Following Gore's Lead, Ex-Senator Uses Slides to Push Bay Cleanup
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 6, 2007
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.
Those who have seen the slide show say they found it powerful -- even if it is the length of a Hollywood epic.
"Whatever he has to say, he often takes a long time to say," said state Sen. Brian E. Frosh (D-Montgomery). "But he knows his stuff, he's passionate, he's right."
Winegrad's next presentation is scheduled for Sept. 20 at 6:30 p.m. at Downs Park in Pasadena.
Last Wednesday, seven people -- including two teachers from Anne Arundel Community College and an activist for preserving open space -- gathered to watch the show on the deck of Winegrad's home in Oyster Harbor.
From the waterfront spot southeast of Annapolis, they could see ospreys overhead and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in the distance.
He began by ticking off the slow or nonexistent improvements in pollution control and in efforts to bring back populations of blue crabs and oysters. Winegrad's show, "The Chesapeake Bay: An Imperiled Treasure and the Inconvenient Truths About Its Recovery," immediately struck a somber tone.
"Look at that trend," he said, as a chart on the laptop screen showed the bay's water becoming muddier over the years. "There's no way to put a happy face on this stuff."
Winegrad then outlined his proposed solutions. He wants a law that will order "no net loss" of forests across the Chesapeake's 64,000-square-mile watershed, because the woods don't cause the pollution problems that farms and suburbs do. Any trees chopped down would have to be replaced by new ones somewhere else, he said.
"The bay cannot be restored without radical land-use reform," Winegrad said.
In the slide shows, he also proposes a tougher approach to farm runoff. Instead of allowing farmers a choice about adopting measures to reduce polluted runoff, Winegrad thinks the state should mandate such action but help farmers with funding.
Both of these policies would be major changes even in Maryland, a state with a relatively "green" reputation. Neither would be easy to enact or implement, said Ann Pesiri Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission. She said farmers probably would rebel against the cost of making mandated changes, and a "no net loss" regulation on forests would be difficult to enforce.
Still, Swanson said that Winegrad makes an important point about the unfulfilled promises of bay cleanup.
"He's recognizing," she said, "that there is an enormous gap between what we need to do, and what we are able to do."
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