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The Chesapeake Bay

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Invest an Hour. The Great American Cleanup

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Don’t know if you heard, but we’ve got some stuff coming up.  Do you have a plan for the Great American Cleanup?

It used to officially be the Great American Cleanup, and that’s still the theme.  Given the success of last year, Keep America Beautiful has christened this year as National Days of Action!  We’re using it to mobilize some of the 8 million of us who call The Commonwealth home to spend some time during Earth Month (it deserves a month, doesn’t it?) making things a little cleaner.  You know; pick up some trash, plant a flower, paint something.

Our Event Central for this year is the Hampton Roads area.  Now, before all of you NOVA folks and mountain people get in a roar, there is a good reason for this:

 

  • Our version of the Hampton Roads area includes Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Suffolk, goes as far west as Emporia and up the DelMarVa into Gloucester County.  We’re looking at around 2 million Virginians.
  • We have some great partnerships in place with the United States Military, some great public and private volunteers, and corporate partners like Pepsi, Waste Management, Troy-Bilt, and Solo.
  • Keep America Beautiful picked us.

 

Why did KAB pick us?  Because we did a fantastic job last year.  Using us, askHRgreen, and other groups, we brought together thousands of people for hundreds of projects across the state, and especially in the Chesapeake Bay areas, for clean, green, beautiful projects.  And it was an honor.

We’re in a pretty elite group.  KAB chose ten cities across the country to be incubators for this goodness, and we’re sharing the honor with big-name towns like Oakland, California, Houston, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It’s pretty special.

Our big event kicks off on Friday, April 27th with organization, projects, and a reception at the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk.  Things will pick right back up again on Saturday, with almost sixty projects taking place throughout the Hampton Roads area.  We have a thousand volunteers so far, but you can still get involved.

You don’t have to be in Hampton to help, though.

Last year almost 4 million volunteers spent over 5 million hours participating in the Great American Cleanup.  Think about that:  Everyone spent about an hour.  That makes it more manageable, doesn’t it?  It’s kind of like exercise.  Just 15 minutes a day can make you more fit.  $5 per week can add up to a summer vacation.  It adds up.

Start today, and choose to recycle something.  Spend a few moments tomorrow picking up some trash.  Devote part of an hour this weekend to greening up your yard.  Spend an hour during the Great American Cleanup Keeping Virginia Beautiful.

Before you know it, you’ll have invested a year.

 

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The Chesapeake Bay: Virginia’s National Treasure

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The weather last week knocked down a lot of beautiful trees.  It caused power outages; it shook things up at the North Anna Nuclear Reactor, and disrupted our week.  It also dumped a bunch of rain.  All of that water ran into our storm drains, filled our creeks, swelled our streams, flushed our rivers, and much of it ended up in The Chesapeake Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay.  The name comes from an Algonquian word referring to a village “at a big river.”  When the first European settlers wandered into the Bay in the early 16th century they commented on the massive oyster reefs that they had to navigate.  They initially thought “Chesepiooc” was the native word for “Great Shellfish Bay.”  Oysters are natural water filters and keep the water clean of sediments and pollutants.  In 1507 the population of oysters could filter the entire Bay in about three days.   The current population is about 5% of what it was in 1507.

In the 1970’s scientists discovered one of Earth’s first “marine dead zones” in The Chesapeake Bay.  Runoff from farms, industrial waste, and chemicals like phosphorus and nitrogen created algal blooms that rendered the water hypoxic or starved of oxygen.  In addition to massive fish kills and crab migrations this dead zone devastated the oyster populations in The Bay.  Oyster farming of this depleted population further depleted stocks to the point that it now takes over a year for the little mollusks to keep The Bay clean.

There is hope for The Chesapeake Bay, though.  There are many groups and organizations that are spearheading efforts to return The Bay to its glory days.  The Chesapeake Bay Program coordinates efforts from Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, and the Environmental Protection Agency.  It brings together local, state, and federal government groups with citizen advisory panels and other volunteer groups.

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation started in 1964 with a concerned group of businessmen and Chesapeake fishermen.  Their mission is to restore The Bay to its former glory by encouraging protection and conservation of The Bay and its tributaries.  The rightly refer to The Bay as a “National Treasure.”

The UVA Bay Game was conceived by students and faculty at The University of Virginia in partnership with Philippe Cousteau.  It uses real world demographic, economic, and scientific data to show the impacts that we have on The Chesapeake Bay and its watershed.  It’s kind of like a live Farmville game where players can change behaviors and policy and it will show up on the future of a Virtual Bay.

Many of our groups and volunteers at Keep Virginia Beautiful work to protect our waterways.  All of these streams and rivers feed into our greatest body of water, The Chesapeake Bay.  If you’re in Hampton or Harrisonburg, Alanton or Andersons Mill, from one end of our State to the other we need to protect The Chesapeake Bay by doing our part to Keep Virginia Beautiful.