The Environment in Focus

A weekly perspective on the issues and people changing Maryland's natural world

Pipeline Denials Protect Potomac River and Speak for the Trees

Interbreeding of Ravens Echoes Human Genetic History Encore

A weekly perspective on the issues and people changing Maryland's natural world

Last week, the Trump Administration announced proposed new regulations that would eliminate federal Clean Water Act protections for 51 percent of wetlands in the U.S. and at least 18 percent of streams.Republicans at an EPA press conference portrayed the rollback as relief for family farmers. Farmers allegedly faced bureaucratic permitting requirements just to use lowlands with puddles on their own property under wetlands regulations imposed by President Obama in 2015.

Biologists have long raised concerns about the ecological impact of the world’s most popular weed killer, RoundUp.RoundUp’s active ingredient, glyphosate, kills milkweed plants in and around farm fields and on roadsides, depriving monarch butterfly caterpillars of their sole source of food. This has contributed to a 90 percent decline in monarch butterflies over the two decades RoundUp has been widely sprayed on genetically-modified corn and soybean crops. But the herbicide has also unleashed a second trend: a rash of lawsuits. People suffering from a form of cancer allegedly linked to RoundUp have filed more than 9,000 lawsuits against the weed-killer’s manufacturer, Monsanto, and its German parent company, Bayer pharmaceuticals.Environmental attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. represented a California man dying of lymphoma who in August won a $289 million jury verdict against Monsanto and Bayer.

Nutria, also called Myocaster coypus (latin for mouse beaver), are large rodents native to South America that wreaked havoc on the Chesapeake Bay's wetlands when they were imported in the 1940's for the fur trade.But now nutria face their last stand on Maryland's Eastern Shore. There are almost none left alive after an intensive, more than decade-long trapping campaign by federal and state government agencies.Wildlife managers conducted a successful eradication campaign against the invasive species because they eat the roots of wetlands plants. This accelerates the erosion of marshes that are important breeding grounds for fish and birds, and also work as water pollution filters that clean the Chesapeake Bay.

Last week, on Black Friday, the Trump Administration released a Congressionally-mandated scientific assessment of the impact of climate change. The report examined the future American economy, predicting that wildfires, droughts, and floods will impose hundreds of billions of dollars in costs by the end of the century if nothing is done.

A weekly perspective on the issues and people changing Maryland's natural world

Atlantic sturgeon are dinosaur-era fish with bony plates and sandpaper hide that were once the kings of the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways along the East Coast.These giants with long snouts, whiskers and soft mouths were once so common that during their spring spawning runs up rivers, their bodies – sometimes 15 feet long and 800 pounds – would crowd streams like living logjams.Sturgeon were a mainstay in the diet of many Native Americans, who speared the fish from canoes and used every part of the animals. English colonists, however, regarded sturgeon mostly as nuisance and a trash fish.That was until the 1870's, when a vast industry developed to slaughter sturgeon for their eggs, also known as caviar. By 1900, virtually all sturgeon in North America were wiped out – the passive creatures speared by the millions as they traveled up streams, their bodies left to rot. And then the caviar industry moved on to Russia. For decades, biologists in the Chesapeake Bay region assumed Atlantic Sturgeon were virtually extinct, harmed also by pollution and dams. A few old adult sturgeon were found at the far southern end of the Bay – in the James River – but there were no young anywhere, foreboding ill for the survival of the species.But then… something miraculous happened.