Meet the Next Generation of Chesapeake Bay Region Environmental Leaders

Meet the next generation of Chesapeake Bay Region Environmental Leaders and their approach to the Clean Water Act, now 50 years old.

When we were kids, we stood by the water’s edge clutching small damp pebbles in our tiny hands. With a measure of tenacity and pluck, we lobbed the pebbles one by one into the water. Creating subtle ripple effects was the goal; each enlarging circle on the water fascinating and entertaining us. 

Fast forward. We are now, as they say “adulting,” on our waterways, and we’re doing much more than tossing pebbles and watching the effects they make. Whether you are a bona fide sailor, weekend fisherman, or love a great sunset from the shoreline, you are most likely impacting the waterways of our precious Chesapeake Bay, and it’s complex system of rivers and streams on both the Eastern and Western Shores of Maryland.  

These impacts—our adult ripples—as it were, are fortunately monitored by a select group of individuals charged with not only evaluating the consequences of our cumulative, collective actions as we interact with our waterways in our daily lives but finding solutions to myriad issues that our “fascination” creates.    

This year with the 50th anniversary of the passage of the landmark legislation known as the Clean Water Act, we thought to converse with a few individuals from this select group who advocate for our local waterways every day. Each has the distinction of being relatively new in their current position, creating a next generation of environmental advocacy on the Bay. 

Jesse Iliff

Severn River Association 3.0

“Severn River Association, 3.0.” That’s how the new executive director of the Severn River Association, Jesse Iliff, likes to think of the time ahead of him at SRA. We caught up with Iliff, who formerly served as the South, West, and Rhode river’s riverkeeper at Arundel Rivers Federation for more than six years, during his first week of his executive directorship last March. Our discussion began with some historical perspective, but then shifted to topics such as the ever-present need to win over the hearts and minds of the citizenry when it comes to environmental responsibility and impact, the role the now 50-year-old Clean Water Act plays in the work they have yet to do, and his thoughts on what’s currently working and what he most wants to address.  

“The Severn River Association is the oldest watershed organization in the country. It was founded in 1911, and for over a century, it was an all-volunteer organization which had a number of impressive impacts on policy and on the river during that time,” Iliff says. “But in the early 20-teens, the Board started to feel it was important to ramp up our impact, and they believed the best way to do that was to become a professional organization with paid staff, so I think of that first century as Severn River Association, 1.0.”

To his mind, Severn River 2.0 was ushered in with the hiring of his predecessor, Tom Guay in 2017. (Guay remains very involved with the organization with roles in advocacy, restoration project management, and as a program officer.) This era was marked with the expansion of key programs, and the introduction of contractors who helped push specific projects. 

“But fundraising was always a bit of a challenge,” Iliff adds. “Thankfully, the Board has been re-energized in the past two years and fundraising has improved a lot.” 

All of which, leads Iliff to see his tenure as the beginning of “SRA 3.0.” In addition to his work with Arundel Rivers, Iliff brings the weight of a law degree with an environmental concentration from University of Maryland’s Carey School of Law to his new position. He is a Severn River native son, serves or has served with several vital related organizations, such as The Maryland Oyster Advisory Commission and the Maryland Commission on Climate, and is a self-described “eco-freako.” 

When it comes to action items in his new position, Iliff has already hit the ground running by providing expert testimony regarding several bills in front of the Maryland Legislature, which is a regular occurrence in his river-keeping roles, as is the always-pressing objective of winning over hearts and minds when it comes to galvanizing the citizenry in relation to issues that threaten our waterways. Regarding that, Iliff says, much of the work that riverkeepers do is helping people connect the dots from individual actions to larger impacts; and addressing complexities on both residential and commercial levels. 

“In our environment, it’s complex because of the sheer number of people that you need to try and reach. Here, on the Western Shore, the Anne Arundel County area, it’s all about trying to win over hearts and minds,” Iliff explains. “They need to know that what they do on their property matters, and why it matters, what the impact is…how their own personal practices are cumulative.”

On the other hand, managing impacts from commercial and residential development are always a matter for concern.

“A lot of people might not know that many of the streams in Anne Arundel County are no longer just vectors for upland pollution, they are sources of pollution in and of themselves, because the increase in impervious surfaces from development has led to faster flowing water which erodes the streams within their banks,” Iliff says. 

“Many of them have gotten so deeply cut into the flood plain that now every time it rains, like in a big thunderstorm, you’ll see the pulse of water come through, and chunks of the upstream river banks will just break off and fall in,” Iliff adds. “And then it just becomes like creamed coffee everywhere down stream of that break. So, a lot of them need intervention.”

A Distressing Trend

Along with managing the core issues that regularly affect the water quality of the Severn River, there is one particular matter that is becoming increasingly problematic to Iliff.

“Overall, clean water lawsuits and enforcement actions have dropped precipitously in the past decade and that’s not because the violations have stopped, it’s because the funding has been cut,” he explains. “Yet, Maryland’s general fund revenues have increased.”

Iliff is specifically referring to what he calls a “conscious policy decision to de-emphasize enforcement” among local law enforcement (City of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County) when infractions and violations are taking place on the water. 

The buzz phrase in enforcements circles, says Iliff, is “compliance assistance.” This practice, he says, involves offenders caught in the act of an infraction on the water basically receiving a slap-on-the-wrist-type warning or a redirection to immediately correct an issue. The offenders are then given the opportunity to correct the offending action and are re-visited by law enforcement to see that they have done so. The problem is, offenders oftentimes do not correct their behavior or action, and generally they are still not forced to face any consequence as a result. 

“I have always viewed ‘compliance assistance’ as a euphemism for free legal advice for polluters.”

Noting that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, an adapted piece of Federal legislation which passed in 1972, Iliff explains that there remains much to be done to accomplish the legislation’s primary goal of keeping defined pollutants out of our waterways.

“[The Act] predicted having done the work by 1985,” Iliff says. “The reason that hadn’t happened was probably shortsightedness, and perhaps a little bit of rose-colored glasses on behalf of Congress back in the early ’70s, but also in very large measure because it has been poorly enforced.”

Iliff cites some rather large and highly-publicized non-enforcement snafus concerning the Maryland Department of the Environment and waste water treatment plants in recent years as prime examples of what happens when enforcement officials look the other way. 

“…All the best laws in the world are just a big stack of paper if there is no enforcement of those laws,” Iliff says. “That’s my main thing, honestly. That’s where I’ve carved out a reputation in the environmental community as someone who is singularly focused on enforcement.”

Room for Optimism

At the time of our discussion, Iliff was awaiting word on the progress of a bill in the Maryland Legislature that would address his long-term commitment to oyster restoration on the Bay by providing the funding for a second, large-scale fish hatchery in Maryland. 

“Right now, the only hatchery in the State is in the Horn Point Lab. There have been two times in the last four years where outfits like Severn River Association or Arundel Rivers Federation, or other nonprofits, have looked for oysters to plant. We’re ready to go. We’ve got volunteers. We’ve got boats. We got parts of the river where they will survive, but we haven’t been able to get baby oysters because there’s been shortages,” Iliff explains.

This significant piece of legislation is not only optimistic for what it will help provide, oyster habitats, it is noteworthy in the sense that it is a prime opportunity to see our elected officials working together on a bi-partisan basis in a time when it seems rare. 

Senate Bill 830, sponsored by Democratic Senator Sarah Elfreth and co-sponsored across the aisle by Republican senators Jack Bailey and Adelaide Eckardt, was one of the recent pieces of legislation that Iliff testified on behalf of. 

“If we get a doubling of capacity, then we’re going to have the ammo we need to fight for the oysters,” Iliff says. “The fact that this bill, and this is a big bill, $30 million, not chump change, has bi-partisan support—that warms my heart.”

Isabel Hardesty

Inspiring Clean Water Access for All

Somewhere in the thick of her robust academic career, Isabel Hardesty, understood more clearly that she wanted to take the endless curiosity she had for animals and her growing acumen in scientific research and method to a place where she felt it would do the most good. 

“I just realized that I had a lot of peers in my scientific degree who were going on in academia to get their Ph.D.s, or they were going to be veterinarians, and I just realized I wanted to take the science and use it to make a change,” Hardesty says. “That my skills and my personality would be put to better use in a field where I would be working with other people, and convincing people to make changes in their lives, to preserve these animals, and the environment that I was so interested in.”

Now in her 11th year with ShoreRivers Organization in Easton, Hardesty moved into her most significant role, that of executive director, in 2021. She started out as policy director, spent four years as Chester Riverkeeper, and went on to assume the roles of regional, and then, deputy director. 

The concern’s current iteration, she says, began in 2018, with the merger of its three legacy organizations: the Chester and Sassafras River Associations, and the Midshore Riverkeeper Conservancy that was founded by Hardesty’s father, Tim Junkin. 

“We’ve been around for 35 years,” Hardesty says. “Our three legacy organizations were all founded at different times. The oldest one was founded in 1986, so we have had a presence on the Eastern Shore and established reputation and connections since ’86.” 

Whether it’s policy or education related, and ShoreRivers has a deep foothold in both, behavioral change is at the core of her mission-driven work, a mission based on education, restoration, and advocacy. 

“It’s all working with people and convincing people to do things differently in order to better protect and restore our environment. We need all the different components. We need the academic, the scientists, the researchers,” Hardesty explains. “We need to understand why these ecosystems and animals are important. But then, we need the people that can take that scientific knowledge and communicate it in a way that’s understandable, digestible, and inspiring to the non-scientific community.”

Where the Green Grass Grows

When it comes to convincing residents to do things differently, the organization has put forth what might seem like some counter-intuitive messaging on the subject. 

“What we’re trying to do, just as an example, with our River-Friendly Yards Program, which is really trying to reduce turf grass and the amount of fertilizer that we’re patting on our lawns; what we want is someone to look at their beautifully-mowed, mono-culture, bright-green, fertilized lawn—and feel guilty about it,” Hardesty explains.

Guilt in the hopes that residents will realize that chemical fertilizer use is bad for the river, she says, and that some better alternatives might be planting native plants or a garden, or letting growth, where manageable, become a meadow. 

While this “If-my-lawn-looks-this-good, it’s-gotta-be-bad-for-the-environment” approach may sound “unnatural,” it may nonetheless be memorable enough to give at least some residents a pause to stop and re-assess what they are actually doing.

“That’s the changing of the minds, and changing people’s ideas of what’s beautiful in a lawn,” Hardesty says. “Because what we currently consider [to be] beautiful in a lawn, is really bad for our rivers and our water quality.”

Land Meet Sea

Because Maryland’s Eastern Shore is a complex, majestic mix of the bucolic and the aquatic, it naturally presents some pretty distinct challenges for Waterkeepers, whose movement was built on the idea of citizens taking action against polluters. 

“Row crop agriculture is the Eastern Shore’s primary land use, and, as such, is the primary source of pollution to our rivers,” Hardesty says. However, agriculturally-based pollutants aren’t something that Waterkeepers can necessarily address by traditional means like employing the citizen suit provision of the Clean Water Act, due to the “non-point” source nature of the pollutant release.

“So while many Waterkeepers around the country primarily fight industrial, point-source types of pollution using the Clean Water Act, many others, including ShoreRivers, take a different approach,” Hardesty says.

Through education in best practices and a series of ongoing agricultural restoration and research projects, ShoreRivers works with farmers to address the problem of nutrient and sediment loss that is an unfortunate and unintended consequence of agriculture.

“The best way to clean up our Eastern Shore rivers is to work collaboratively with our farming community to implement practices that are environmentally-friendly and that help meet a farmer’s bottom line.”

Know Better, Do Better

In the state of Maryland, high schoolers are required to pass a course in environmental study in order to graduate. The robust educational aspect of ShoreRivers mission enables kids from four Eastern Shore counties help meet that requirement.

“We come in with funding to do these programs and then we have the staff expertise to lead the programs,” Hardesty explains. “We provide in-classroom lessons, environmental lessons, and we also take children out on field trips; we get them out in the field doing hands-on things out in the environment that they normally don’t have the opportunity to do.” 

Getting to that next generation of kids so they can not only learn about the environment as a construct, but see and experience it as part of their daily lives is a crucial part of the ShoreRivers mission. And while more recent generations are better informed on environmental matters on an overall, global scale, Hardesty says, young people still struggle with what’s going on closer to home on the local level.

“We’ve got students who don’t know the name of the river they live on, or who have never been in a canoe, and we live on the Eastern Shore.”

Unfortunately, those problems, she says, are still often attributed to social-economic boundaries. Realistically, she knows there are many children who lack access to the wonderful waterways on the Eastern Shore and are unable to participate in water-related activities due to social-economic factors. They may also lack access to important information regarding their waterways, issues such as water quality, fishing warnings and advisories, and bacteria levels in the water, which is very concerning to Hardesty.

And so, she says, the organization will work for a future along the waterways that is more robust with general community engagement that is diverse.

“So it’s not just the same types of people at the table who are lending their voice in advocacy to these issues,” explains Hardesty, addressing the area’s historic Black and growing Hispanic communities. “And people in communities who have historically used our waterways and have been shut out from them, or communities who continue to use our waterways in the very few public spaces where they are able.”

Hardesty understands the challenges ahead and knows that continuing to ask the right questions is key. Are we communicating with our Black communities, with our Hispanic communities, with different socio-economic communities other than our normal choir? And how can we do that so that everyone can actually access our waterways and take advantage of living on the Eastern Shore with all these beautiful resources?

Hilary Falk 

Where Humans & Nature Flourish Together

Growing up in Baltimore City, Hilary Falk enjoyed a childhood highlighted by life-enriching and explorative experiences as the daughter of a photojournalist.

“My father worked for The Baltimore Sun,” Falk says. “He was the Sunday Sun Magazine photographer and at [my] very young age he took me out to see the Chesapeake Bay.” 

She recalls fond memories of early morning and early evening excursions when the light on the water was at its best. “I had the pleasure of going on assignment with him and walking through salt marshes and traveling to Smith Island, and I knew then that I wanted to spend my life protecting the Bay.” 

And protect the Bay she does, in her position as President and CEO of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), one that she recently attained in January of this year. 

Protecting the Bay is something she knows she cannot do on her own, as she explains how honored and humbled she is to be working with the team established by her esteemed predecessor. “Will Baker, who led the organization for over 45 years, built a strong and enduring organization, and has really built a team of smart and committed people. I feel privileged to be able to lead the team,” Falk says. “I think I have the best job in the world.”

Blueprint 2025

Falk’s professional arch includes 13 years with the National Wildlife Association (NWA) as Chief Program Officer responsible for leading and integrating programs on both the national and regional level, while also serving as strategic advisor to its CEO. Prior to this role, she also held the positions of Vice President for Regional Conservation and Regional Executive Director for the Mid-Atlantic with NWA, and was Director of the Annapolis-based Choose Clean Water Coalition.

From its inception more than 50 years ago, CBF’s mission has operated with a science-based “blueprint” for the restoration of the Bay. Known as the Clean Water Blueprint, its initiatives to significantly decrease pollutants, shrink underwater dead zones, and return the Bay to the point where its waters are deemed fishable and swimmable are achieved by the year 2025. 

Falk says her tenure at CBF begins as the organization enters a critical phase of implementation toward meeting those year 2025 goals. 

“Formally, 2025 is the looming deadline to have all the programs and practice in place that will result in a restored Chesapeake Bay,” Falk explains. “For me, it’s also a moment to reflect on the past, celebrate the incredible work that has been accomplished, and recommit to the actions it will take to achieve clean water in local streams, rivers, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.”

To this point, Falk says, much has been accomplished. “There’s been an incredible amount of energy, investment, and world-renowned science that has gotten us nearer to saving the Bay than we have ever been.”

Falk points to a decrease over time in dead zones resulting in the rebound of certain species and a long-term trend in increasing acreage of underwater grasses as markers that restoration efforts are progressing.

“What we’re doing here is extraordinary, but I will say that we still have a long way to go,” Falk says. “While we’ve made all that progress, we still have some big challenges, including a lot of great work in Pennsylvania and with agricultural communities…and climate change is putting stress on an already stressed system.”

Falk does feel a fair amount of encouragement and optimism can be taken from the fact that they know what needs to be done, and with the right investment of State and Federal funds, agricultural practices that cause pollution can be addressed and reduced, and the challenges of climate change can be mitigated. 

A political history of bi-partisan support for the restoration of the Bay, is also something she believes we can feel very good about. 

“One of the wonderful things about the Bay restoration effort, is that it has a long history of bi-partisan support from the very beginning. In 1973, U.S. Senator Charles “Mac” Mathias, who was a Republican, took a boat trip on the Chesapeake Bay that led to the first study. And I think from that moment, we’ve seen bi-partisan support for the Chesapeake Bay,” Falk says. 

She also notes that when President Obama took office, he signed an executive order dedicated to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay, deeming it a “national treasure.” 

“So, we have seen this with different presidents, different changes in leadership, and last year’s Federal infrastructure legislation, which supplies record funding for the Chesapeake Bay program, which is part of what the EPA passed with strong bi-partisan support in Congress. These are all great examples of a continued partnership across the watershed of both parties,” Falk says. “I think the Bay is a big unitor. It has been that way and it always will be that way.”

Resiliency & the Next Chapter

What some people may underestimate about the Bay is it’s resiliency, Falk says. That said, however, she reminds residents that each and every person has a role to play when it comes to clean water. And while we have thus far achieved a level of momentum with the clean-up effort that is quantifiable, we must continue to act on that momentum, by continuing to push for the resources necessary to achieve our clean water goals.

Falk strongly believes that the sense of pride that Marylanders feel about the Bay and how it resonates in their own lives via local streams and rivers, can help them connect in a real way to the effort, as well.

“I think that’s where people can do more, too, because cleaning up local streams and rivers will improve the community around those rivers, and I also think that some people see the Bay through that lens, as well.”

When it comes to that “finish line” type of thinking as it relates to successful restoration, Falk errs on the side of caution, and encourages collaboration.

“To really succeed in the next chapter restoring the Chesapeake Bay, we’re going to have to go beyond conservation’s historically narrow lens and the broader conservation community needs to re-center our efforts on the people who live here,” Falk explains. 

“There is really an immense strength in the diversity of the communities that make up the almost 19 million residents of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. We really haven’t done enough to listen to those underrepresented and marginalized voices. And we need to ensure that the concerns of those on the front lines of environmental injustices are addressed.”

Continuing to hold governments at all levels accountable, and ourselves, will also be incredibly important to the mission of restoration, she says, because despite the incredible efforts and enormous progress made in different areas, many hard-fought-for-resources, are still at risk. 

Most importantly, Falk says, we need to recognize that no matter how much progress is made, the work will not just end in 2025, even though that date is top of mind. 

“You know, it doesn’t stop when we reach a computer model or a new number,” Falk says, adding that we can no longer assume that all we need for a healthy Bay is enough oxygen.  

“Saving what is most important to us isn’t a matter of going back to an idealized time when nature flourished and there was little human interaction, she says, because we know that’s not the future. What’s important is creating a future where humans and nature flourish together.”