RICHMOND, Va. (CN) - It is one of America's great bodies of water. The well-spring of drinking water and prosperity for over 17 million people, and testimony to the grit of activists, scientists and regulators who fought to bring it back from the brink of environmental collapse.
Today, however, those same people and their successors say they fear for the world's largest estuary as never before. They view with alarm President Donald Trump's plan to cut the Environmental Protection Agency's budget by 31 percent, and the annual funding expressly earmarked for the bay from $73 million to nothing.
"We need that funding to [keep] the momentum going, to keep the states engaged and everyone else involved in saving and protecting the bay on track," said Rebecca LePrell, executive director of the Virginia chapter of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
“The oysters are finally starting to come back, the water is getting clearer all the time," LePrell said.
“The proposed budget cuts would devastate the gains and investments made in the past, and would significantly curtail our cleanup efforts going forward," she said.
The 200-mile long estuary, a body where 18 trillion gallons of salt and fresh water meet, was once a riot of birds and fish and crustaceans.
Flowing through six states -- Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia -- and the District of Columbia, it was the stomping ground of Maryland's famed blue crabs, and source of prized oysters on tables from Cooperstown, N.Y. to Norfolk, Va.
And its bounty was noted as far as the summer of 1608. It was during that summer that John Smith, a founder of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in North America, went in search of much-needed food for the settlement and came back talking of oysters laying along the Chesapeake "as thick as stones" and more sturgeon in its waters "than could be devoured by dog or man."
But centuries of dramatic urban and agricultural development in the bay's watershed over the ensuing centuries dramatically altered the Chesapeake for the worse. Urban runoff infused the water with oil and other man-made chemicals, widespread farming and the fertilizers that sustained it led to phosphorus, nitrogen and other nutrients pouring into the bay, feeding massive algae blooms that choked the estuarine system and imperiled native plants, animals, and even the humans living along the bay's shores.
The blue crab and oyster populations due to pollution and over-harvesting of their rapidly declining numbers, and the once plentiful schools of mullet, rockfish, trout, and perch disappeared from the transformed the underwater ecosystem.
Against that backdrop, the birth of the environmental movement in the early 1970s, bringing with it the realization that something needed to be done to save the Chesapeake Bay, was a desperately needed turning point in the life of the historic waters.