an "undemanding attempt with no guarantees."

Maybe we should despair.


(photos courtesy of ChesapeakeBay.Net)