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Photo / Dave Harp

Bay region’s growth problemis only getting larger

≈ Advocates push for controlling growth, not just managing it.

By Lara Lutz

In the early days of the Bay cleanup efforts, public presentations about the Chesapeake often included an illustration from the comic strip “Pogo,” with the character’s famous saying, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

If so, the Bay has more enemies than ever. In the years since those outreach efforts took place in the mid-1980s, nearly 3 million more people have arrived in Bay’s wa-tershed. They consume forests and farmland, and generate pollution.

Now, as the human population of the Bay watershed cruises toward 17 million, author and conservationist Tom Horton is asking hard questions about the Bay’s biggest long-term problem: growth.

Concerns about growth—both human population and land devel-opment—have loomed over the Bay’s restoration since it began. And while policy makers and activists have grappled with the issue over recent decades, the collective impact of growth still threatens to slow or halt—or even reverse—Bay restora-tion efforts.

Horton frames the problem in a paper published by the Abell Foun-dation called “Growing! Growing! Gone! The Chesapeake Bay and the Myth of Endless Growth.”

“Growth is good. Growth is neces-sary. Growth will come. Growth can be accommodated,” he writes. “These are the greatest, most un-critically accepted and fatally flawed assumptions made by those charged with protecting the natural resources of the Chesapeake Bay.”

Despite the problems it spawns, most people view economic growth

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2 Bay Journal reprint from may 2009

as necessary and population growth as unstoppable. But Horton dis-agrees. He’s asked for a new public conversation—not to debate growth strategies, but to question growth itself.

“It’s hypocritical to take people’s money to restore the Bay while ignoring how many people live around the Bay and the growth pro-jections for the future,” Horton said.

Horton’s concerns aren’t new, but responding to them has never been easy. From the outset, partners in the state-federal Chesapeake Bay Program recognized that growth could thwart their efforts. In the Chesapeake Bay Agreement of 1987, Bay Program partners called on state and federal governments to “plan for and manage” the effects of population growth and develop-ment on the environment.

Since then, Bay Program docu-ments show the urgency has grown, not diminished.

The Chesapeake 2000 agreement referred to “difficult choices” about growth and land use. Without them, it warned, growth might “eclipse” any gains the region had made in protecting the Bay.

By 2007, the EPA announced that this warning was almost real-ity. A frank report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General confirmed that nitrogen and phos-phorus runoff from developed and developing land is adding pollu-tion to the Bay faster than existing programs can control it. As a result, the goals for reducing pollution from developed lands by 2010 will not be met.

In March, the Bay Program’s an-nual status report again pointed to growth as the Achilles’ heel of the Bay cleanup. While noting small

gains in some areas over the past year, the report warned that popula-tion growth and development was one of the “greatest challenges” to the cleanup. Human activity, the report states, is “overwhelming na-ture and offsetting cleanup efforts.” There was no improvement in the Bay’s overall health during 2008.

Horton, author of seven books on the Bay and a former reporter and columnist for The (Baltimore) Sun, is not surprised. Although growth has become a hot topic over the last two decades among citizens, ad-

vocacy groups and policy makers, their efforts have battled the effects of growth, not the issue of growth.

“Smart growth is still growth,” Horton said. “Environmental groups want to focus on behaviors, not the number of people out there behaving. There’s nothing wrong with that, but they are ignoring a big part of the problem.”

Horton argues that we can only save the Bay by replacing growth with a better model.

“Right now, everything is pretty much cast in terms of ‘grow or die,’” he said. “That’s not something we’ve thought through very much.”

The assumption that “growth is good” leads state and local govern-ments to pursue growth even as its

citizens complain about the impacts on traffic, schools, water treatment systems and open space. Elected officials who champion the Bay can also find themselves supporting projects that create more pollution.

Maryland, for example, has welcomed a large influx of military jobs through the Base Realignment and Closure process. BRAC could bring an estimated 28,000 new households and a combination of 60,000 military and civilian jobs to the state by 2011. Touted as an economic boon, the state must now grapple with BRAC-driven needs for roads, schools, public trans-portation and stormwater controls with a budget that already feels the pangs of recession. At the same time, the state continues to put funds and energy into restoring the Bay and shares the Bay Program’s burden to stem pollution from de-veloped land.

Horton said that growth should give way to stability—in terms of the economy, population and land use. He argues that stability could provide a high quality of life and a better relationship with the natu-ral world, without the high costs extracted by growth.

Experts call it a “steady-state” economy. It’s been an academic concept since the 18th century, but never part of the mainstream dialogue.

A steady-state economy depends on balance, with the right number of jobs, goods and services for a relatively stable population. The growth economy, on the other hand, depends on more people to consume ever larger amounts of products and natural resources.

“We have to be clear that we

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“[There is] a clear correlation between population growth and associated development

and environmental degradation in the Chesapeake Bay system.”

— From the 1987 Chesapeake Bay Agreement, signed by Maryland,

Virginia, Pennsylvania & the EPA

Bay Journal reprint from may 2009 3

The Chesapeake Bay watershed gained more than 10 million peo-ple during the 20th century. From 1950 to the present, the population has grown by more than 1 million people every 10 years. Today’s population is approximately 16.8 million and may reach 20 million by 2030.

Since 2000, “natural increase”—more births than deaths—has been the largest source of popu-lation growth for the Bay region as a whole, accounting for 60.65 percent of the growth. International migration, at 29.68 percent, is the second largest source of growth, followed by the domestic migra-tion of Americans moving into the region, at 9.67 percent.

Although the rate of population growth has slowed over the last three years, the total number of people continues to climb.

The pace and cause of popu-lation growth varies on a local scale. According to Peter Claggett, a research geographer with the U.S. Geological Survey, domestic migration drives the net popula-tion increase in Virginia’s Loudon and Chesterfield counties, as well as York County, PA, and Frederick County, MD.

The most dramatic examples of population growth are clustered near urban areas and the Bay, while the number of people in some outlying areas is dropping.

More than half of the counties in the Pennsylvania portion of the watershed have lost population since 2000, but those counties are mostly located in the northern and western portions of the watershed.

The population in Pennsylvania’s southeastern counties, which are closer to the Bay, has increased.

“We can be pretty confident that the Bay watershed will have to accommodate another 2 million people by 2030,” Claggett said. “They will probably go to suburban areas around major metropolitan regions. They won’t be spread evenly across the watershed.”

— Lara Lutz

Population Growth in the Region

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Calvert County, MD, is one place in the Bay region that has put the brakes on growth. Deliberately.

By limiting the amount of homes allowed in the county, its growth rate dropped from an average of 4 percent per year during the 1990s to roughly 2 per-cent in 2006, and 0.9 percent today.

The change began in 1997. With proximity to Wash-ington D.C., access to the Bay, good schools and a low crime rate, Calvert County was a popular place to be.

“We were the fastest-growing county in the state for about 15 years,” said Greg Bowen, director of plan-ning and zoning. “We are geographically the smallest, with one of the smallest populations, but we had to build a new school just about every year.”

With 23,000 households at the time, Bowen said the county was on track to reach a total of 54,000. The county decided to analyze the future impact on its budget, schools, roads and rural character.

The full build-out, they found, would take Calvert County beyond its resources. Expanding the main highway from four lanes to six would be an enormous financial burden for the state. The pace of school construction was unsustainable. Water in the aquifers wouldn’t last to 2030.

The county commissioners wanted to lower the build-out limit, and they took the proposal to the public. “It was very controversial,” Bowen said. “We went to every group in the county and talked about

consequences and alternatives. We turned out to have pretty strong support from a quality of life standpoint.”

Zoning, which defined the amount of houses that could be built in different areas, was cut by 50 per-cent. The commissioners were re-elected. Further zoning limits on growth were enacted in 2002. New school construction has stopped. The water supply looks good until at least 2030.

The rural landscape—and property values—have been preserved through a program of Transferable Development Rights. Developers who want to build more densely in designated areas must purchase those rights from rural property owners, who receive the payments in exchange for moving development rights away from their properties toward town centers.

Bowen can’t predict what will happen after the county reaches full build-out. “But at least we bought ourselves time to really look at the impacts and make good decisions as time goes on,” he said.

Bowen attributes their new balance to a creative TDR program and intense public dialogue. “I think it requires us to reach out to the community and gain understanding. The whole thing can be counterintui-tive. The idea that you can slow growth but maintain or improve property values is something you’ve really go to slow down and think about.”

— Lara Lutz

are not talking about fewer jobs,” Horton said. “There’s a difference between economic development, which generates jobs, and eco-nomic growth, which physically expands the human footprint.”

Growth is the model we’ve lived with for hundreds of years, said economist Herman Daly. And in the long run, he says it won’t work.

Daly is a professor at the Uni-versity of Maryland and a board member for the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy, an international nonprof-it organization.

“We live in a growth economy. That’s the way everything is

geared,” Daly said. But, he said, most economists assume growth is good without fully weighing the costs. “We may be in an era in which growth incurs environmen-tal and social costs faster than it produces benefits,” he said.

A steady-state could be better for both the environment and for hu-man quality of life.

“We really do live in a finite world,” Daly said. “We take from the environment all that we use, and we eventually return it in the form of waste. We need a balanced flow to maintain ourselves and all the populations of things. That flow has to be within the capacity of the eco-

system to absorb and regenerate.”No one can predict the exact de-

tails of a steady-state economy, but job categories, patterns of consump-tion and the aims of technology would shift in size and importance.

“We would still be innovat-ing and developing,” Horton said, “just like a person grows mentally, spiritually, and maybe even more physically fit, even though they aren’t growing taller or fatter.”

Still, given the current economy, that’s a tough sell. Americans equate growth with jobs and purchasing power. In an economy that’s lacking both, growth seems important.

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Calvert County Develops a Plan to Slow Growth

Daly believes that growth helped to cause the recession and won’t lead to sustainable solutions. “There was too much borrowing against the future,” Daly said. “This, I think, is the thrust of growth.”

The alternative is to improve quality of life through invention and ingenuity, without consuming ever more land and goods. “It’s qualitative improvement,” Daly said. “We can have a better diges-tive system instead of simply a bigger jaw.”

A steady-state economy recog-nizes boundaries. This challenges the U.S. notion of freedom. Most people accept the principle of growth, if not its outcomes, be-cause they associate it with free-dom and a persistent sense that “more” must be better.

Horton calls that a myth. Limits exist already, and unending growth will bring more. “I defy anyone to show me a place that has grown while making fewer rules,” he said. “Yes, we have all these freedoms, but if you pursue any of them to excess it limits others. If you are free to build where ever you want, you limit hunting, bird watching and other uses of the land. What we seek is a balance, and right now we are way out of balance.”

In a steady-state economy, balance also requires a stable population.

In the Bay watershed, the hu-man population has been growing for centuries and picked up speed in the 20th century, when it gained more than 10 million people. In 2000, the total population stood at roughly 15.7 million. Today’s population is approximately 16.8 million and it may reach 20 million by 2030.

Negative Population Growth, a nonprofit organization based in Northern Virginia, is well aware that stopping or even slowing this growth is a political quagmire. The group has been active since 1972 and works on Chesapeake issues in addition to its other national pro-grams.

In 2007, they asked the region’s governors to create a Chesapeake Bay Commission on Population

Growth that would set guidelines and restrictions on future develop-ment. Vice president Craig Lewis said that they received a few writ-ten responses with sympathy for their concerns, but no commitment to action.

“Population as a whole is a tough issue,” Lewis said. “But this ideol-ogy cannot continue. In 20 or 30 years, where are we going to be?”

According to Lewis, planned growth won’t fix the problem. The end result is still more people.

“The answer is to make difficult, conscious choices about the num-ber of children we have and also the immigration rate,” Lewis said. “Immigration is the most tangible of the two. It’s the elephant in the room.”

This year, Negative Popula-tion Growth hopes to rally student involvement to halt the surge of population growth in the Bay re-gion. The campaign includes radio

station advertising and a free poster showing the connection between population growth and “overdevel-opment.” More than 1,500 schools in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. received the poster.

Most advocacy groups in the Bay region, however, have chosen to confront sprawl—promoting compact development or improved stormwater management—instead

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Photo / Dave Harp

of growth itself. Some contend that population isn’t the real problem. For others, the topic is too radical, too complicated, or less pressing than the immediate impacts of con-sumptive land use.

Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, agreed that growth can’t continue without limits. But he does not see human population as a pressing problem for the Bay.

“Land development has grown at about five times the rate of the population,” Boesch said. “It’s not driven solely or even principal-ly by population growth.”

Immigrants from outside the United States play a role in popula-tion growth, but Boesch said that they do not contribute to sprawl. “For the most part, those folks are not buying in the outlying suburb housing de-velopments,” Boesch said. “Their economic status and cultural inter-ests don’t require expansive land development.”

For nonprofit organizations, the question of taking a position or dedicating staff to such issues can be difficult. The Sierra Club has struggled internally, sometimes bit-terly, with its position on immigra-tion for years. So far, it has contin-ued to emphasize the root causes of immigration and stand neutral on questions of national policy.

Ed Wilson is vice president for 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania.

That state has hot spots of popula-tion pressure along its southern border, but he said his organization finds sprawl to be a much greater, widespread problem.

“It’s a big mistake to equate sprawl with population growth in Pennsylvania,” Wilson said. “On the whole, we’re a slow-growing state and many parts are actually losing population. But those same places still have a problem with sprawl.”

But taken as a whole, the popula-tion of the Bay region is both soar-ing and sprawling.

William Baker, president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, says that neither can be ignored when analyzing the Bay’s problems.

“The number of people is abso-lutely at the heart of environmen-tal degradation on this planet,”

Baker said. “And we consume more, which means that we pollute more.”

The complexity of the issue, combined with the limits of staff and financial resources, has led the CBF to emphasize growth management instead of growth itself. And according to Baker, those efforts usually don’t take top priority. “We have such egregious water quality violations that an organization like ours has got to practice triage and stem the immediate bleeding,” Baker said. “To me, that’s the responsible use of our members’ dollars.”

Baker said that dealing with growth management is a daunting task. Despite local-level success

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Land Use & Development

in the Bay Region

The steady march of people into the Chesapeake Bay region has resulted in more roads, subdivisions and businesses to serve them.

Sprawl has transformed forest and farmland into large-lot subdivisions with unprecedented speed, creating long commutes for its new residents along with a diminished sense of place.

Streams and rivers, stripped of protective forests, are degraded by stormwater runoff.

More than 750,000 acres of forests fell to development between 1982 and 1997—an area 20 times the size of the District of Columbia.

Farmland has decreased around developing suburban counties.

When green space gives way to hard surfaces such as roads, rooftops and parking lots, greater amounts of polluted stormwater wash into waterways.

Aquatic organisms begin to feel the effect when impervious surfaces cover just 10–15 percent of a watershed.

This happens quite often in the Bay region: Between 1990 and 2000, impervious surfaces increased by 41 percent—250,000 acres—while the population grew by just 8 percent.

According to the Chesapeake Bay Program, stormwater runoff is the Bay’s fastest growing source of pollution.

— Lara Lutz

“Land development has grown at about five the rate

of the population. It’s not driven solely or even principally by population growth.”

— Donald BoeschPresident, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

stories, he believes the regional pic-ture is grim. He supports Horton’s call for a hard look at growth and its possible alternatives.

“Growth for growth’s sake is a Ponzi scheme doomed to failure,” Baker said. “It’s built on a house of cards.”

On the local level, growth is an emotionally charged issue that of-ten pits economic interests against quality of life. Lines between the two are blurred. Farm families who value rural living also defend their ability to convert farmland into subdivisions, often for economic survival. Will more houses crowd the schools, or provide tax revenue to improve them?

On the regional level, the Chesa-peake Bay Program has similar problems. As a voluntary partner-ship that involves state, federal, and local governments, just talking about growth can be difficult.

Rich Batiuk, associate director for science with the EPA Chesa-peake Bay Program Office, said that confronting growth head-on has never met with success. “Growth is a very sensitive issue in the states. There is a huge diversity in how they make land use deci-sions, and they are concerned about the feds or others entities trying to deal with it.”

In 1988, a Bay Program report on population growth and devel-opment through the year 2020 sparked some discussion but not much else. The Bay Program’s Land, Growth, and Stewardship Subcommittee struggled to find ac-tive support.

A scientific committee produced another report, Chesapeake Fu-tures: Choices for the 21st Century,

which outlined the consequences of growth for the Bay. “We brought in some very smart folks for this report, and they did a phenomenal job. But it never really got a toe-hold,” Batiuk said. “The committee was frustrated.”

Since then, the Bay Program has worked with the U.S. Geological Survey on a land use model that can provide detailed growth sce-narios for all six states and the District of Columbia. The hope is that policymakers will use this in-formation to shape their decisions.

But avoidance is still at play.“Even with these tools in hand,

we’ve had some resistance from partners in using this informa-tion to look out to the year 2030,” Batiuk said. “They ask, why do we need to add one more level of com-plexity on a subject that’s already very complex? Won’t this set the bar even higher?”

The publication of “Growing!

Growing! Gone!” has given Horton the chance to talk with citizens, local governments and the media about growth. Current economic woes, combined with long-standing worries about the environment, have opened the door for tough questions.

“Most people in the environmen-tal community are really glad that someone—not them—is bringing this up,” Horton said. “Even the scientists. They think we need to discuss this, and they are frustrated by their own inability to do it.”

Horton would like to see a task force explore what the region would be like with a steady-state economy.

Author Peter Victor produced a similar study for Canada in his book, “Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster.” In March, a sustainable develop-ment commission in the United

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7 Bay Journal reprint from may 2009

Photo / Dave Harp

8 Bay Journal reprint from may 2009

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Kingdom issued “Prosperity With-out Growth?,” which Daly said is the first government statement to take the question seriously.

No such work exists for the Bay region or the United States as a whole.

Horton also suggests build-out analyses on the local level, to show how current growth rates would impact schools, roads, budgets and overall quality of life.

Without changing course, popu-lation growth and development will ultimately overwhelm the best attempts to reduce pollution in the Bay from other sources.

But is it possible to challenge the basic concept of growth and its deep ties to U.S. culture? “In the past, that kind of debates has been considered taboo,” Batiuk said. “But it’s one we need to have.”

Economists say that transition-ing to a steady-state would take decades. A sudden switch would be disastrous—both unwise and un-necessary.

It begins, Daly said, with a dif-ferent vision of the world, one in which the human economy is part of the global ecosystem and “shar-ing” is a live concept. It also means

respecting boundaries. Daly cites the “cap-and-trade” systems for pollution management, and the idea of a carbon tax, as small inroads.

Boesch thinks that ideas like these, driven by the need to re-duce global warming, are making the concept of sustainability more mainstream. Governments might take action on global warming that will in turn change our approach to growth.

“We can think growth as the refinement and improvement of our society and our lives,” Boesch said. “If we can have the debate on that, and get people thinking of growth in those terms, it changes the equation. But it takes a different mind-set of how we view and value growth.”

After more than two decades, the Chesapeake region’s Pogo prob-lem remains unsolved. If it doesn’t finally seize this challenge, Horton predicts that growth will kill our collective quality of life and take the Bay down with it.

“I think there are plenty of economists out there who can tell you that growth is not the answer to poverty, it’s not the answer to affordable housing, and it’s not the answer to environmental prob-lems,” Horton said. “So let’s ana-lyze whether growth is good or not and try to envision our lives with-out growth as the prime directive.”

“Growing! Growing! Gone! The Chesapeake Bay and the Myth of Endless Growth” (August 2008) is available online from the Abell Foundation at www.abell.org, un-der the Publications/Library Link. Printed copies are available by contacting Wanda Gresham at 410-547-1300 or gresham@abell.org.

Growth from page 3“Americans are

about a twentieth of the world’s population.

Yet we consume a quarter or more

of the world’s natural resources, and generate

similarly disproportionate amounts of pollution.

Daily, with our large appetites for fossil fuels, we burn

about the same number of calories–186,000–

as a mature sperm whale”

— Donald BoeschPresident, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science