The Environment in Focus

It’s a watershed moment in American politics. Climate change and the environment, for the first time, have risen to become among the top issues in a Presidential election. President Trump is campaigning against the whole idea of environmental regulations and has falsely labelled climate change a “hoax.”

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Glyphosate, the main ingredient in RoundUp, is sprayed on millions of acres of non-organic crops around the world.

Biologists have concluded that glyphosate has contributed to the 80 percent decline – and possible future extinction – of Monarch butterflies. The World Health Organization in 2015 classified glyphosate as a “probable” human carcinogen, triggering more than 100,000 lawsuits – and so far, three court judgments – against Bayer for allegedly causing their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other cancers.

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Jay Falstad, Executive Director of the Queen Anne’s Conservation Association on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, first became obsessed with balloons a few years ago. He was out strolling with his daughter and noticed some litter.

“My daughter and I found a cluster of balloons here on Unicorn Lake,” Falstad said. “And on those balloons was a note written in Sharpie pen that said, ‘If you find these balloons, call this number. We want to see how far they’ve travelled.’ And so, I called the number and it turned out they originated from Dayton, Ohio, and had been released four days earlier, and travelled almost 500 miles and ended up landing here. It was after that that I began to see balloons everywhere. You’d see them in farm fields, and hanging in trees.”

He was not the only one haunted by balloons…kind of like a character in the movie It based on the Stephen King novel about the sinister clown. But in this case, the victim was the Chesapeake Bay.

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While many Republicans have been in denial about the realities of climate science – notably the denier-in-chief, President Trump, who falsely labels climate change a “hoax” – Baltimore County State Senator Chris West is what you might call a fact-based Republican.

West, a 69-year-old resident of West Towson, is an attorney and former President of the Bar Association of Baltimore City.

He is co-sponsoring a bill, introduced on Friday in the Maryland senate, that would dramatically reduce greenhouse gas pollution from the state by requiring a gradual shutdown of the state’s six remaining coal-fired power plants between 2023 and 2030.

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Since 1971, 10 states – led by Oregon and Vermont – have passed bottle deposit laws. These so-called “bottle bills” have proven to increase recycling rates and reduce litter on roadsides and in waterways. The laws give people a financial incentive, often five or ten cents per bottle or can, to pick up the litter and return the containers for a cash reward.

For example, Michigan passed a 10 cent bottle deposit law in 1976 and today enjoys a 95 percent recycling rate for bottles and cans. That’s almost four times the 25 percent rate in Maryland, which does not have a deposit law.

Six times in Maryland over the last decade, legislators have proposed bottle bills. Predictably, soda and beer manufacturers and store chains have fought the laws, because they don’t want to lose any income or take responsibility for handling dirty containers.

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To the strains of Lee Greenwood’s song “Proud to be an American,” President Trump took the stage at the American Farm Bureau convention in Austin last week and boasted about repealing water pollution control regulations across the U.S.

The Obama Administration imposed the Waters of the U.S. Rule in 2015 to protect intermittent streams and scattered wetlands that are not adjacent to rivers or lakes. But what Trump did not tell the farm convention is that the Obama-era regulations already exempted most farming practices, as did previous federal and state wetlands protection rules.

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In 1983, 1987 and 2000, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the other Chesapeake Bay region states all signed much-heralded agreements to clean up the nation’s largest estuary.

But these agreements all failed to make any progress in the overall health of the Chesapeake Bay for a simple reason: They were purely voluntary, with no enforcement mechanism.

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The Maryland General Assembly’s annual legislative session opened today. The two most important environmental issues being debated this year in Annapolis are – once again -- climate change and the cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay.

State Delegate Kumar Barve, a Democrat from Montgomery County and chairman of the House Environment and Transportation Committee, is proposing legislation that would shut down Maryland’s six remaining coal fired power plants.

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During the last decade, when the Chesapeake Bay region states publicly promised to increase their efforts to clean up the nation’s largest estuary, four of the six states quietly cut funding for the state environmental agencies responsible for carrying out that cleanup.

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Bonnie Bick is an unassuming person. She’s a 72-year-old former flower child and pre-school teacher with a soft voice, who has little money and few possessions, but loves walking in the woods near her small brick house in southern Maryland.

But among land conservationists, she is a hero – a fierce and tenacious fighter who outlasted developers and the political establishment in Charles County to stop a highway project – the Cross County Connector, which would have fed sprawling subdivisions. The project has now turned into a proposal for a much greener bike path surrounded by trees.

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