Letter from Leadership: Protection or restoration? How about both!

Written by Mark Bryer, Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Chesapeake Bay Program

It’s a false dilemma we’ve all heard before: “You’re either with me, or you’re against me.” In the case of the Chesapeake, we often run into a less pugnacious, but similarly false, contradiction when we talk about protecting or restoring the Bay, its rivers and streams and the lands that surround them. To be sure, there are pristine healthy watersheds that need a focus on protection, as well as severely degraded areas that need a lot of restoration. But in reality, the vast majority of waters and lands across the Bay region need efforts that both restore and protect, so that we’re bringing back clean water, healthy habitats, and opportunities to enjoy nature, while ensuring we don’t lose the ones we already have.

The January announcement of funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers a great opportunity to put this potent combination into practice. Through its new Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) nine projects across the Bay’s watershed will receive nearly $25 million. This funding will deliver restoration and protection in key areas across the Bay’s watershed, bringing a renewed focus to critical areas of the region and new partnerships.

One funded project, the Delmarva Conservation Partnership—co-led by The Nature Conservancy and the Delaware-Maryland Agribusiness Association—offers a unique collaboration between conservation organizations, agribusinesses, government agencies and the scientific community. This partnership focuses on a holistic approach to target conservation practices—ones that both restore and protect—that will achieve the greatest outcomes. In the Choptank, Nanticoke, and Pocomoke river watersheds, partners will work together to connect improved management practices in agricultural fields, with over 1,500 acres of wetland restoration and protection.

The natural world is an interconnected system: the actions we take to build the health of our local lands and waterways go on to benefit the water, land, air and living resources throughout the watershed. When our efforts are similarly interconnected—by including both protection and restoration—we can better ensure our work benefits the health and resilience of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and all of us who depend upon it.