Last night I watched “The New World,” about the founding of the Jamestown colony. Although the movie focused mainly upon the interaction of the English and the Indians, the movie played out upon a backdrop of the Chesapeake Bay and James River. The pacing of the movie was insufferably slow, but the photography was stunning. The Bay, its tributaries and their wetlands are as beautiful as any place on earth. I find it heartening to see that the Virginia Tidewater still has spots of wilderness, that we have not totally destroyed our natural inheritance.
Which brings me to the news of the day…. Four hundreds years later, give or take a few months, the governors of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the mayor of Washington, D.C., the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have proclaimed that they have “stopped the bleeding” in the Chesapeake Bay. But they acknowledged that much remains to be done to fully restore the Bay to health. Reports Scott Harper with the Virginian-Pilot:
It was Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s first meeting with the Chesapeake Bay Executive Council, and the freshman Democrat used the occasion to urge a faster cleanup pace but also to keep some perspective.
Kaine said the vaunted cleanup of North America’s largest estuary has shown “steady improvement,” despite frustrations that it has taken more than 20 years and billions of dollars to reach this break-even point.
If we can say that we’ve halted the downward spiral of the Bay’s ecology, that’s progress indeed. But it will take billions more and decades more to restore it to the pristine condition of 1607. If you watch the movie, you will know that the effort is worthwhile.
(As an aside, “The New World” provides a vivid depiction of indian culture that is refreshingly free of Politically Correct claptrap in which the English settlers are the bad guys and the Indians are the noble savages. The movie portrays, correctly in my book, the interaction of two mutually uncomprehending civilizations.)
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