Will Baker, an institution in mid-Atlantic environmental circles, is stepping down at the end of the month after four decades as head the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a tenure virtually unmatched in the nonprofit world.
During his time as president, the organization has grown into a regional environmental powerhouse, with a staff of 210 and about 300,000 members. CBF has helped to push through a series of laws — mainly in Maryland and Virginia— to protect wetlands and forests, require farmers to limit fertilizer use and curb waterfront development.
It has advocated for tighter catch limits on the Bay’s striped bass, oysters, crabs and menhaden, while pressing for increased state and federal funding to upgrade sewage treatment plants and pay farmers to limit runoff from their fields. It has sued polluting industries and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Water Act, and it has taught legions of youngsters and adults about the Bay.
Through it all, Baker has been there, insisting with seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm that the Bay can be saved and, lately, that this is its best and maybe last chance, if only political leaders can muster the will. Yet after all this time, the Bay is still not saved. In some important ways, it’s in better shape than it was 45 years ago. But it’s not back to anything like the natural bounty that English explorer John Smith found in the early 1600s. In November, Baker sat with Tim Wheeler, a senior reporter and editor at the Bay Journal, to discuss progress and pitfalls over the last four decades. (The below Q and A has been edited for length and clarity, and Tim Wheeler’s complete story on Baker’s legacy can be found here.)
Forty years is a long time to be head of any organization, much less a nonprofit. How did you do that?
You know, one day at a time. It doesn’t feel like 40 years. It has been extraordinarily rewarding. I feel like I’ve gotten so much more out of CBF than CBF has gotten out of me.
Tell me how you wound up at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
I got out of college, I was going to move to Washington. I had an apartment that I put a deposit down on, and I had a couple of leads on architecture firms. I was going to work for a year and then go to architecture school. So, the landlord calls and says, “I’m sorry, we’re going to send you your deposit back; we’ve rented it to somebody else.”
So, I started doing some freelance tree work. And I was working for a gentleman by myself, stupidly, way up in a tree. And he came out – I’ll never forget, it was mid June, late June, hotter than Hades – and he had a glass of iced tea that I looked down at. And he looked up and he said, “Will.” And I said, “Yes, Mr. Semans?” And he said, “Would you like to save the Bay?” And I said, “Yes, Mr. Semans, that would be fine.” And he said, “Come into the house and talk to me when you’re finished.”
He was a trustee [of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation]. He has been my mentor ever since. His name is Truman Semans [now a partner with the investment firm Brown Advisory]. He said, “I want you to go down to Annapolis and meet [then CBF executive director] Arthur Sherwood. I did that, and Arthur gave me a job as assistant to the director.
What did that job entail?
Oh my god. I sat in a chair next to Arthur’s secretary and did whatever she asked me, which was often going to get her sandwiches.
But within about 2 or 3 months, I was on the payroll full time. I can’t remember what I got paid, probably 10,000 bucks or something. And I started doing media stuff and the newsletter and press releases. By 1981 I was made interim Executive Director. …And then there was a national search. I was not a candidate. After about 3 or 4 months of working literally 7 days a week…I said, I can do this. And I threw my hat in the ring…There was a huge divide in the board between those who wanted a superstar and those who wanted this, you know, 27-year-old kid, and my side won.
So when Mr. Semans asked you if you wanted to save the Bay, did you have an environmental bone in your body then?
I had no idea. During my college years, I was an antiwar activist. And I was political. But I was not, my family wasn’t, environmental. They were liberal Democrats, but they weren’t environmentalists. I learned on the job. I didn’t have an environmental degree, anything like that.
When you came in, in 1981, what kind of a vision did you have for what this organization was going to be?
None. I was just trying to keep the organization afloat….I think we had a deficit of about 50% of the operating budget. … I had learned fundraising from Arthur… So that’s what I really focused on…. I was trying to get the thing back on its feet and maintain the current vision.
What was that vision?
From day one, when Arthur used to take kids out on the bay in his Boston Whaler, we’ve done three things: education of kids; advocacy – meaning lobbying in its broadest sense; and litigation…. And then restoration is the fourth leg of the four-legged stool that came later.
A number of environmental and conservation groups run education, but it’s often staffed with summer interns and part timers. At CBF you hired full-time educators, and you made this a bit more of a pillar of the main operation, is that right?
That’s the critical difference between CBF and lots of other organizations: Full-time educators who work 12 months a year under full benefits, and not a heck of a big salary, but they’re full-time employees. And what that does is it allows us to have people who make a career out of it, or, you know, stay for longer than just a season or two…I think education is the best long-term investment in the future of the Chesapeake Bay (that) CBF performs.
There are a lot of people that are in government, in business, in academia, (who have told us) that “I got my start as a student on an education trip at CBF. That’s what generated my interest in the environment or marine science” or what have you.
What I love about CBF is that it constantly is evolving. We are not stuck, other than we’re still doing education, advocacy, and litigation and then restoration. But we are constantly evolving as an organization.
You mentioned the other pillar was advocacy. And you had pretty good access at the statehouse level in Maryland and Virginia over the years… But in Pennsylvania, though, you’ve had a hard time, haven’t you?
Well, the Pennsylvania House hardly will appropriate money…for schools to buy books. It just is as fiscally conservative as any legislative body I’ve ever worked with…And Pennsylvania is so far behind.
Elsewhere, CBF always seemed to have the ear of the governor and legislative leaders and, the Bay became a sort of mantra…You’ve hit sort of a bump with Maryland in the last few years, though, haven’t you? What’s the problem?
Well, most fundamentally…a reluctance to enforce laws and regulations. Enforcement in Maryland under this administration has diminished greatly. And you see that from fisheries, to poultry, to point-source discharges to Conowingo.
That’s always been a soft spot, even in Democratic administrations, hasn’t it? I mean, (Gov. Parris) Glendening scaled back enforcement under his term.
Well, CBF wouldn’t have a litigation and an advocacy role if enforcement was as good as it needs to be. Because one of the big things we do is we try to pressure government to enforce the laws, whether it’s local, state or federal. So you’re right. But there has been a sea change under this administration [of Gov. Larry Hogan].
Have you personally tried to sort of break through there with Gov. Hogan?
I would say I’ve had a good relationship with every governor of Maryland and Virginia since I’ve been running CBF, except Gov. Hogan. First of all, he canceled his meeting as a candidate to meet with our Board of Trustees, the morning of the meeting. He promised to reschedule, he never did. He promised to schedule after he was elected, he never did. And then once he was elected, I started trying to get a meeting with him. And I think it took me three years. And when I finally got the meeting, he berated me for the entire hour.
Going back to when William Donald Schaefer was elected governor, I’m sure you were not too sure about what you were getting in that regard.
Schaefer called me in very early on and said he wanted me to work for him. As a Special Environmental Assistant. I wasn’t going to leave CBF. But before the meeting ended, he said, “Of course, Will, you know, it’ll be a $1 a year job.”
Arthur and I (also) met with Schaefer when he was [Baltimore] mayor, this was 1978. He said, “I want you guys to put kids on the water out there.” And he pointed to the harbor. And he said, “I want you to put ’em out there. And I want you to do it now.” We had the first education program in Baltimore Harbor long before the Science Center or the [National] Aquarium. But no, I mean, Schaefer was tough. He wasn’t an environmentalist at heart, but he did some good things.
[Bob] Ehrlich, the other Republican governor during the 1990s , wound up doing a good thing for the Bay [signing into law a wastewater fee known then as the flush tax, which raised millions for upgrading sewage treatment plants].
Bob and I used to have breakfast about once every six or eight months when he was in Congress. And we worked a lot on sewage treatment funding, things like that. And then he became governor. So I had a relationship with him, and sure, you know, he was he was not as strong as we liked. And we butted heads. But overall, it was a cordial and somewhat productive relationship
There was a period where it seemed that CBF really changed its tone with farmers, to the point that some people sort of felt like CBF had gone soft on ag pollution. Tell me about that.
We have always viewed agricultural runoff and the associated pollution as one of the primary causes of the Bay’s degradation, and we’ve never shied away from that. What we have tried to do that some of our colleague organizations haven’t always bought in on is we have tried to get funding for agriculture, both private and [public]. We’ve raised millions of dollars to put best management practices on farmland. And to do that you have to gain the trust of the farmer to go in and start working with him.
Bringing it back to that issue about enforcement, there was a recent report from the Environmental Integrity Project, which showed that Maryland’s enforcement with farmers is really pretty weak. So how does working with farmers get you anywhere?
Once agriculture breaks the law, then you need to enforce, and we agree with the EIP report. Absolutely….I would think, looking at the EIP report where litigation might be most effective would be not to pick some individual farmer and say, “You should be sued,” but rather to pick the state agency that is not enforcing the law and say that they should be worried about litigation.
What do you think are the most important achievements of CBF?
Take three areas we look at: fisheries, pollution, and habitat. In fisheries, the rockfish moratorium in Maryland, which spread up and down the East Coast…I have to give another example on fisheries and that was, you know, overcoming the (proposal to introduce a) foreign species of oyster and getting all of the effort on the native oyster. I mean, that was huge. And you know, I’m not saying CBF is the only one on either of those. But I’m very proud of our contributions on both of those.
On pollution, early on in the mid ’80s, we were partnering with [the Natural Resources Defense Council], challenging discharge monitoring reports. And we went after Bethlehem Steel, and that settled out of court. We went after Gwaltney of Smithfield, and we won. And they appealed it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where it was heard. And we won. We sued Philip Morris ourselves. And that was in state court, which is really difficult. We won in the Virginia Supreme Court.
And then on habitat. I mean, we’ve been out planting trees and doing shoreline restoration and stream buffers for 30 years and have raised millions of dollars to do that. And you know, none of those are things that came from me. All of those examples came from staff, and I just had the good sense to support them and help raise the money to do them.
What have been your biggest disappointments or frustrations?
That the bay’s not saved….We talked about Don Schafer. The winter he went out of office, my daughter and I were walking on a Sunday, around Church Circle. I remember exactly where it was in Annapolis, and we saw the governor, who was now no longer governor. He was trudging along, and we started talking. He said, Hello. And I said, hello, and we talked and talked. And as we started to walk away, he said, “Will.” And I turned back, and I said, “Governor.” He said, “I thought it would be easier.” I said, “Governor, what was that?” He said, “Saving the Bay.” I will never forget that.
You have given speech after speech written message after message saying we can save the Bay, we can do it in our lifetimes. I’m 68 already, you’re going to be 68. Do you really think that now?
It depends on how you define save the Bay. And you know, the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint says that we will have all of the measures in place by 2025 to ensure that we will reach the pollution reduction targets. It doesn’t say that the pollution will be reduced by 2025. But we will have reasonable assurance that the measures are in place and the funding mechanisms, etc. to get there. So is that a saved Bay if they if they are able to reach that, which of course is not certain? It depends on your definition. But you can broaden that, in answer to your question as well….We think that a saved Bay is in A on our report card, but a B or a C plus would be pretty big news. [The CBF report card issued in January gave the Bay a D-plus]
It’s looking right now like there’s a number of the key commitments there that are that are falling short, significantly short. And so a lot of people are saying, basically, now it’s time to start talking about a new agreement. The current one is going to hit 2025. And it’s still going to be short, including, quite possibly, if not likely, the [nutrient reduction targets].
I think it was a year ago, maybe even 14 months ago, when some of the Bay leaders started saying we’re not going to make it. And we thought that was a huge mistake because to say that takes all the pressure off. Our reaction was, we’re litigating. So we sued EPA.
And when you look at it, Virginia, Maryland, DC, Delaware, West Virginia, are arguably on track…They’ve got a lot left to do, but they’re on track. Pennsylvania is so far behind as to be outrageous. New York, we targeted as well, way behind. So, you know, is it possible?…We’re not giving up. Every month, it’s less likely, but there’s no reason to give up and to say, let’s just start thinking about moving the goalposts again. I’m so sick of that, you know?
Isn’t the reality that this is a never ending task?
It’s like, you know, learning how to play chess. It’s continuous. Absolutely. But these deadlines, these targets could have been met with the political will and without the four years of Trump. And with Pennsylvania being at least a partial partner.
Some folks think that the Bay Foundation is at a crossroad. Obviously you’ve got a new leader for the first time in 40 years, but [they also say] that its mission needs reexamination … because of climate change [and] because of the changing demographics of the watershed and the growing awareness that environmental groups and the environmental movement, in general has not represented either the demographics or the interests of the population as a whole.
Could you do me a favor? Could you ask one of those people if they work for an organization that has a full-time environmental justice attorney litigator? (CBF has one).
I mean, our numbers are not where we want them to be. The board’s about 25% nonwhite, the staff is about 10% nonwhite…We’re working like crazy to improve those numbers. We have a Latina chair. (It’s a) huge challenge and not just for CBF. It’s a huge challenge for all environmental organizations.
Do you think CBF has been effective?
No, no, I just wasted 40 years of my life.
I mean, where we are now. And the fact that this is taking this long.
So, well, I mean, your question implies that maybe the Bay should be better, should have been better sooner quicker, which I would be 100% in agreement with, obviously. So I’m not going to defend that the Bay is not getting better…But we have stuck to the mission. Now, you can say we could have been more successful. I wish somebody had told me earlier how they think we could have been.
No regrets?
No regrets? Gosh, I mean, that would then imply that every decision CBF has made has been the right one. Of course, it hasn’t. But overall, I don’t have any regrets, no.
