Who Is Waterkeeper: Benjamin Ford, Miles-Wye Riverkeeper

July 23, 2025

Ben Ford has only been the Miles-Wye Riverkeeper in Maryland since 2023, but has spent most of his life exploring and enjoying the watershed. Ben grew up boating on the Miles River and tributaries of the nearby Choptank River. Some of his earliest memories include fishing for crabs off of his uncle’s dock or sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. During high school and college, he taught people of all ages how to sail. Ben even met his wife while standing in the Miles River during a shoreline build.

In 2009, Ben began working at Washington College, a small liberal arts college on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, leading an ‘in-the-field’ curriculum called Chesapeake Semester. The job entailed managing an experiential education program focused on the culture, history, geology, biology, politics, and humanities of the Chesapeake Bay region. In this role he traveled with undergrads throughout the Bay watershed, using the Chesapeake as a case study for understanding the issues and challenges facing coastal communities around the world. In this capacity, Ben also leaned on a group of well-respected water advocates: local Waterkeepers.

So when the role of Miles-Wye Riverkeeper became available in 2023, Ben was well versed in the movement. He wasn’t looking for another job at the time, but knew that this was a great – and rare – opportunity.

“I was familiar with the movement. When this opportunity came up, I couldn’t not do it,” says Ben. “I enjoyed my previous job very much, but I wanted something that would challenge me in new ways. I had worked with Matt Pluta at Choptank Riverkeeper, Elle Basset of Arundel Riverkeeper, Zack Kelleher of Sassafras Riverkeeper, Annie Richards of Chester Riverkeeper, and all these other folks. And I thought, these are wonderful awesome people that I want to work with. I have to work with these people. It was a no-brainer for me.”

Ben’s watershed is more than just one river as the hyphenated name of the organization may suggest. The Miles River is a little more than 50 miles long. The watershed comprises over 150,000 acres. About half of the land use is agriculture, another third is forest or brush, and the rest is development. The Wye River is about 15 miles long and joins the Miles River near its mouth to the Eastern Chesapeake Bay.

There are a number of contributors to the area’s water quality, though agriculture is the most significant factor.

“I hesitate to say that farm runoff is the biggest threat, but it is our biggest pollution source. It’s also the biggest opportunity. Those farmers want to keep the nutrients on their fields too. So I act as a conduit to connect those people to resources,” says Ben. “A dollar spent reducing runoff from agriculture can go a lot further in nutrient reduction. It’s often the cheapest best management practice.”

The abundance of agriculture also means there’s not one single polluter to point to as the problem. It’s non-point source pollution, meaning there is not some big factory discharging into the rivers. Instead, it’s hundreds of small family farms and septic systems on private residences doing their best to operate in a clean and responsible way. It has informed the way Ben approaches the problem and the community with something he calls a ‘friends first’ approach. It leans more on community building, rather than litigation and direct confrontation.

“It’s not that we won’t sue, it’s just a tool that we have. And we keep that tool at hand,” says Ben. “But our most effective tool is to approach the situation in a friendly manner.”

Development also poses a risk to the area, buoyed by the surge in ‘Covid refugees’ who discovered in recent years that remote work could let them live anywhere. Like many places, there is a housing shortage in the area. There is also an incentive to build and increase tax revenue. Ben is not necessarily opposed and rather works to make sure that these houses are not sited in “really horrible” locations.

“We work hard to be sure that if they are being put in, they have good stormwater management,” says Ben. “We want provisions that encourage owners to put in rain gardens and pollinator patches.

Other natural mitigation solutions that Ben and Miles-Wye Riverkeeper work on include underwater grasses and oyster beds. The state of Maryland is proposing $1 million a year over the next 25 years to restore oysters to the area, which would be a huge win for water quality given all the many ways oysters can help aquatic ecosystems. Ben sees his role in this program as helping to communicate the positive impacts.

Ultimately, Ben’s biggest role is to protect these waterways. He wants his 3-year-old son to swim, fish, sail, and crab in cleaner waters than he grew up experiencing. He also wants people to be good stewards. To his way of thinking that starts with access. Ideally, giving people a sense of ownership – even kinship – with their local waterway will lead them to also protect it.

“No matter where you live, or how bad you think your local waterway is, change often starts with only a handful of voices, or even sometimes a single voice,” says Ben. “Don’t be afraid to seek out like-minded folks to advocate for your right to clean water.”