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The Environment in Focus is a weekly perspective on the issues and people changing Maryland's natural world. There's a story behind every bend of the Chesapeake Bay's 11,684 miles of shoreline, in every abandoned coal mine in the Appalachian Mountains, in every exotic beetle menacing our forests and in every loophole snuck into pollution control laws in Annapolis. Tom Pelton gives you a tour of this landscape every Wednesday morning at 9:35 a.m. He describes the people behind the news and discusses the broader government policies and trends shaping our ecology -- our land, our air and our Bay.
Tom Pelton is senior writer for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. From 1997 until 2008, he was a journalist for The Baltimore Sun, where he won national awards for his environmental reporting. He's hosted "The Environment in Focus" since 2007.
The Environment in Focus is sponsored by The Nature Conservancy, which conserves the lands and waters on which all life depends. In Maryland, our work spans from the Chesapeake Bay to our western forests, protecting clean water and air, preserving recreational opportunities and saving our natural legacy for future generations.
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Photo of Atlantic killifish from Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources
For years, many people thought that evolution was something that happened slowly, over thousands or millions of years. But in a new book, Evolution in a Toxic World, toxicologist Emily Monosson explains how industrial chemicals are causing rapid evolution in Atlantic killifish (pictured above), as well as in moths, worms, mosquitoes and perhaps many other creatures.
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An ancient arms race on the ocean's bottom pits shell crushers, such as blue crabs, against shell builders, such as clams and oysters. Research by Justin Ries of the University of North Carolina (above) concludes that carbon dioxide pollution creates acidic conditions that accelerate shell growth for the predators but slows down the building of shell defenses by their prey.
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Bonnie Bick
Southern Maryland environmental activist Bonnie Bick and her allies won a major victory when they defeated a highway project that would have brought sprawling suburban development to the forests and wetlands around Mattawoman Creek, one of the most fertile fish breeding grounds in the Chesapeake Bay region. But efforts to stop sprawl in Charles County triggered a fierce backlash from the development lobby.
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Photo of juvenile blue crab from Chesapeake Bay Program.
The Chesapeake Bay had the murkiest water on record last year because of storms that flushed pollution and mud into the estuary. But, paradoxically, the Bay also experienced a 66 percent jump in the blue crab population last year--and the highest production of baby crabs on record--because regulations protected spawning female crabs from overfishing. And some scientists suspect the storms might have helped to drive more crab larvae into the Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.
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For the last 15 years, Professor Wolfgang Vogelbein of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science has been working to discover the causes of mycobacteriosis, a chronic wasting disease that infects a majority of striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay. He believes the disease could be linked to pollution and overfishing -- but now his federal funding is about to run out, before he can finally solve the puzzle.
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Just minutes before midnight on the last day of the Maryland General Assembly session, lawmakers approved a landmark law that will require cities and counties to create fees to pay for stormwater pollution control projects. Although ridiculed by critics as a "tax on rain," advocates argue the stormwater fees will put thousands of people to work building stormwater filters (like the one shown above in Montgomery County) and allow local governments to tackle the only source of pollution still growing in the Chesapeake Bay.
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Psychologist Jean Twenge's research into opinion polls conducted of college freshmen since the 1960's concludes that people in their teens and 20's today -- which she calls "Generation Me" -- care less about environmental issues and political affairs than the Baby Boomers or Generation X'ers at the same age. Some college students today strongly deny they don't care much about green issues, although they say economic stress in recent years has made them more focused on fighting for jobs than almost anything else.
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The University of Maryland Environmental Law Clinic has been threatened with budget cuts and other legislative actions because it joined with activists in suing an Eastern Shore poultry farm and Perdue for allegedly allowing a pile of waste (shown above) to pollute a Chesapeake Bay tributary. Although the outcome of the Hudson Farm lawsuit is uncertain, one thing that is clear is that environmental law clinics across the country often have been subjected to political attacks from legislators and governors when they challenge powerful economic interests, a legal scholar has concluded.
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The migration of osprey mark the seasons in the Chesapeake Bay, with their return in March from South America a sign of spring. But an increasing number of these "fish hawks" appear to be spending the winter in the bay, and returning earlier -- perhaps the result of a warming climate. (Photo of osprey by James A. Galletto, Nature and Wildlife Photographers of Long Island/NOAA )
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Although Pennsylvania farms contribute a significant amount of pollution to the Chesapeake Bay, half of the 40,000 farms in the state's part of the Bay watershed do not have pollution control plans required by law to reduce runoff of manure and soil into streams. One farmer who is doing an exemplary job of following the state's clean streams requirements is Leroy Walker, above, who recently built new manure management pits, a shed, and barn to reduce runoff pollution.
