What would a Chesapeake Bay National Recreation Area Look Like?

By John Page Williams

In September 2020, Annapolis endurance athlete Chris Hopkinson paddled a standup board the full length of the Chesapeake Bay (215 miles from Havre de Grace, at the mouth of the Susquehanna, to Cape Charles, outside the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel) to raise funds for the Oyster Recovery Partnership. His inaugural Bay Paddle attracted so much attention that he organized Bay Paddle 2021 for last September. It drew multiple teams of paddlers on boards and in kayaks. This time, he broadened the beneficiary list to support not only the partnership, but also the Chesapeake Conservancy’s efforts to develop a national park for the Chesapeake. 

That park may be a good idea whose time has come, but how would the National Park Service (NPS) build a Chesapeake National Park? Buy up all of the water and the land around it, then evict all of us who live here so tourists from afar can visit? Of course not, but the question is reasonable. We all tend to…