Four Centuries of the Chesapeake Bay Is Public Seminar Topic

How has the Chesapeake Bay changed over the past four centuries? Kent Mountford, who has devoted much of his adult life to studying the bay and historical records about it, will present a program addressing that question at Old Dominion University Thursday, Nov. 12.

"Captain John Smith's Chesapeake: A Look at the Bay in 1607-08" is the title of Mountford's presentation in the Fall 2009 Seminar Series of ODU's Department of Ocean, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

The seminar Nov. 12, which is free and open to the public, will be at 3 p.m. in Room 200 of the Oceanography and Physics Building. All seminar attendees are invited to a reception for Mountford in Room 404 immediately after the presentation.

Mountford is an ecologist and environmental historian for Cove Corp. in Lusby, Md., a provider of environmental and ecological services. A noted author as well as researcher, he wrote "Closed Sea: From the Manasquan to the Mullica, a History of Barnegat Bay" (2002) and collaborated with Helen C. Rountree, ODU professor emerita of anthropology, and Wayne E. Clark, a southern Maryland government official and newspaper columnist, on "John Smith's Chesapeake Voyages, 1607-1609" (2007).

In the early 1980s, as a biologist doing research on the Potomac River, Mountford became interested in restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. He began studying 17th century records and the paleoecological records of scientists to construct his own view of the Bay as it was when John Smith arrived in the New World.

Mountford writes the historical column, "Past is Prologue," in the Bay Journal, which is published by the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay (http://www.bayjournal.com/index.cfm.)