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Regulatory Capture, The Chesapeake Bay, And Hampton Roads: What's On Your Plate, Ronnie David Gannon

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The Chesapeake Bay and its 64,000 square mile watershed are both severely impacted from excessive amounts of nutrient pollution, which contributes to a growing presence of dead zones in the Bay. What causes nutrient pollution? What are dead zones? In addition, many of the Bay's commercially valuable species of marine life have been/ are overexploited to the point of collapse / verge of collapse. Despite all of these facts, management agencies continue to weakly enforce regulations. Why?

Not to mention, much of the Bay's marine life is unsustainably caught in the contaminated waters of Hampton Roads. How, and for what? …