He came to Washington with a canoe, looking for a lake. What he found instead was the Chesapeake Bay.

During the next 25 years, J. Charles “Chuck” Fox would upgrade to a kayak, and eventually a sailboat. And the Bay would become not just his playground but his career focus.

As the Chicago native moved from small nonprofits to big head-of-agency jobs, Fox never took his eyes off the Bay. How could a waterway that practically flowed past the federal government’s doorstep be allowed to suffer? Why, despite billions of dollars, significant laws and the best of intentions, was the Bay still struggling?

Fox has been in a good position to answer these questions over the years: as a high-level staffer with the Environmental Protection Agency under President Bill Clinton, an administrator with the Maryland Department of the Environment, and secretary of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.

But he has never had a more influential perch than the one he has now. Last May, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson selected Fox to become her senior adviser on the Chesapeake Bay and the Anacostia River. Jackson created the position, Fox said, because she wanted greater accountability in the effort to clean up the Bay.

Fox’s promotion came on the heels of President Obama’s executive order, which declared the Bay a national treasure and assigned the federal government with devising a plan to clean it up. Fox along with representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are devising the cleanup strategy.

Fox works out of the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program, the multi-agency effort based in Annapolis charged with implementing the past Bay agreements. He sat down in December to talk with Chesapeake Life about what’s different this time around.

Q: You came here in 1984, just as the first Chesapeake Bay cleanup agreement was signed. Did you ever think that 25 years later we would still be talking about cleaning up the Bay?

A: I remember in 1984 working on the Hughes Laws. [Named for Gov. Harry Hughes, it included Maryland’s landmark Critical Areas legislation and the phosphate ban.] It was a very huge deal. All of us, at the time, really thought it would greatly improve the quality of the Chesapeake Bay. There was this sense of ego; you were working on these big important things to save the Bay, and it was going to work! But we didn’t appreciate at the time how complicated the Chesapeake Bay was. We’ve come to learn that the Chesapeake is a bay, not an aquarium.

Q: If you had to point to one thing that has slowed or stopped the Chesapeake’s cleanup, what would it be?

A: First and foremost, the accountability to pollution control in our watershed. Our progress in controlling pollution has been woefully inadequate. There has always been regulation. It is a little bit of a misnomer that the Bay Program has been a voluntary program. The cleanup agreements were voluntary agreements, but the Clean Water Act has been around since 1972. The challenge today is using a lot of the science that we know and the voluntary spirit we had in the past and moving forward in a much more accountable way.

Q: One of your major initiatives is dealing with climate change, which is a big national issue but not one we hear a lot about when it comes to the Chesapeake. Why is that now a priority?

A: Imagine you spend all this time restoring wetlands, only to find them submerged. Climate change affects storms, the dead zone, the kinds of algae we have, the crabs. We really came to the conclusion that, as a federal family, we needed to assume a leadership role to adapt to the reality of climate change.

Q: We’ve had 25 years of agreements and promises to clean up the Bay. How is the Obama Executive Order different?

A: We’re seeing ideas and actions by the federal government that we haven’t seen—ever. EPA is trying to improve pollution control programs. NOAA is dealing with climate change. Fish and Wildlife is expanding land conservation programs like never before.

Q: A year ago, there was a debate about whether or not the Bay needed a regulatory limit placed on the pollution that a river or stream could accept (known as Total Maximum Daily Load or TMDL). Now that the TMDL is coming, how do you think it will change Bay cleanup?

A: The TMDL is the primary means of increasing accountability, increasing specificity. It is how we will achieve progress. The power of the TMDL is that it will quantify limits for all point sources of pollution, from urban stormwater to concentrated animal feeding operations. Now, we have to make sure that this TMDL yields a different result for the future than the agreements of the past.

Rona Kobell, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, is now a staff writer for the Bay Journal.