Doug Howe, a self-described “river rat,” grew up in Brunswick, a small town on the Potomac River. He’s old enough to remember when the river would freeze solid in the winter and families would go ice skating. Just 15 years ago, Doug tells me, the stretch of river below Brunswick boasted world class fishing. Now, he says, “the river is dying.”
When it rains, Doug sees the river run brown with sediment. He notices oil sheens in tributary creeks, and traces them to runoff from the town and the railyard. A formerly pristine tributary that locals call Dutchman’s Creek is silted up. “It used to be a paradise,” Doug says of that creek and the pastureland it ran through. Now, Dutchman’s Creek is surrounded by a new subdivision.
Doug’s story is a story of loss, and sadness and frustration come through as he tells it. It’s painful for me too, because Brunswick is the town I call home, and Doug is my neighbor. In the years I’ve lived here, I’ve oriented much of my life around the river. I rarely catch any fish, but I love foraging for pawpaws along the bank, cycling the C&O canal towpath with my partner, and wading in the shallows with my dog. For my fortieth birthday, I organized a DIY triathlon that started with a swim in the river and ended with a run along the towpath. A bald eagle flew overhead as we started the race.
Despite all that the Potomac River offers us—adventure, beauty, some degree of sustenance—I think Doug is right: it’s a shadow of its former self. Once, a long time ago, this river was healthy and abundant beyond our wildest dreams.
I’m starting this blog to explore the dream of rewilding the Potomac River and its watershed, and thereby restoring the river to health and abundance. My intention is to go beyond superficial explanations for the river’s decline, and instead to connect its health to deep patterns in our culture and society. Through a series of posts—some longer, some shorter—I’ll offer reflections on how we can shift these patterns and invite readers to join me in embracing new ways of being. Rather than shaming anyone, I’ll strive to offer a true invitation. The change that feels most meaningful to me, and that I’m most interested in promoting, is embraced joyfully.
Abundance is relative
One way to see the river’s decline is by comparing the condition of the most popular fishery in the middle stretches of the river, smallmouth bass, to its condition a few decades ago. Despite a vigorous stocking program, smallmouth bass numbers keep declining. State authorities point to unusually bad floods during 2018, but the fishery was already struggling before then, and since then it’s failing to recover. The problem is much bigger than one bad year.
Smallmouth bass isn’t native to the Potomac or other East Coast waterways, so it’s fair to question whether the abundance of that species is the best metric for assessing the health of the river. But the decline of smallmouth surely tells us something about the river’s capacity to sustain wildlife, especially since there’s no indication that the smallmouth’s niche is being filled by other species. Instead, the niche itself appears to be shrinking.
True, by some measures the health of the river has been improving in recent years. Organizations like the Potomac Conservancy, citing Environmental Protection Agency computer models, say the last few years have seen small reductions in the amount of pollution that’s reaching the river. These metrics, however, are very low-resolution—they are based on aggregate pollution estimates for the entire Potomac watershed—and it’s difficult to assess whether the improvements modeled for recent years are real and significant.
It’s easier to conclude with confidence that the health of the river improved in the late twentieth century. The Clean Water Act of 1972 ushered in major improvements in sewage treatment and industrial pollution management. On top of that, the Potomac watershed, like much of the East Coast, had growing forest cover after about 1920, and that regrowth accelerated markedly after 1950. The percentage of the watershed with forest cover is estimated to have reached 60% around 1980, from less than 30% in 1900. Brunswick itself powerfully illustrates those topographical changes. Photographs of Brunswick and the surrounding country from the beginning of the twentieth century show a denuded landscape with few trees, eroded slopes, and smoke-filled skies. Later the decline of local heavy industry, changes in agriculture, and the substitution of fossil fuels for biomass power allowed much of the forest to regenerate over the course of the century, around Brunswick and throughout the watershed. In combination with the improvements in control of water pollution, these land use changes reinvigorated the river. There was a lot more underwater vegetation, for example, in 1990 than there was during the 1960s and 70s. My neighbor Doug witnessed this healing of the river personally, and his memories of a thriving, fish-filled river in the 1990s contrast with his childhood memories of a river that was much more polluted.
But to me it feels unsatisfying to use the degraded mid-twentieth century river as the baseline for evaluating the river’s health today, because that leaves out of the conversation the much healthier, more vibrant river that came before. Instead, I like to look back to the Potomac River of hundreds of years ago. Taking that longer view not only gives a more accurate sense of the enormous scale of what’s been lost, but helps me envision a degree of health and abundance that might be possible again.
Indeed, the abundance of the Potomac River of centuries past is legendary. Early colonizers reported runs of shad and other herring in the lower Potomac so numerous that they imagined you might be able to walk across the river on the backs of the fish. Contemporary accounts from the 1830s indicate that a single haul could yield hundreds of thousands of herring—a fishery that’s long since closed—and the total Potomac River harvest during that decade is estimated at several billion herring per year. Native Americans referred to the place where Brunswick now stands as “Eel town” or “Eel pot”—a testament to the former abundance of the American eel, a keystone species that’s rare in the river today. And of course the health of an ecosystem is much more than the populations of a handful of species. The abundance of these fish populations, and their capacity to withstand wanton exploitation for decades, indicate a much larger web of health and resilience. American eels are a great example that I’ll return to in a future post. For now I’ll just note that they would have contributed to abundant mussel populations (because many mussels travel on eels during part of their lifecycle), in addition to providing food for people, ospreys, raccoons, herons, striped bass, and many other species.
What does the river need?
As Doug’s experience tells us, the Potomac River has healed before. Land use change and improved pollution management delivered cleaner water, rebounding plant communities, and thriving fish populations in the late twentieth century. But that truth sits alongside another one: that even the relatively healed river of the twentieth century remained in a tragically degraded state when viewed in comparison to its history, and thus its potential.
Which makes me wonder: Why has progress in healing the river stalled, and what would it take for the river to be truly healthy and abundant once more?
I can’t give a comprehensive answer to such a huge question here. But I have one answer that feels important, that I think provides a starting point. My answer began to take shape two years ago when, during a three-day ride I took with my partner along the river between Cumberland and Brunswick, I noticed a recurring feeling I couldn’t name. For personal reasons I plan to explore in a future post, I was emotionally raw during that trip, extra attuned to both my feelings and my partner’s. So I noticed, more easily than I normally would, how the river, landscape, and wildlife supported me, calmed my tingling nerves, eased my aching heart, and gently but powerfully reoriented me to beauty. In my vulnerability I was grateful for that. And then came the feeling I couldn’t name. Like generosity, but not a character trait, as that word implies. This feeling was contextual and relational, inseparable from my experience of the more-than-human life around me then and there. What I felt—motivated by a heady mix of gratitude for what had been given me and hope of deepening the relationship, melding our fortunes, healing and thriving together—was a powerful desire to give to the river.
The desire to give is a key component, I believe, of any healthy relationship, including a healthy relationship between humans and the world around us. The type of relationship it makes possible could be called reciprocity, mutuality, kinship, or love. As I’ll explain in the next post, this way of relating has been marginalized in our society, and most of us have little practice in allowing it to guide our behavior. But it is at the heart of our project here at Wild Potomac. It informs all of what’s to come.
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