For Chesapeake, a Few Inconvenient Truths

Following Gore's Lead, Ex-Senator Uses Slides to Push Bay Cleanup

A former Maryland state senator -- upset with the continued pollution of the Chesapeake Bay is taking his message on the road with an Al Gore-style environmental slide show about the "inconvenient truths" of bay cleanup efforts.

Gerald W. Winegrad (D), who left the Senate in 1995, has presented the slide show more than a dozen times. The audiences, totaling 100 people since May, have included top officials at state agencies, environmental groups such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and members of the public.

Despite a massive government effort dating to 1983, the bay's problems with pollution, "dead zones" and vanishing wildlife have improved little. To reverse these trends, Winegrad is calling for stringent policies that would help preserve forests and require farmers to deal with polluted runoff. Some observers say those ideas could face serious opposition. But Winegrad said he's compelled to push for change after decades of watching the bay's health decline.

"I just felt an obligation to go out and foster the change that needs to be done," he said. "People are telling me, 'You don't know how much difference you're making.' . . . I'm hearing, 'You need to keep this up.' "

Winegrad, 62, grew up in Annapolis, and fished and crabbed on nearby creeks with friends. He was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates from Anne Arundel County in 1978, and then to the state Senate in 1983.

During his years in Annapolis, Winegrad was known to some as the "environmental conscience" of the Senate for his work to preserve open land, reduce pollutants that harm the bay and ban fishing of the bay's decimated rockfish in the 1980s.

After retiring from the Senate, Winegrad taught university courses about the bay and worked for the American Bird Conservancy, a nonprofit group. Earlier this year, a reporter asked him to comment on recent government reports detailing the state of the bay.

What he saw outraged him, Winegrad said.

"The progress has been very sporadic, and the problems are even more great and hard to solve" since the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement was signed by local and federal officials in 1983, he said. The best that can be said, according to Winegrad, is that "things would have been a lot worse" if governments had not tried to help the Chesapeake.

For another person, in another era, the product of that frustration might have been a pamphlet, a petition or a protest. But not for Winegrad, and not after Gore's slide-show-turned-documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar and made climate change a mainstream topic.

Instead, Winegrad turned to PowerPoint.

He created a monster of a presentation that has grown to more than 80 slides -- many crowded with bar graphs and paragraphs of text. In contrast to Gore's film, which lasts 1 hour and 40 minutes, Winegrad's presentation can take two hours or more.