Save the Bay! We're committed to reducing pollution, improving fisheries, protecting and restoring natural resources, and building an environmental ethic in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
Why do we exist?
he Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) fights for bold and creative solutions to the pollution that plagues the Bay and its tributaries. Across the six-state watershed, CBF sets the agenda, serves as a watchdog, and speaks out on behalf of the Bay and our environment to business, government, and the public. Through hands-on projects, we restore the Bay’s essential habitats and filtering mechanisms, including forests, wetlands, underwater grasses, and oysters. We fight for strong and effective laws and regulations and work cooperatively with government, businesses, and citizens in partnerships to protect the Bay. When necessary, we use legal means to force compliance with existing laws. And CBF’s environmental education program introduces students of all ages to the wonders of the watershed and works to heighten sensitivity, increase knowledge, and empower citizens to take action.
What have you accomplished?
CBF provides inspirational outdoor learning experiences to more than 30,000 students and 400 teachers and principals each year.
- CBF’s “No Child Left Inside” coalition fought successfully to introduce an environmental literacy requirement for high school graduation in the state of Maryland. Maryland is the first state in the country to approve such a requirement.
- In 2011, in response to growing concern about the impacts of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on the environment and human health, CBF and partners filed a legal petition calling for a comprehensive analysis of the risks and impacts of natural gas extraction in the Marcellus shale region. CBF wants to see stricter regulations of wastewater from drilling, better planning, and updates to the Oil and Gas Act aimed at improving safety and collecting data.
- In 2011 CBF volunteers restored 150 acres of wetlands and 130 acres of upland habitat, and planted 60 miles – or 680 acres – of trees as streamside buffers throughout the watershed.
- CBF’s 2011 “Clean the Bay Day” in Virginia organized more than 6,000 volunteers to remove over 200,000 pounds of debris from 500 miles of stream and shoreline. “Clean the Bay Day” is an annual event spanning the Virginia portion of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.
- A 2009 lawsuit brought against the Environmental Protection Agency by CBF and our allies for failure to enforce the Clean Water Act was settled in 2010. After the Obama administration issued a new federal Chesapeake restoration strategy, the EPA signed a landmark agreement to settle the lawsuit and create a strict new pollution-reduction diet called a Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) for the Bay-area states.
- In response to the agricultural lobbyists’ legal challenge of the EPA’s authority to issue the TMDL, CBF and a coalition of environmental groups filed a formal legal intervention in federal court to stop lobbyists from derailing the unprecedented federal-state cooperative effort to reduce pollution in the Bay.
- The Bay’s blue crab population surged 60 percent in 2010 after Maryland and Virginia implemented a CBF-supported reduction in the harvest of female crabs by 30 percent. In 2011 crabs remained at their second-highest level since 1997.
- In 2009 CBF received federal stimulus funding provided through the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority (PENNVEST) to construct pollution-reduction projects on farms. Improvements on 44 farms across PA will keep 1,544,390 pounds of nitrogen, 481,674 pounds of phosphorus, and 1,674 tons of sediment out of streams that flow into the Bay every year. The projects created 175 full-time-equivalent, private-sector jobs that lasted a year.
- CBF’s oyster restoration program places more than 22 million spat-on-shell oysters in the Bay each year, helping to increase the decimated population of these natural filters. Oysters are beginning to show a resistance to diseases that have ravaged their population for more than two decades, and in 2011 levels of baby oysters (spat) were at their highest levels in 14 years.
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