The Environment in Focus

Last week on this program, I narrated a feature on the joys of kayaking on the Prettyboy Reservoir in Northern Baltimore County amid the glorious colors of fall. The next day, I received a letter from an attorney at the Baltimore Department of Public Works, which owns the reservoir.The letter said that city officials had heard my show and then checked their records and found that I did not have the proper sticker for boating on the reservoir. ----Failure to follow the City of Baltimore Watershed Regulations is...subject to fines up to $1,000,---- the letter warned.

It was a crisp, fall Sunday afternoon, with the sun dazzlingly bright after a summer of relentless rain. I wanted to go off on an adventure to a place I’d never seen.So I did what I normally do on such occasions: I turned to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. The wildlife agency has an app that you can download onto your smartphone that features an interactive online map showing the exact location of every public access boat launch site in Maryland – almost 500 of them, along with maps of hiking trails, state parks, public fishing piers, and other places you can enjoy the outdoors.I highly recommend the AccessDNR app. I’ve made it a personal mission to use the app to try kayak at all the public boat launch sites in the state. On this Sunday, I looked at the map – and noticed a red dot that I had not yet visited. It was at the Prettyboy Reservoir in Gunpowder Falls State Park, about 40 minutes north of my home in Baltimore.So I drove up there, and after dragging my kayak down to the water’s edge, set off paddling across the glassy waters in the late afternoon sun.

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

There’s a lot at stake in the elections on Tuesday, including which party controls the U.S. House and whether Congress will begin hearings and oversight of the Trump Administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.The Republican-led U.S. House has passed 36 different anti-environmental bills and amendments the last two years, according to the National League of Conservation Voters. This includes legislation that would undermine the Chesapeake Bay cleanup by stripping EPA of its authority to penalize states that fail to meet pollution reduction targets.The House's majority also voted in favor of legislation that would – among other things – reduce protections for wetlands and streams; allow more methane pollution from oil and gas drilling sites; and override local bans on the use of pesticides in lawn care, such as have been adopted by Howard and Montgomery counties in Maryland.Congressman John Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, voted against all these bills and is running for re-election in a district that includes parts of the Baltimore area. “The House has been on a crusade to overturn regulations that protect our environment,” Sarbanes said.

Back in 2015, Montgomery County, Maryland, became one of a growing number of local governments across the country to restrict the use of pesticides in lawn care. The weed killer RoundUp and other pesticides have been linked to health risks in humans and sharp declines in populations of Monarch butterflies, bees, and other pollinators around the world.George Leventhal, a Montgomery County Councilman, was the lead sponsor of the lawn pesticide ban. He remembers the arguments made by local parents.“We had mothers of asthmatic children who were having asthma attacks when their neighbors were applying pesticide spray,” Leventhal said. “The spray would carry in the wind, and would trigger asthma, chemical allergy, multiple chemical sensitivity -- and there is no need to use these toxic chemicals on your lawn.”The county’s prohibition in October of that year came seven months after the World Health Organization, in March of 2015, labelled RoundUp’s active ingredient, glyphosate, a probable human carcinogen.But the pesticide manufacturing industry sued the county. And a judge in August of 2017 sided with the industry, striking down a portion of the county ban that applied to private lawns – although not to public property, such as playgrounds and county parks.

Wes explores the future of security.

People don’t always think about the environmental impact of the food they eat -- and specifically, the water pollution created by the meat processing industry.More than 8 billion chickens are slaughtered every year in the U.S., along with 100 million hogs, and 30 million beef cattle. These animals are processed in more than 5,000 meat processing plants, large and small.

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

Chesapeake Requiem is a new book about the culturally rich and historically unique community of watermen on Tangier Island in the southern Chesapeake Bay and how sea-level rise may soon wash it all away. That would make Tangiermen some of America’s first climate change refugees.The author, Earl Swift, produced a complex and beautifully written book by spending 14 months living among the watermen on the tiny, isolated crabbing town just south of the Maryland/Virginia state line. But it’s not just a book about Chesapeake culture. It also raises profound and troubling questions about America: about climate change denialism from the crab shacks on Tangier Island to the White House; and what our country should do about the inundation of a growing number of waterfront communities caused by sea-level rise.Earl Swift, a former reporter for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, joined famed Chesapeake Bay author Tom Horton and myself in a panel discussion of the Chesapeake and climate change at the Baltimore Book Festival on Sunday.

With the smokestack of Maryland’s largest trash-burning incinerator in the background, dozens of protesters held a rally on Friday in south Baltimore’s Carroll Park to demand either a shutdown or stronger pollution controls on the BRESCO waste-to-energy plant.The activists gave speeches and waved signs beneath a banner that read, “Burning Trash is Not Clean Energy.” That’s a reference to a 2011 state law that gives the 33-year-old incinerator, operated by the New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator company on contract for the city, millions of dollars in tax breaks as a source of allegedly “green” energy, like solar or wind.