Water
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I have spent a lot of my volunteering time helping to monitor and improve the local rivers.  This is part of one huge effort - Save the Bay - which is the biggest in the eastern USA.  The Chesapeake Bay is the estuary of several large rivers, not only in Virginia, but all the way north to New York state.  It is a huge watershed of 64,000+ sq.mi (166,000+ sq.km) with 17+ million people covering part or all of 6 US states and the District of Columbia.  [For comparison, this is 30% larger than the whole of England.]  Most of the water comes into the bay via the Susquehanna River from New York and Pennsylvania.  We live on the southernmost tributary, the James River, which is 348 mi (560 km) to 444 mi (715 km), depending on where you start measuring, and itself has a watershed of 10,000+ sq.mi (27,000+ sq.km).  [For comparison, this is about 1/5 of England or 1/3 of Scotland.]

Captain John Smith (famously saved by Pocahontas) led explorations around the Chesapeake in the first decade of the 17th century and documented the environment of the bay.  In comparison, surveys of the bay from the 1960s and 1980s judged that the overall ecological health of the bay was about 20% compared to Smith's reports.  With the Save the Bay effort, the goal is to reach 50% by the mid-2020s; in 2018, it was up to 33%.

Clean river and bay water is important for very many reasons, of course.  This starts with the extent of the harvested food: crabs, fish, oysters, etc., and its healthy consumability, all the way through to the health of recreational water activities.

Note that I will be helping monitor water health on four rural watersheds flowing into the James.  The four (Rivanna, Hardware, Rockfish, and Tye) watersheds combined are about as extensive as the (Gwy) Wye in Wales and England!

Gareth Hunt, 08 April 2020