The Environment in Focus with Tom Pelton

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. and 5:45 p.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.

Program Days: 
Wednesday
Short Program: 
Only Archive
9-21-11: Stain on Bay Illustrates Need for Stormwater Controls

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EPA Bay Czar Jeff Corbin points to runoff pollution caused by rain storm
EPA Bay Czar Jeff Corbin points to runoff pollution caused by rain storm.

Near-record rainfall from Tropical Storm Lee flushed so much mud, trash, and contaminants into the Chesapeake Bay that NASA satellite photos showed a huge brown stain nearly the length of Maryland.  EPA Bay Czar Jeff Corbin says the runoff pollution was a vivid illustration of the need for the improved stormwater control systems that will be required by EPA's new Bay pollution "diet"--if these limits survive court challenges and political attacks from industry groups.

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9-7-11: Sunset for a Chesapeake Island Town

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Tylerton at sunset.
Tylerton at sunset.

It would be easy to idealize life in the Chesapeake Bay island fishing town of Tylerton, which has a population of 50 people and is located 40 minutes by boat from Maryland's lower eastern shore. But the proposed closing of the Tylerton Post Office is an example of how the community is being threatened by population loss, rising seas, and winds of change.

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8-24-11: A Three Billion Dollar Sewer Repair Bill

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Health warning on bridge over Herring Run in northeast Baltimore, which has been plagued with sewage overflows.
Health warning on bridge over Herring Run in northeast Baltimore, which has been plagued with sewage overflows.

Older cities and towns across Maryland are spending almost $3 billion over the next 14 years on construction projects designed to end chronic problems with sewage overflows during rain storms.  In places like Baltimore's Herring Run Park (shown above), and in the Western Maryland town of La Vale, workers are rebuilding leaky and antiquated sewer lines to comply with orders from EPA and the Maryland Department of the Environment.

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8-10-11: Wings Beneath the Waves

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Cownose rays dining on oysters. Photo courtesy of Robert Fisher/Virginia Insitute of Marine Science.
Cownose rays dining on oysters.  Photo courtesy of Robert Fisher/Virginia Insitute of Marine Science.

Cownose rays, also called "Chesapeake Stingrays," have been flying along the Bay's bottom, vacuuming up oysters for as long as the estuary has existed.  Oyster farmers, however, want to sharply reduce ray populations because they claim rays are a growing threat to the aquaculture industry -- and this makes conservationists nervous that rays could be decimated.

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7-27-11: Sinking the Clean Water Act

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Photo by Bill Portlock/Chesapeake Bay Foundation
Photo by Bill Portlock/Chesapeake Bay Foundation

On July 13, 223 Republicans and 16 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to gut the 1972 federal Clean Water Act, leaving the control of pollution to the states instead of the federal government. The measure is unlikely to pass the Senate, but it is an example of the increasingly intense attacks on environmental regulations in general--including pollution limits for the Chesapeake Bay--in the Republican-controlled House.

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7-15-11: The Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay

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Stern of the Tanka, a World War I era cargo ship, by Tom Pelton
Stern of the Tanka, a World War I era cargo ship. Photo: Tom Pelton

In a shallow bay of the Potomac River about an hour south of Washington, D.C., lie the remains of 214 wooden cargo ships from World War I, some of which have sprouted trees and become islands. The so-called "Ghost Fleet of Mallows Bay" is a reminder of the waste of war, but also of nature's resilience and ability to transform even a graveyard into an insurgency of life.

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6-29-11: The Fish that Saved Jamestown

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Researchers working with Virginia Commonwealth University caught and released this sturgeon in the James River on September 11, 2009. It weighed 300 pounds and was more than seven feet long. Photo: VCU.

Researchers working with Virginia Commonwealth University caught and released this sturgeon in the James River on September 11, 2009. It weighed 300 pounds and was more than seven feet long.  Photo: VCU.

The Atlantic sturgeon, a dinosaur fish with armored back and whiskered chin, was the fish that fed and therefore saved the first successful English colony in North America: Jamestown.  But today, the James River is the only place in the Chesapeake Bay region where sturgeon are still reproducing, and the federal government is considering endangered species protections for the fish.

This podcast originally aired December 1, 2010.

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6-15-11: Is Natural Gas Dirtier Than Coal?

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Drilling rig

A hotly debated study by Cornell University Professor Robert Howarth concludes that hydraulic fracturing for natural gas is as bad as coal mining--and perhaps worse--from a global warming perspective. Howarth says vast amounts of methane--a potent greenhouse gas--escapes during gas drilling and transportation, and this means that natural gas is not a clean, green bridge fuel to a low-carbon future. The industry strongly disagrees.

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6-1-11: Stream of Troubles for a Backwards Fish

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AmericanEelPixNOAA.jpg
American eel. Photo credit: NOAA.

The American eel, or Anguilla rostrada, is one of the strangest and most contrarian fishes in the world, with a migration pattern opposite that of most species.  But its populations are declining, in part because of overfishing for seafood markets in Europe and Asia, and because a growing number of their streams are blocked by dams and development.

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5-18-11: Crows -- Scapegoats in a Medical Mystery

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PhotoCROW.jpg
Crows.  Credit: iStockphoto.com

When the West Nile Virus spread from Africa to New York 12 years ago, crows became infected with the mosquito-borne disease and started dying by the millions across America. Many people blamed these black carrion eaters for spreading the flu-like illness to about 300,000 Americans. But now researchers say the crows were innocent victims, and West Nile Virus was spread by the more cheerful-looking American Robin and other birds.

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Contact Tom Pelton at pelton.tom@gmail.com

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