By Margaret Pizer
What should farmers be doing to improve the health of Chesapeake Bay? How about watermen? And regulators?
The UVA Bay Game is a large-scale simulation that allows players to take the perspectives of these and other stakeholders in the Bay region. In honor of Earth Day 2011, on April 22, students at seven universities in the region gathered on their home campuses and communicated with each other through internet videoconferencing for a little bit of friendly competition and a lot of learning.
Each school played the role of a different basin within the Chesapeake Bay watershed: Patuxent, Potomac, York, James, Eastern Shore, Rappahannock, and Susquehanna. Within each basin, students took the roles of watermen, animal farmers, crop farmers, or developers, while others spread amongst the campuses played statewide regulators of those industries.
At the College of William & Mary, where students were representing the York River basin, the game helped students understand some of the pressures and frustrations that bay stakeholders face. In each round of the game, players make decisions about how to pursue their assigned roles and then see the consequences when the simulation is run—both in terms of individual income and in terms of Bay health.
“We got to choose how many days we put pots out to collect crabs, how many days we got to dredge, how much we could purchase in extra equipment,” said biology major Micah Jasny, playing the role of a waterman.
“I made $15,000 in the first round because I was trying to be environmentally friendly, so I had a cost economically,” explained first-year student Erika Wenrich, playing the role of a crop farmer.
Students said they came away with a new appreciation of how regulations, economic pressures, and environmental practices all come together to make Bay restoration complex and challenging for stakeholders.
William & Mary Biology Professor Randy Chambers, who coordinated the event on campus summed it up: “Overall the fidelity of playing this game to the real world is probably pretty good, and unfortunately . . . although our best efforts were to say that the environment is important to us, the quality of the bay went down.”
Hopefully this hands-on experience of these sobering realities will help the next generation of Bay stakeholders face the challenges of balancing the economic and environmental health of the Bay.
“I really feel connected to my field now,” said junior geology student Lyndsey Funkhouser.
The UVA Bay Game development is sponsored by the UVA Office of the Vice President for Research, in partnership with Azure Worldwide, a strategic environmental design, development, and marketing company. Virginia Sea Grant is a sponsor of the UVA Bay Game User Group, a consortium of seven universities (United States Naval Academy, George Mason University, William & Mary, Hampton University, Old Dominion University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Virginia) coming together to play the Bay Game
