While military munitions sources contribute significantly to the pollution and degradation of Chesapeake Bay, they have been completely overlooked in many of the efforts to restore the Bay.Death of the Chesapeake, Richard Albright’s third environmental book, explores this important aspect of the nation’s environmental health. The book also recognizes for the first time that efforts to restore the Bay have failed because of the violation of a fundamental precept of environmental cleanup; that is, to sample the site and see what’s there. The Bay itself has never been sampled. Thus, this book presents a view of the environmental condition of Chesapeake Bay that is totally unique. It covers a part of the history of the Bay that is not widely known, including how the Bay was formed. It presents a mixture of science, military history, and novel solutions to the Bay’s degradation. In so doing, the author examines the military use of the Bay and reveals the extent that munitions dumpsites containing nitrogen and phosphorus as well as chemical warfare material are affecting the environment. The book concludes with the author’s own cleanup plan, which, if implemented, would go a long way toward restoring health to the Bay.

Notes author Albright: “In college I was a member of the Ann Arbor Amphibians SCUBA Club. One of our members was the American on the three-country team with Jacques Cousteau that developed the aqua lung during WWII. Whenever Jacques would come to the Great Lakes, we would be invited to see his latest movies. Cousteau introduced me to underwater munitions and environmental changes in the oceans. Also, while at U-M, I ran a dive boat out of Port Huron and was part of the team that found the Charles S. Price, a freighter that sank in the great storm of 1913, memorialized by Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”