The group has learned it needs to find common ground with developers to get results. It depends on how well we manage sprawl. The economic prosperity and increasing human population that fuel sprawl are having a profound effect on water quality in general and the Chesapeake Bay in particular, conservationists say. Current population growth is accelerating at about 300 people per day. About 18 million people are expected to live in the watershed by 2020.
More people means more houses, businesses, miles behind the wheel and roads.
And as Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia and the federal government work to lighten the impact of farming and sewage discharges on the bay, the effects of the region's growing population are becoming more pronounced. That is where groups such as the Friends of the Rappahannock come in, Matuszeski noted. The Friends, in coordination with another environmental group, The Center for Watershed Protection, are working with developers and government officials in the Fredericksburg region to protect the Rappahannock. Some 90,000 acres of farm, forest and wetlands are developed each year within the bay watershed, according to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group. If the Rappahannock River and Chesapeake Bay are to be preserved as healthy systems, the amount of concrete and pavement that growth generates must be reduced, said Tom Schueler, director of the Washington-based Center for Watershed Protection.