When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, said Samuel Johnson, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Johnson's observation goes a long way toward explaining Virginia's recent progress on interim cleanup goals for the Chesapeake Bay.
For many years, deadlines and mileposts regarding the bay passed without censure and almost without notice. From time to time, someone inside the Beltway would send a stern letter to states in the watershed, warning them that if they did not straighten up and get to work, they might soon receive another stern letter.
All that changed when the Obama administration took office. As the headline of a September editorial put it at the time, "They Mean It." Shawn Garvin, head of the EPA's mid-Atlantic division, said, "We are serious." If Virginia did not adopt more rigorous standards, the administration made clear, then the EPA would impose them.
The state got to work. And the effort seems to be paying off. Earlier this week, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson told the Chesapeake Executive Council, a group of political leaders from the watershed region, that progress toward improving the health of the bay is on track. Virginia is actually ahead of schedule on certain benchmarks.
It would be nice to know the precise cost of all these rules — just as it would be nice to know the precise cost of the pollution that has made them necessary. Even Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley concedes that "it is very, very true that cleaning the bay is expensive" — though he adds that "letting her die is even more expensive."
That will not happen. Hypoxic dead zones, declining crab populations and other problems may reflect a degraded subaqueous environment, but the bay will not go toes-up altogether. Neither is it realistic to expect that the bay can be restored to the Edenic condition in which Capt. John Smith found it when he explored the waters in the 17th century. The law of diminishing marginal returns has not been repealed. Yet Virginia can still play a major role in returning the bay to good health. And it seems at last to be doing so. You can thank the Obama administration for that.
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