The Environment in Focus

Exactly one week after his inauguration, President Joe Biden issued an executive order promising to tackle climate change. He set a goal of making all electricity generation in the U.S. free of carbon dioxide pollution by the year 2035.

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After World War II, the DuPont chemical company began marketing Teflon, the miraculous-seeming nonstick agent sold on pots and pans around the world.

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My brother Mike texted me about our mom. He wrote: "If you want to say any last words, Tom, you'd better get out here fast.” Our mother, Patty Jane Pelton, had been slowly declining from congestive heart failure.

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As President Biden gears up to tackle a daunting variety of problems – ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to climate change – he’s forming a cabinet to reflect his priorities. His pick to spearhead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is Michael Regan.

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It’s a cold winter day, and I’m exploring an old forest of oaks, tulip poplars and beech trees in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.

I’m with Dennis Whigham, an ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, hunting for orchids. Many of the 25,000 known species of these flowers are threatened or endangered, in part because their complex lifecycle is vulnerable to disruptions caused by development.

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Amid the chaos of a pandemic, as well as the lingering shock waves from the recent anti-Democratic riots by Trump followers in Washington D.C., the Maryland General Assembly’s annual legislative session opened today in Annapolis. 

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Yesterday, the Trump Administration’s EPA Administrator spoke during an online press conference to announce a new regulation that he said would end EPA’s use of “secret science” in federal government decisions to control pollution from industry.

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Kevin Omland, a biology professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, stands below a highway overpass towering above a wooded stream valley in the Patapsco Valley State Park, just southwest of Baltimore.  He aims his binoculars up at a scraggly nest of sticks that ravens built in the steel beams beneath Interstate 195. 

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Ah, Christmas time!  I went walking through my neighborhood and was charmed by the strings of lights illuminating porches, the inflated Santa, the plastic reindeer, the snow and ice.  But then I saw flowers emerging from the ground, near a cherry tree in full bloom.

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