In the early 2010s, the effort to save the Chesapeake Bay was riding a wave of optimism.

Barack Obama controlled the White House. Maryland had passed a cascade of bay-focused laws establishing programs still used to pay for sewage treatment upgrades, finance shoreline restoration and manage stormwater runoff. Underwater grasses were on the mend and the bay’s notorious oxygen dead zone appeared to be shrinking.

“There was a collective sense, on both the estuary side and up in the watershed,” said Rich Batiuk, a retired scientist who spent 33 years in the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay office, “that we had broken through.”

Today’s picture is murkier.

Progress on key water quality goals has slowed. Despite former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley’s pledge that the state would achieve new pollution limits by 2020, the state has yet to reach that goal. Other watershed states lag further behind.

At the same time, the bay cleanup faces stiff political headwinds under President Donald Trump.

As the Chesapeake restoration enters a new era — governors from across the watershed are expected in Baltimore this week to extend cleanup to 2040 — the movement appears uncertain about its future, according to interviews with over a dozen advocates, scientists and policymakers. Some remain bullish that their approach will continue to gain ground; others, like Batiuk, worry that, four decades in, the campaign is losing steam.

The bay movement has long swung from “moments of extreme optimism to moments of quiet resignation,” said Todd Eberly, a political science professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In the last decade, though, Eberly said attention to the bay has waned. Oxygen dead zones once drove news cycles, but people today are more concerned with affording groceries or their mortgages.

“Our commitment to the environment is about a mile wide but an inch deep,” Eberly said.

Losing political oxygen?

In recent years, the bay movement has celebrated incremental victories — like restored oyster populations in certain tributaries and renewed migratory pathways for fish — but progress on its core mission has been stubborn.

That’s because pollution reductions in the early decades hinged on reforms to wastewater systems — a major driver of water quality degradation that was easy to isolate — while the rest is more diffuse, washing into waterways off sprawling developments and farm fields.

As the restoration movement works on these harder-to-fix problems, bay leaders worry about the public losing interest.

That’s why Maryland Natural Resources Secretary Josh Kurtz says it’s important that advocates help people see connections between the watershed and day-to-day interests, be it kayaking, fishing or environmental science.

“We need to keep coming back to the fact that what draws people into the bay restoration might not have anything to do with the Chesapeake Bay itself,” said Kurtz, who chaired the Bay Program committee that drafted the new agreement.

Just how engaged residents are in the Chesapeake Bay’s health is difficult to say.

Polling in Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania, conducted last fall by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, found 55% of respondents believe restoring the bay is a bigger priority today than 10 years ago.

Kim Coble spent much of her career as the Bay Foundation’s Maryland director and now leads the Maryland League of Conservation Voters. Green advocates today must justify their goals by proving other benefits, like for the economy, Coble said.

“You can’t just say, ‘This will help the bay,’” she said. “That’s not enough anymore.”

Even within the environmental community, Coble said it’s gotten harder to draw attention to the bay. Climate-driven calamities often overshadow the estuary’s challenges, which she said can seem less significant.

People talk about extreme heat or devastating storms, she said. “But the conversation around the bay is, ‘How’s the crab population?’”

The Trump factor

By ratifying a new bay agreement this Tuesday, leaders from across the watershed will signal continued support for the multibillion-dollar restoration. But success also depends on the federal government, which funds the Bay Program and coordinates the multistate response.

Under Trump, some bay advocates argue that the restoration effort should take wins where it can. The new bay agreement pares back some ambitions set in 2014 and avoids the term “climate change,” a response to Trump’s attacks on such programs.

But it’s a strong pact considering the circumstances, said U.S. Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Maryland Democrat and bay champion.

“People need to recognize the political climate and the political pressures,” she said. “This new agreement does move the ball forward. It still centers science ... when we’re in the middle of the most anti-science federal administration in the history of this country.”

A new director will help steer the Bay Program’s next steps under this revised agreement. Appointed in September, Dan Coogan is the program’s seventh leader in six years.

Though Bay Program employees fired early in Trump’s term were hired back, other longtime staffers left, meaning Coogan takes over a team that has lost years of experience.

In a statement, EPA spokesperson Amanda Hancher declined to comment on personnel changes and said the agency regularly reviews spending “to identify efficiencies and redirect funding” to programs that improve the bay’s water quality.

The EPA declined to make Coogan available for an interview, but he introduced himself to a Bay Program advisory committee last month.

A 20-year EPA veteran, Coogan has served largely in budgetary roles, a résumé that worries some advocates after Trump’s previous attempts to defund the Bay Program. Recently, he worked alongside the Department of Government Efficiency that helped implement steep cuts to EPA spending, an experience he called “very positive.”

“We had a really good team that brought in some good outside perspectives to EPA,” he said.

Old bay and new bay

For much of its four-decade history, the save the bay movement was championed by leaders who’d been there almost from the start. Not so today.

Just about every bay-focused organization has gotten new leadership in the last decade, said Bay Foundation President Hilary Harp Falk, whose predecessor stepped down in 2021 after 40 years.

Falk said this new generation has risen to the occasion despite political challenges.

“I see a lot of really good people rolling up their sleeves, sitting at the table and working hard for the Chesapeake Bay,” she said.

Others are jaded.

“I just don’t see those kinds of people that are necessary to move forward,” said Jon Mueller, director of the University of Maryland’s Environmental Law Clinic.

Formerly the Bay Foundation’s litigation chief, Mueller said he’s given up expecting the EPA will hold states to nutrient pollution goals and stakes his hopes in outsider lawsuits instead.

Batiuk feels the effort has failed to adapt its approach to agricultural runoff, the bay’s biggest source of nutrient pollution.

“I can’t be optimistic about what’s happening now,” said Batiuk, who fears a backslide as climate change and development worsen conditions.

Adam Ortiz, who led the EPA’s mid-Atlantic region under the Biden administration, sees it differently. Now a deputy secretary in the Maryland Department of the Environment, Ortiz pointed to new investments to curb runoff upstream.

Maryland is piloting a program to restore key tributaries. In Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin approved over $200 million for sustainable farming. Pennsylvania, long blamed for holding back the bay, has taken more initiative, supporting hundreds of millions of dollars for conservation practices on small farms.

“Maybe there’s not as many ‘Save the Bay’ bumper stickers,” Ortiz said, “but is that the best metric?”