LITITZ, Pa. - More than a decade ago, tiny Lititz Run in Lancaster County was a ribbon of fetid water that was too hot, too slow, and too poisoned by agricultural runoff to support trout for more than a few weeks.
Then the community embraced its revival. Neighbors re-created wetlands. Farmers changed time-honored ways. Today Lititz Run is a rarity among waterways: a year-round trout stream that has won national accolades and been cited as a model.
But as a tributary in the Susquehanna River watershed, Lititz Run still isn't clean enough, and it adds to the pollution that the Susquehanna sends downstream to the nutrient-choked Chesapeake Bay.
Pennsylvania bears a huge responsibility for the despoiling of the bay. The Susquehanna, which drains half the state, pumps in 40 percent of the bay's nitrogen, largely from agriculture, and a gusher of its two other major pollutants - natural sediment and phosphorus from fertilizers and detergents - abetting the decline of the Chesapeake's celebrated fishing industry.
"As goes Pennsylvania," says J. Charles Fox, the Environmental Protection Agency's senior Chesapeake adviser, "so goes the bay."
Lititz Run, all 6.5 miles of it, is a microcosm of the problem. Though much has been done, the pollution runs deep and will be hard to totally reverse. Even as it first burbles forth in the quaint town of Lititz, about 75 miles west of Philadelphia, the stream is laced with harmful nitrogen, likely from decades of fertilizing nearby.
The stream's renewal represents a hopeful but cautionary tale for how difficult a real cleanup will be.
Experts say the efforts in Lititz need to be enhanced and then duplicated across 100,000 streams in the bay's watershed.
It won't be enough, they say, just to curb runoff, alter farm practices, and upgrade sewer plants.
Saving the bay will require a broader range of fixes across a wider swath of the watershed, the tenacity of governments, an influx of money, smarter development, and the long-term cooperation of virtually everyone living here, at a time when the population is increasing dramatically.
"We are 17 million people living in this watershed," says Don McNutt, administrator of the Lancaster County Conservation District, "and we're going to impact it. The farmers are feeding the people, and the people are flushing their toilets. That's the long and short of it."
President Obama has promised to help. In the spring, he signed an executive order requiring a more aggressive federal role in cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay.
Instead of goals a decade out, the states have set two-year "milestones." So the people who set them will still be in office and accountable when it's time for a reckoning.
The goals are also humbler, critics note, falling short of past promises. Officials call them more realistic.
This fall, for the first time, they will begin setting strict numeric pollution limits - called a "total maximum daily load" - for the bay. Those will be passed down to the states, then to smaller jurisdictions. The limits will be largely mandatory, not optional.
The first draft reports detailing the government's plans are to be published Wednesday on the Web.
The aim is to restore what Obama called a national treasure. The Chesapeake is the country's largest estuary, so called because it mixes salt and fresh water.
Today, even though people swim in the bay, eat its fish, and ply its waters with all manner of boats, "it is a shadow of its former self," says Harry Campbell, a scientist with the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation.
Water quality remains poor, and the habitats are dramatically degraded. Signature species like the blue crab and the Chesapeake oyster are at a fraction of historic levels, in large part because of the pollution coursing down from the north.
The first of many failed attempts to clean up the bay began in 1983. Two more followed, with the latest one expiring next year. The most recent efforts have left the bay "no better, or arguably even worse, than it had been," says John Hanger, secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
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