Tayloe Murphy has been a leading voice for environmental interests for decades, playing an instrumental role in the development of key legislation, regulations and policies. It all goes back to his roots on Virginia’s Northern Neck.

 

“Right after law school, I moved to Richmond and started working for a firm that is now called Hunton & Williams. I stayed there for four years, then decided I couldn’t get the mud off my shoes and went back to the country.

I moved into my family’s farm—we have a little summer cottage on the farm. I renovated it, and I’ve lived on this farm on the Potomac since 1965.”

 

When he first moved back to the farm, he noticed a number of unfortunate changes. “I started thinking to myself, things are getting really bad—we’re not catching rockfish, we’re not doing other things, and so I got involved with the local government,” he says. A few years later, “I decided that I would get involved in politics because I saw what the river had been like as a child, and I saw what it was becoming. It was getting worse daily.”

 

In January 1982, Murphy became a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. “Speaker A. L. Philpott put me on the conservation committee for the Chesapeake and its tributaries. About three or four weeks after I got there, he asked me if I’d be interested in being on the Chesapeake Bay Commission. Then, as for my committee assignments, the speaker kept putting me on things that had environmental issues.

 

“My focus all along had been the Chesapeake Bay—that’s where I’m from, it defines who I am. I made a speech, and Governor Gerald Baliles quoted my opening statement in one of his State of the Commonwealth addresses. I opened my speech by saying, ‘how we treat the land is how we treat the water,’ and I still believe that today.”

Northern Neck Courtesy of The Northern Neck Tourism Council

 

Murphy’s dedication to the Bay is evident in his involvement with the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act. After he and his colleagues developed a report with the Institute for Environmental Negotiation, he got a call from John Daniel, then secretary of natural resources. “He said, ‘the governor and I have read the report and we would like to introduce some legislation as part of Governor Baliles’ environmental initiatives in January.’ That wasn’t even a month away! John came out to my house along with Bud Watson, [with] the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Tim Hayes, who was then [with] the Environmental Defense Fund. So they came out and we [started writing] the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Act on my kitchen table.”

 

As for the future, Murphy believes, “We know how to take the nitrogen and phosphorus out of sewage treatment effluent. We know how to implement best management practices on agricultural lands. We know how to establish riparian buffers and keep them properly vegetated to avoid nonpoint source pollution. What we don’t have is the funding to implement these programs, and in my judgment that is the most critically important issue that faces the future of the protection of the environment in Virginia.

“In my lifetime, I have watched a vibrant commercial seafood industry die. I have watched it literally die. It breaks my heart to see people I have known all my life whose livelihoods depended on healthy resources.

“It has died because of our lack of commitment on the part of the state and others to protect it. The watermen used to have a poster with a beautiful picture, and the bottom of it said, ‘Keep My Workplace Clean.’ And we didn’t do it. We didn’t keep his workplace clean and therefore he is out of business, and that is wrong. That is just dead wrong.”