Chesapeake Bay Population Growth Essay

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The Impacts of Smart Growth Strategies in the Chesapeake Bay Since the early 1990’s the Chesapeake Bay has been suffering from different pollutant sources such as overpopulation, human activity on land and runoff. Although pollutants are part of the problem, they only make up a small percentage of the Bay’s problems. Human activity and urbanization are the main contributions for the Bay’s poor health. An increased human population necessarily causes an increase in human waste. The problem with the Chesapeake Bay Watershed’s population growth is that it cause a lot of trash, waste and unknown fluids to be dumped into the Bay and as the people multiply trash, waste and fluids will also multiply. Not everyone living in the Chesapeake Watershed …show more content…

Leapfrogging is when development is happening on a virgin land near areas of dense development (Charles, Crowder & Shreve, n.d.). People who live near these areas will have a hard time getting to work which is the problem. Urbanization occurs when the the physical size and the number of people living in that city grows. The Chesapeake Bay Watershed has multiple major cities, such as Virginia, Maryland, Washington DC, Baltimore and parts of Delaware, which makes urbanization potentially high in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed (Charles, Crowder & Shreve, n.d.). The Chesapeake Bay Watershed already has a large amount of people and if we expand cities, then that can be a pull factor for others outside the Watershed. Overpopulation is already a major problem in the watershed and urbanization will only make the problems worse. There are already 15 million people living in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and if the population continues to grow they predict it will be 18 million by the year 2020 (Ernst, 2013). If the population continues to grow rapidly the Bay will eventually get over crowded with runoff, trash, and human substances the bay will go into a bigger dead zone or become permanent (Forbos,

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