Why should we care about the Bay?
If you’re from Maryland, you know exactly which Bay I’m referring to. For the uninitiated, that would be the Chesapeake Bay, the pride and joy of Maryland (have you seen the blue heron license plates?). Millennials like me, since kindergarten, have been implored to “save the bay,” and “protect the watershed,” but what does that even mean? We can’t begin to answer this without some basic knowledge. Let’s start by talking about the watershed.
The term watershed refers to the land surrounding all of the streams that flow into the same body of water. To understand this, it’s helpful for me to think of it as levels. Here in Maryland, the ultimate destination for all of the water in streams and rivers is the Atlantic Ocean. The Chesapeake Bay flows into the Atlantic. Two of Maryland’s largest rivers, the Susquehanna river, and Potomac river flow into the Bay. And a bunch of smaller streams and creeks flow into these large rivers. That is a lot, and as much as I could talk about watersheds all day, we don’t have that kind of time. So we’ll narrow our scope as we go forward.
The Chesapeake Bay watershed encompasses six states in the Mid-Atlantic: New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC. Since our book will focus on a relatively small stream in Maryland, we’ll mostly stay in the state for the duration. If we have to skip down to Virginia or up to Pennsylvania, it’ll be a brief trip.
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