Water's Way: Thinking Like a Watershed (2021)

soaking mists

to gully washing thunderstorms

april showers

to autumn nor'easters

rain falls as it always has

but the landscapes that receive it the

path rain takes

the speed at which it runs off have

changed dramatically

[Music]

consider water's way throughout the vast

basin of chesapeake bay

some 40 rivers and

thousands of creeks feeding the great

estuary from across nearly a sixth of

the east coast

this is the watershed

every drop of rain that falls on 64 000

square miles heads one way bayward

and the chesapeake which appears so long

and broad

is in context just a smallish and

shallow pool of water on the receiving

end of everything 18 million people

in six states in the district of

columbia do with the land for good or

ill

technological controls on bay pollution

from sewage autos and factories

have made modest progress

but it's clear this will not be enough

to achieve a healthy bay

further progress must come from the

lands of the watershed from better

understanding of what was water's way

in the chesapeake basin when the bay was

clearer cleaner healthier

[Music]

the title of this film derives

from a man who shot a wolf on a mountain

in arizona a century ago

also from a beaver i executed much more

recently on a tidal tributary of the

chesapeake

neither aldo leopold nor i yet grasped

the wisdom of the natural landscape we

did not think ecologically

leopold would become known as the father

of wildlife ecology

but back in his trigger happy days like

most hunters of his era

he thought that fewer wolves meant more

deer that no wolves at all would mean

hunter's paradise

years later he re-evaluated this in a

classic essay called thinking like a

mountain only the mountain has been

around long enough to know what the howl

of a wolf really means

and that

deer run in mortal fear of the wolf

but the mountain is in mortal fear of

the deer and the idea of that is that if

you take wolves out of the landscape the

deer population increases

and they start to eat everything around

them

and then hence we have more erosion we

have less food and cover for other

wildlife

[Music]

while beavers are not predators

you can make a similar argument

that preserving a creature that people

eradicate is a critical part of

preserving a healthy diverse

rich biological ecosystem and natural

environment

i only saw my hapless beaver as a sharp

toothed rodent chiseling down newly

planted trees

threatening to dam up the creek and

flood my newly acquired property

i did not appreciate how her species for

thousands of years

had transformed the north american and

chesapeake landscape to an extent

rivaled only by modern humans and in a

profoundly more affirming way

i was not thinking like a watershed

millions of beaver ponds and dams once

sponsored a lush mosaic of wetlands

throughout the chesapeake region

these slowed and spread and retained

water flowing to the bay from every

creek and river

letting it soak in and percolate through

the ground

this bay of beavers damped the flooding

of the fiercest storms elevated the

water table to feed creeks through seeps

and springs during the worst droughts

lent a resilience and stability to the

whole system

this pre-colonial landscape was not just

greener more forested than today's it

was wetter

a watershed more accurately described as

a water keep

and these lavishly beavered lands

afforded splendid habitat with all

manner of fish and fowl and amphibians

the water that slowly escaped to the bay

through forests and wetlands was clean

and clear beyond present day imagining

because beavers have been gone so long

we trapped them out of the chesapeake

watershed by 1750

there's almost an ecological amnesia

as to the the benefits they conferred

the world they created to how the

watershed in effect thought

modern humans have thought so very

differently

creatures the dry land we embrace the

straight line and live at right angles

to the earth we pave and channel ditch

and drain

the faster rain swooshes off our

cityscapes and crop lands the better no

time for water to soak in recharge the

shallow aquifers

the upshot has been a massive load of

sediments and fertilizers and chemicals

to the chesapeake estuary which has

become murky and devoid in oxygen as a

result

water's way gets simplified

nature's symphony moves towards single

loud notes

stability and resilience and biological

diversity are diminished flood and

drought are exacerbated

one two three in the 1970s grace brush a

paleo ecologist at johns hopkins

university we have a kit that extracts

dna began to extract yards-long muddy

cylinders from the bay's bottom

sediments

unlocking a whole library of the

estuaries past a record going back a

thousand years and more

oh that's great sediment is always being

eroded off the land and it gets

deposited in wet areas ponds lakes

estuaries and so on

and it just piles up

year after year after year

so each one of those layers of sediment

contains

what i'm calling hydroglyphics here but

they're really actually fossils fossils

of small animals fossils of pollen

grains seeds many many

entities that get preserved in that

sediment

at a certain depth in the core for

example a shift from oak to ragweed

pollen corresponded to the beginnings of

colonial agriculture as forests gave way

to the ax and the plow

similarly shifts from pollens of swamp

plants to dry land plants

showed the drying out of the beavered

landscape as humans trapped them for fur

after we began to accumulate some

evidence from the sediment cores

we began to integrate that into some

pictures of what the bay might look like

in the pre-colonial time it was forested

and it had all of these wet areas many

of them created by these beavers

by the late 17th

to the early 18th century the beavers

were gone

then we get to the late 19th to early

20th century and that's when

80 of the forests were deforested

so we have

a lot more forest now than we had in the

early 1900s

but there's still a lot of agricultural

land

and also paving has started so this land

that is

not forested is paved a lot of hard

surfaces

so you're getting a lot more runoff into

the bay this transformation of its

watershed led directly to today's

degraded chesapeake bay

whose astoundingly shallow water

drains a region from new york nearly to

north carolina and as a result is more

impacted by land use than any comparable

body of water on earth

instead of the water seeping through a

forest floor of litter

and leaves and twigs and so on the water

now is just flowing off

on these hard surfaces

and going into the estuary and carrying

with it

many many

substances fertilizers sediment and so

on

[Music]

if i were the chop tank the eastern

shore's biggest river

it's on nick carter's place i'd want to

be born to start my journey to the bay

nick has spent nearly half a century

renaturing his patch of the watershed

it's one of many places the shop tank

gets its start but it is the very nicest

nick does think like a watershed

in fact you can step off this driveway

where we're now walking step off just a

few feet and you'll find how much softer

how much more pervious

that ground is you can feel it as soon

as you step off exactly amazing this is

what the earth ought to feel like

without the influences of man

this is

exemplary

of everything

from the mississippi to the atlantic

coast

as it was before the europeans got here

all the tributaries to the bay

were shielded and guarded and stabilized

by the forest

without this

foreign

far greater transmission of water

so the more water you got running off

the more nitrogen you lose the more

phosphorus you lose

the phosphorus and nitrogen and the

runoff from the land cause explosive

growth of algae in the bay that blocks

light and consumes oxygen both of these

harmful to aquatic life

those nutrients if retained on the land

build fertility support life and

splendid diversity

in those early days before colonization

when we had a very wet watershed

the watershed was taking care of the

nitrogen it was recycling the nitrogen

and so

once that was

drained you had all of this nitrogen no

longer going back into the atmosphere

but just being washed off into the bay

you could cut down a tree you can plant

a new tree but it's going to be 10 to 12

years

minimum before it's going to produce

seeds and start a new generation

so the thing that happened

with the clearing of the forest

was that you had

eventually only these organisms like

dandelions on the land that that have a

generation time of a year so they'll

just come back and come back and the

same in the water the fish and crabs and

so on that have a long generation time

of years

they just can't make it

they're replaced

by these

very small organisms bacteria

diatoms

and so on one cell that have a

generation time of a day or a few days

and that was a terrific change

i said this transformation of the land

from forest to farms and hard services

and the rapid rate at which it occurred

was one of the great ecological

phenomena in human history it would have

enormous repercussions for the estuary

that drained these altered lands

so it was an enormous change in a very

short period of time

development nowadays comes with a host

of mandatory controls to mitigate the

quantity and quality of the storm water

caused by more paving

more intense rainfalls driven by climate

change lend an urgency to this

ellicott city gets a combination of

river flooding from the patapsco river

that runs

right at the top of it but it also has

watershed flooding

from the three square miles of urban

development

upstream in 2016 and 2018

we had storm events that dropped about

six inches of rainfall in less than two

hours

in each case they were

thunderstorms and just kept training

over the same area

and the streams couldn't handle it and

so it went overground and ran down the

street to a depth of five to six feet

washing hundreds of cars into the

patapsco

and regrettably the loss of the several

lives between the two floods

it devastated the downtown

business district and closed for many

months while they were

trying to repair the basic

infrastructure

hiking the slopes above ellicott city

schuler explains how local development

has degraded a small stream and

contributed to the flooding

if you have really good eyes you can see

the

sewer manhole stack

in the foreground right there which was

never intended to be put in the middle

of the stream so all that sediment

erosion has eroded and gone down to the

river

again being pushed by that powerful

force of urban storm water and this sort

of single thread stream that we see

in modern times

is not what we would see back then we'd

see a multiple thread stream with a lot

of different shoots and

things like that

a lot of our scientists are revealing to

us

what those

historic streams were like that are just

a lot different from what we see

in 2021

so we're on the banks of the new cut now

and this gives you a good sense of what

we contend with here in the watershed

which is a willingness to pave and

develop right up to almost the very

banks of these streams as they descend

down into main street ellicott city

and maybe one or two developments that

doesn't make a difference but this is a

death by a thousand cut

a thousand new cuts on this new cup

branch and the consequence of that over

and over again along the length of every

single one of these streams that ends

and bottoms on main street

is devastating

there is a fatalistic approach to the

old ellicott city watershed that is we

have destroyed this watershed to such an

extent that you should allow us to

continue to destroy that last little bit

of it that's left those last forested

acres those last steep slopes that last

stream bank that's not already scoured

covered in riprap destroyed that

non-functional floodplain

as we studied a lot of streams we

realized that very low levels of

impervious cover somewhere around 5 to

10 percent

in a watershed was enough to begin

degrading and diminishing the quality

of urban streams and to put 10 percent

in perspective that's pretty

rural development like one acre lot

subdivisions

and after about 25 percent impervious

cover

much of stream health degrades uh

completely we call them non-supporting

streams

baltimore washington dc are like 70 to

80 impervious cover

again that iron law of imperviousness is

very hard to repeal

the

sheer magnitude of the impacts are

really hard to

fix

with one practice

and so we have to take more of a

holistic

watershed approach

where we try to

restore all the elements that make

an aquatic ecosystem work the riparian

forests

the wetlands along the stream corridor

in some cases

the stream

itself

so that's kind of the challenge that we

face now in the next generation of how

we can bring back

our urban streams

and make better progress against the

ravages of impervious cover

agricultural lands across the bay

watershed have shrunk dramatically often

because of development in the last

century

but the intensity of farming has leaped

as chemical fertilizers pesticides and

weed killers per acre have multiplied

also the manure from animal operations

that have grown larger and more

concentrated

the sheer extent of agriculture and its

intensity have made it the single

largest source of bay pollution

in recent decades farmers have begun to

surround their fields with forested

buffers and wetlands

and border their ditches with vegetative

cover to intercept the movement of

sediment manure and chemicals into

waterways

yeah i'm trey hill i own and operate

harborview farms with my father we have

farms that we till in talbot county kent

and cecil counties

i'm a strong believer in the buffers

a buffer is is trying to take land out

of production that's really close

to environmentally sensitive areas

the easiest example that would be like

if you're farming next to a river

with the conservation services done

they'll pay us rent

on land if we take a certain amount of

that out of production

and what they'll do is they'll also pay

us to plant native vegetation

switch grass big blue stem little blue

stem things like that that have really

deep root systems

and we don't fertilize it so it's

wildlife habitat but also when anything

comes off the field it acts as a filter

before it goes to the river

winter plantings of so-called cover

crops is another practice farmers are

adopting to reduce runoff

cover crops are sown to suck up

fertilizers still in the shallow

groundwater after cash crops are

harvested

keep nitrogen and phosphorus from

running into the bay

similarly planting without plowing to

minimize runoff is becoming widespread

since agriculture first started people

have tilled the soil to take care of

weeds

in other words when you run a rotary hoe

in your garden for example now when we

plant our crops we don't do that at all

we plant into soil just as it is by not

loosening that soil by not disturbing it

we get a lot less erosion a lot less

runoff yeah people ask me how much

farther can we go how much better can we

be at environmental cleanup

and it's easy for me to think that we've

we've finished right we're at the end of

the road like we've done everything we

can do

but then i think back to when i was 30

and i thought the same thing

and the way i farm now

is completely different than i did 15

years ago

so all i can do is hope that 15 years

from now i'm farming completely

different than i am now

[Music]

my husband robert fry and i run st

bridget's farm in kent county

kennedyville maryland it's 62 acres we

milk 60 jersey cows with a robot which

we put in three years ago

when we bought the farm it was all in

wheat and it had been a rotational

standard wheat bean corn

system we tried to grow some corn silage

for a year we grew some annuals but

after many failed experiments we decided

to put everything into permanent pasture

everybody knows that permanent pasture

is the best practice for water quality

and

erosion control and so you have a living

root year round

there's no bare soil

if there's a water event we have a

culvert that goes down along our fence

line

and you can literally see the water from

our land is clear and the water from the

tilled the ground is brown

and it's clear as day

we have about

19 paddocks in this

this section of fields about a little

over 20 acres so the reason to separate

the paddock is to promote soil health

really you don't want to have the cows

grazing the new growth all the time

we've just been destroying soil for

years we haven't been replenishing soil

when my dad was farming in the 50s they

never talked about it and it's only been

recent that people started talking about

soil health okay let's go the economic

system in which we are working rewards

uniformity simplicity speed

and size

it doesn't reward supporting beaver dams

it doesn't reward

doing things to get more birds on your

farm

the wrong things are being rewarded in

our system

some of the earliest signs of

agriculture's impact on the bay and

grace brush's sediment course

involved ditching to drain croplands

turning streams and swamps into straight

channels designed for a single purpose

it was

amazing

that that pollen

changed

from totally wet plants

to almost entirely dry plants almost

immediately at the time of colonization

the land became dry very quickly

and that's when i began to look at the

ditches

that changed the land very very quickly

and also

uh changed the water very quickly

because then you got all this stuff

coming into the bay very very quickly

generally farmers like to see water move

off the land but in a ditch project like

this we're trying to do both so it's

designed in a way to hold and convey

water in a way that doesn't hurt crops

growing will also achieve our water

quality and also habitat goals i mean

we're

literally 500 yards from an active farm

field

and transitioning from a ditch to a

natural stream channel

i often take my students on a special

part of the nanticoke river

to illustrate water's way the human

approach versus nature's

the river one of the wildest and

loveliest in the bay begins as a

man-made ditch constructed to perform

one vital duty

quickly draining storm water off the

flat corn and bean fields of the

watershed

we are just now leaving the ditch the

straight line the single purpose

just beginnings of seeing nature

reassert itself

but where ditch maintenance stops

the universal tendency of free-flowing

water to wander to curve and loop

quickly asserts itself you see how those

branches start to catch debris and

that'll form a little

jut out that'll cause the water to start

to bend and

start to return it to its natural shape

here the meandering complex river serves

no one purpose just promotes life and

all its beauty and diversity nature

comes back pretty quick if you let it go

not far off on the pocomoke river

there's been another encouraging

reconciliation

this impressive restoration by the

nature conservancy along with state and

federal agencies

has leveled old dikes to reconnect the

river with nearly seven square miles of

flood plain wetlands humans acting like

beavers

spreading the water out letting it take

its time to the bay

so the goal is to bring the flood plain

elevation which is back here straight

across

so that when we get the storm events the

the water has the opportunity to go into

the flood plain filter in there during

the event so the breaches act as the

inlet outlet during the storm events

it was channelized in the 30s and 40s

for agriculture purposes so the farmers

in the area could drain their bag fields

quicker

we're allowing it to kind of act and

meander like it did once 70 years ago

you know we're permanently protecting

land we're increasing habitat we're

increasing water quality so everything

that had the opportunity to go out to

the bay before now has the chance to

come in here on field trade before it

gets into our system and now listen to

the chesapeake

another example of helping water relearn

its natural ways

is on the smithsonian environmental

research center's large tract of forest

and wetlands on the rhode river south of

annapolis maryland

so this is muddy creek the north branch

of muddy creek this

channel here

was deeply incised i was cut down it

looked like a drainage ditch

in some places there were 10 or 12 feet

between the flood plain and the bottom

of this stream channel

and the reason it got eroded like that

is because of the single culvert

that carries the water under the road

and you can see it looks kind of like a

big pool

before it looked like a drainage ditch

there's a berm that's been constructed

just downstream

of me

and that now deflects the water out over

this flood plain

and this this part was was dry before

now it's a wetland

about 80 percent of all the development

out there has been already done with

poor environmental practices

so we've been spending millions and

millions every year

to restore this restore the streams

retrofit storm water practices

create wetlands

get back some of those habitat

features we lost

it's a slow chugging train it's a huge

job it's multi-billions

and multi-decades to do

meanwhile we keep developing

we don't

need

expensive programs

to save the land and the day

you just need a whole lot less people

doing a whole lot less modification of

the land

what we let this land do

is about as low budget as you can

possibly get because it didn't cost us a

nickel to let this forest grow back up

we've lost more than half the

chesapeake's original wetlands

lost some 40 percent of its forests

forests and wetlands are the watersheds

least polluting land uses and they're

just beautiful

but thinking like a watershed doesn't

stop at the water's edge

on the bay's bottom the remaining one

percent of oysters are nowadays valued

for their services to clean water and

provide habitat in the reefs they build

no longer just regarded for the price

they fetch per bushel

similarly remaining meadows of

underwater seagrasses that struggle for

light in the modern murky bay

are now prized for providing oxygen and

for nurturing a variety of aquatic life

including blue crabs who seek their

protection to molt and grow

but putting all these ecosystem

valuations into protective restorative

action

remains very much a work in progress not

nearly enough

restoration goals set by federal and

state governments throughout the bay

watershed were badly missed in 2010

the revised deadlines set for 2025 are

by no means assured of success

the solutions going forward will

increasingly lie with the land with

learning to think like a watershed with

relearning water's old ways

rather than pushing it rapidly away

downstream

in reconfiguring the landscape and the

way it sheds water

slowly leanly cleanly clearly

lies the bay's future

lies our future

[Music]

could a small brained compulsive rodent

castor canadensis the beaver be a key

so we're in the long green creek

watershed

in baltimore county flows to the lower

gun powder and then eventually the lower

gun powder flows into the chesapeake bay

1993 this valley was a cow pasture

virtually no trees in sight there was no

shade for the stream the banks on this

stream were eroding in a sort of an

accelerated fashion so we got some small

grants to do some live staking where we

put willows and dogwoods into the stream

banks and some of them would sprout and

turn into trees

and way back when we didn't know it but

that was going to be beaver food later

on as those

willows matured

we put an easement on this ground the

landowners

set this aside as a natural area

for years after that they would trap the

beaver out um because

they thought that you know the beaver

eating the trees was a bad thing

over time

what we all started to find out was that

if you left the beaver alone there was

so much more wildlife here that's why

you call beaver the keystone species

everything else benefits by allowing the

beaver to come in and alter the

landscape

we installed a flow management device

which allowed some control to the land

owners about how deep this water was

going to get and how high the dams were

going to get

so it gave them some control

reduced the flooding on the farm road

and uh over the last three years we've

seen this area transform again and again

and again

as the beavers increase their numbers

and make this habitat you know what you

see today which is really sort of a

narnia type wetland for wildlife

i live in the catoctin mountains of

northern frederick county

we're at

1500 feet elevation here

the first beaver arrived

in march four years ago and that was

herbert and the first evidence was a

little dam where the pond overflows

14 months after he got here bieber came

dashing out of the thicket into the

wetland into the pond and

i thought that's not the way herbert

would normally act later on we realized

that was the female we named her

sherbert

the next spring they had three

baby beavers in the lodge they built

over there

and last year

they had three more babies in the lodge

they had on the island in this pond from

the very beginning of herbert arriving

here

you know i posted pictures of herbert

and then herbert and sherbert and the

babies and i tell you as much as i wish

that my posts on climate change and

other things got as much attention as

those do they have been the most popular

thing that i i post for the most part

there are just so many benefits to

having beavers for wildlife for water

quality they catch a tremendous amount

of sediment that would otherwise get to

the binoxi river or the bay

they clean and filter water they help to

recharge groundwater which keeps springs

active and flowing for more of the year

because of that

when we create a world that's better for

beavers it has

uh tremendous ancillary

benefits and impacts for human community

and society

i'm looking out at this beautiful pond

that was created in 1990

by some beavers that moved in

unexpectedly and built a dam

and they're long gone but

the pond remains

and we discovered that the the pond

and the beaver dam were stopping

nutrients and sediments from going down

the stream because we have a stream

monitoring station

that monitoring station was running

since the mid-1970s

the beaver dam was built in 1990 15

years after we started monitoring

and then we waited another five or ten

years and looked at the data and we

could see the effects of the of the dam

from comparing before and after and this

pond is still here

[Music]

living with beavers can take some effort

my wife cleo braver and i moved here in

around 1997

from baltimore

and just fell in love with the place

put in 18 acres of wetlands and 20 acres

of border of the fields and then turned

it into an organic vegetable operation

let a lot of the property

essentially go back to nature

the pond that we were by right here

was here when we got here

it was full of fish and and attracted a

lot of wildlife and eventually attracted

some beavers

we first started noticing small trees

disappearing

and

every now and then a little bit of a

larger tree and then we spotted them

the pipe is to keep the pond at a

certain level

and keep it from overflowing in big

rains

as i understand

there's only one thing a beaver can't

stand and that's flowing water

so

they would continue to block the pipe

i would unblock it

they would block it

i would unblock it

they would block it

i would unblock it

so far i've been keeping score

i think it's beavers about 100 and ali

about zero

we actually enjoy having the beavers

here and watching what they do

they're incredible little creatures

and uh incredibly busy

there's other resistance to beavers

trout enthusiasts as one example worry

that beaver ponds will raise

temperatures in the cold water that

their favorite sports species requires

as opposed to dams that we would

build

beaver dams are generally porous so

you've got water coming out of the

bottom

you've got water coming out of the

middle

you've got these side channels

which are great for fish passage

so

fish evolved with these beaver dams in

place so they're able to find these

little nooks and crannies through the

dam

you can even kind of shoot your hand all

the way through and get to the other

side so salmon and trout and other

species of fish

can get through these dams and you know

these gravels below the dam this is a

great spot for spawning

so i'm hoping that this dam increases in

size over time

and what that's going to do is shoot

water out across a greater width and

spread this energy out even more

there's a lot of places in frederick

county where beavers would happily move

into

streams that they would damn ponds that

they would move into but there's a

difference between that and places where

people welcome them

or or coexist with them and so there's

only two ways that that can happen one

is that you have areas that are big

enough and wild enough

so that beaver activity is part of a

bigger landscape in a five or ten

thousand acre park or something like

that or

people choose to put some effort into

coexisting with them and that's what

we've done here

between this area near our house and

pond and over where the other three

ponds are uh between this method some

other methods and chicken wire have

probably saved about

five or six hundred trees from the

beavers

so it's basically kind of the deal we've

struck with the beaver it's like

although really he's sort of forced to

comply

i save two trees which i walk by all the

time so i can reinforce it more if i

need to

and

they get all the rest of the beech trees

right around here

if we give beavers the space practice

peaceful coexistence

they will repay the favor with a better

bay than humans alone could ever achieve

or afford

it is no stretch to imagine a

science-based formula for giving

pollution credits or cash payments to

landowners who welcome beavers

we're on winless run

in baltimore county

this is a urban watershed

seen a lot of development in the

watershed over the last 20 years

the beaver

may have come in from the the bay they

may have come in from white marsh run

but they found this habitat ideal

and as you can see they've they've made

quite a home here

the pond is 10 to 20 acres in size think

about it this pond

treats all this urban runoff all the

same runoff that we're spending

you know millions if not billions of

dollars

to try and mitigate and improve water

quality in the chesapeake bay

and the beavers are here doing a lot of

that heavy lifting for us for free

and it makes a lot of sense to me as a

you know someone who's been in the

restoration

uh practice for the last 30 years that

maybe the answer to restoring the bait

doesn't include a lot of rocks and logs

and man-made ponds but just sort of

honoring the ecosystem services

of

this furry little rodent who used to be

here in the millions but was trapped out

you know way back when before

any of us ecologists were walking around

the landscape taking notes

so if you think about it you know

beavers

are really

they're really a big part of our history

in this country but they're not part of

our culture

learning to appreciate and live with a

creature whose ecological vision

diverges from our own

will require us to think more like a

watershed to understand what was once

water's preferred way upon and through

the landscape

and how that translated into a

chesapeake now imperiled by near amnesia

of what once was

a chesapeake also that will increasingly

need more stability and resilience

across its landscapes to offset the ever

wilder swings of flood and drought that

will come with climate change

and the impacts of a population we

blindly assume can keep growing without

limit

aldo leopold in his book sand county

almanac published back in the 1940s

worried about the trend of a nation

newly in love with the automobile to

thrust

roads into the loveliest parts of the

american wilderness

far better he said

to build appreciation for unspoiled

wilderness into the still unlovely human

mind

just so with learning to appreciate and

emulate water's way upon a once and

perhaps future chesapeake

if we can learn to develop in ways that

let water soak in

minimize farm runoff into our rivers and

streams

reconnect our ditches and stream

channels to their broader flood plains

let water spread out

meander more as nature intended

then we might just might

experience once again a watershed

resilient to flood and drought

and a chesapeake clean and clear

[Music]

[Music]

long before i was made in the depths of

the earth he knew of my long

fashioned my birth with a passion to

journey out over the sea

this vision

flowing and free

this dark fertile land will surely

reveal

a place to believe

the passions we feel the wings of the

morning the cup of his hand

nourish the longing in this dark river

land nourish the longing in this dark

river land

singing us us

south seven

[Music]

changed

[Music]

[Music]

oh

[Music]

you