Saving the Bay : People Working for the Future of the Chesapeake by Ann E. Dorbin

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good. 2001. John Hopkins University Press. Illustrated.

a collection of first-person accounts from ordinary people doing their part to ensure a healthier future for the Chesapeake.

These stories show that not only are individual actions critical, but they accentuate the positive rather than negative human impacts on the environment.

The 46 individuals profiled here are a diverse group. Their occupations range from Rufus S. Lusk III — an ordained clergyman and businessman whose actions include using washable dishes instead of Styrofoam tableware at parish functions and installing a rain garden to handle the runoff from a strip center’s parking lot before it enters Dueling Creek — to Lloyd “Lou” Wells, an inmate who runs the the aquaculture program at the MarylandCorrectional Training Center in Hagerstown, MD, which supplies fish to derbies for inner city children and for stocking in recreational areas.

Some of the people, have been active for decades, such as Jolene and Joseph Frock, who were active in getting their community to recycle in the late 1960s, before terms like “ecology” and “recycling” were household words. Others have only just begun, such as Richard Callahan, who at 17, organized a riparian buffer project for an Eagle Scout project.

While the work of Michael J. Ogburn, a graduate student who is team leader of Virginia Tech’s Hybrid Electrical Vehicle Team (Their engine’s only waste product is water that can be drunk straight from the tailpipe.) may be beyond the scope of many readers, the example set by Elizabeth S. Hartwell is not. When after 35 years of firebrand activism, emphysema finally confined her to bed, attached to a permanent oxygen machine, Hartwill did not give up her mission and continues to write letters on environmental issues.

None of the people profiled sees him or herself as an environmental superhero. Each merely saw something that he or she thought they could — and should — do and went on from there.

The impact that these individuals have had on the Chesapeake Bay and its watershed might best be described by an inscription in a small ceramic bowl that marathon swimmer/activist Joseph P. Stewart received after the 1998 Chester River Swim: “And she understood that her life was like a river. She could wade by its edge or jump in and swim.”