Fight for the Bay: Why a Dark Green Environmental Awakening is Needed to Save the Chesapeake Bay
by Howard R. Ernst. Rowman & Littlefield. 2009. 144 pages. Paperback. $19.95.
Pollution has reduced more than 400 water ecosystems around the world to “dead zones,” notes U.S. Naval Academy political science professor Howard Ernst in Fight for the Bay. For conservationists trying to save these ecosystems, the eastern United States’ Chesapeake Bay serves a cautionary tale.
Since the early 1980s, Ernst explains, a publicly funded Chesapeake Bay Program has coordinated bay-restoration efforts with the governments of neighboring states Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The program, however, lacks any lawmaking power. It only organizes public education campaigns, distributes grants to citizen cleanup projects, and sets nonbinding guidelines for state officials. This “voluntary” approach—“light-green conservation,” as Ernst calls it—failed miserably. Fauna and animal life across the bay remain in jeopardy, and its fishing industries have collapsed.
There is no substitute for political action and litigation, Ernst concludes. However, he sees the Chesapeake Bay Program’s “light-green approach” being repeated in estuaries around North America and beyond. He hopes that conservationists will change course and accept confrontation as necessary for reform.
Ernst’s Fight for the Bay is an incisive look at an important ecosystem and what communities everywhere can learn from it. Researchers, environmentalists, and political activists of all kinds may find it an enlightening read.
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