GreenVest Chesapeake Bay Initiative

If a solution doesn’t work, you try a different approach. The Clean Water Act has been in place over 25-years and, despite the efforts and promises of many the Chesapeake Bay and many of its tributaries remain significantly impaired. Continued delays in enforcing existing laws, adopting new standards to address continued growth and having the political will to enforce them is a baseline requirement for dealing with the effort to restore Bay water quality. The State of Maryland, standing last in leadership, its' environmental community fractured and without cohesive input both contribute significantly to the stymied effort to improve water quality and restore health to the Bay’s resource values.

The promise issued BY EPA in July 2010 suggests new TMDL standards have to be 60% implemented by 2017 and full implementation has to be shown by 2025. On September 24, 2010, the EPA released the new Draft Chesapeake Bay TMDL standards setting binding limits on nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment discharges throughout the Chesapeake’s 64,000-square-mile watershed in an effort to meet mandated Tributary Strategy Goals by 2025. To learn more about how EPA is trying to add some teeth to what is otherwise political pandering at best Please download the executive summary in PDF. Written comments will be accepted by EPA and noticed in a pending Federal Register public notice that will also appear on the EPA’s website http://www.epa.gov/chesapeakebaytmdl. Final TMDL Standards are to be adopted by December 21, 2010. MDE has already responded to the EPA’s TMDL Standards by issuing Public Notice for Lower Patuxent Drainage for new TMDL standards which can be found online at http://www.mde.maryland.gov.

In order to strike a balance between an active and growing economy and environmental quality but we must implement rules that facilitate market based solutions that actually lead to installation of critical restoration measures. Not continued and overlapping studies, not continued monitoring of the baseline without action, not arguement about scientific practices and theories which are very well understood. It is time for action and implementation of the results of decades of monitoring and studying the problem which involves a combination of stemming current and changing permitted and non permitted pollution practices combined with real restoration.

When legislators or local mandates establish certain land use practices, there are frequently insufficient or lack of money allocated to verify compliance, much less enforce these rules and practices.

What we need is public understanding and knowledge of the relationship between the way we live and the impact we have on our natural systems. This then, has to be coupled with embracing individual responsibility for the stewardship of our planet that does not currently exist. It should not be up to the taxpayers to fund the continuing bad practices of those who violate environmental quality. Those who help restore, enhance or preserve environmental quality should be rewarded. Those who continue to violate the environment should pay a penalty.

GreenVest has announced the GreenVest 2010 - Maryland Initiative. This is an effort to attack the issues at the source, and that ultimately have an impact with what happens with land. Our initiative will provide comprehensive land planning skills to local planning boards who can influence land use to provide for the permanent protection of environmentally sensitive areas. The owners of these easement areas will be paid for giving up their development rights through the sale of ecosystem service values associated with the environmental lift provided by their land. The initiative by GreenVest will include training and education for developers, the farming community, municipal employees as well as advancement of policy within the States to allow for this initiative to grow and thrive. Pilot projects to establish the short and long term goals and place restoration and permanent protections in place are currently on the drawing board. This initiative will be undertaken and advanced through strategic relationships with Bay Bank, The Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Natural Resource Conservation Service, The Chesapeake Bay Fund, SustainabLE2 and The Faux Group.

For more information, please contact: Wendy Hershey at 410-268-7422