A few-days-old fertilized oyster larva is no bigger than a speck of dust. But under a high-powered microscope, a fully formed mollusk is visible, complete with a teeny tiny shell and miniscule “foot” that, when ready, will attach itself to the oyster’s forever home.

In the wild, oyster larvae are vulnerable to the countless whims of Mother Nature. But raise them in a man-made hatchery, with the right balance of temperature, water quality, and a gourmet diet of algae, and they will grow into tiny “seed” oysters.

Like a farmer purchasing soybean seeds for planting, healthy larvae and seed oysters are vital for watermen and aquaculturists who will plant them in the Chesapeake Bay, where they’ll be raised to fulfill their destiny on plates across America. On their way to beds of crushed ice or to be fried and tucked into po’ boy rolls, these tiny oysters will play an outsized role in water quality, habitat creation, and economic development.

For many seed oysters in the state of Maryland, that journey now begins at Ferry Cove Shellfish. It is the state’s newest, most state-of-the-art private hatchery—the only one in Maryland operating as a nonprofit. And it is poised to have a major impact on the region’s shellfish aquaculture, the process of farm-raising seafood.

In 2025, it successfully produced two billion oyster larvae from its location in the hamlet of Sherwood near St. Michaels, where the waters of Eastern Bay flow into Poplar Island Narrows. Ferry Cove’s building is nestled between a wildflower meadow and a veritable forest of native grasses, which president and CEO Stephan Abel’s dog, Petey, happily disappears into when given half a chance.

The water flowing around Poplar Island was part of the appeal of this spot, says Abel, who lives in Annapolis. He had access to 20 years’ worth of Army Corps of Engineers data from their restoration of nearby Poplar Island.

“So I knew what the water was here,” he says. Like good soil for plants, “having the right water is paramount.”

The fact that a 70-acre parcel was available there—and close enough to sizeable towns like Easton to entice a strong workforce—sealed the deal.

Much of the acreage is leased to a local crop farmer, but there’s also a weather station installed in partnership with the University of Maryland (UMD), a sea-level rise monitoring system, and an ongoing shoreline restoration project. Tanks and cages near the waterline are evidence of a facility used by the Maryland Seafood Cooperative, which supports watermen new to aquaculture.

These projects aren’t just about environmental altruism. Weather, water temperature, rising tides—it all impacts the oysters. The health of these bivalves often corresponds with the health of the Bay, and vice versa.

“We are the applied science,” says Abel. “We come at it from the industry perspective—the aquaculturist’s or waterman’s perspective—listening to what they need, working with researchers, and then developing products.”

Abel is an unlikely aquaculturist. A Philadelphia native, he grew up sailing every summer on the Chesapeake. But the extent of his oyster knowledge was that they taste good served with a wedge of lemon.

He began his career in the military, moved to the dot-com glamour of the late ’90s, then, after the boom, landed a job at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR). From there, he went to the Oyster Recovery Partnership (ORP), where he served as executive director for 13 years.

His tenure corresponded with the state’s creation of an Oyster Advisory Commission tasked with developing a road map for restoring the native oyster. Years of over-fishing, habitat degradation, and disease reduced Maryland’s annual oyster haul from one to three million bushels in the mid-20th century to a few hundred thousand today. The plan included money to train watermen in aquaculture; Abel worked on those training programs at ORP.

The benefit of aquaculture is that wild fisheries are open October through March. But farmed oysters are available year-round. Problem was, even as aquaculture was being promoted, there was a seed shortage. There are a handful of small, private hatcheries in Maryland, but most larvae come from the UMD Center for Environmental Science’s Horn Point Oyster Hatchery. As a state entity, it was producing most of its larvae for Bay restoration projects, with only a small amount for commercial use.

Abel saw a need in the market for consistent, reliable access to seed.

“I also saw that the future of shellfish restoration is limited, because government money can only go so far,” he says. “My mind shifted from bulk restoration to ‘how do we get more oysters in the Bay that not only benefit the Bay, but also benefit the local economies and local industry?’ And that’s aquaculture.”

The hatchery opened in 2021, thanks in large part to investment from the Philip E. and Carole R. Ratcliffe Foundation. Inside, the waterfront idyll is replaced with pristine water tanks and modern technology, more like a scientific research lab than a nursery.

Hatchery manager Steven Weschler stands under a large screen where every tank’s water quality is managed via a computerized system. He walks to the brood stock room, where wild oysters pulled from the Bay are kept at 68 degrees and fed a nutrient-rich diet of algae before moving to spawning tables, where the water is heated to a balmy 85 degrees to facilitate the release of sperm and eggs. Heavily filtered water from the near shoreline fills the tanks.

Once fertilized, larvae move to rearing tanks where they are watched carefully for the emergence of an eye spot and a foot—a sign they’re ready to attach to shells. Some larvae will be sold to local watermen—they’re microscopic; more than one million fit in a Dixie cup. The aforementioned foot will attach to shells and be planted as “spat,” aka adolescent oysters, in the Bay. Grown naturally in the Bay, most are destined to be shucked and jarred.

Other larvae are circulated with finely pulverized shell at Ferry Cove. As they grow, the oyster attaches to the microscopic shell, becoming stand-alone oyster seed—two-to-four millimeters each in size—destined to be grown by aquaculturists in mesh bags placed in cages. They will grow into the deeply cupped variety that’s appealing to serve on a plate.

These are the kind raised by Tal Petty, the founder of Hollywood Oyster Company in St. Mary’s County. He buys millions of seed from Ferry Cove, which allows him to harvest 52 weeks a year. Not surprisingly, he values that the product is consistently available. What excites him, though, is that while aquaculture oysters are specifically raised to be sold, any oyster put in the Bay plays a part in its health.

Petty sets his oyster cages on a hard sandy bottom in Hog Neck Creek. “You put a cage of oysters in the water, you pull it back out a couple months later, it’s teeming with eels, fish, algae…You’ve created a water world where there was a desert before,” he says.

While rearing larvae is an intricate process at Ferry Cove, farm-raising oysters is just as arduous. Patrick Hudson, owner of the True Chesapeake Oyster Company, explains that buying from Abel allows the farmers to concentrate on what they do best—raising delicious oysters. His oysters travel from cages in Southern Maryland to Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, and restaurants across the Mid-Atlantic, including their own, True Chesapeake in Hampden.

“Producing healthy, reliable seed suitable for aquaculture is incredibly complex,” says Hudson. “Ferry Cove brings cutting-edge technology and valuable science to that process, giving us strong, consistent seed we can depend on.”

Ferry Cove’s efforts have been welcomed by traditional watermen as well. Jeff Harrison, president of the Talbot Watermen Association, has been working the water for decades. He explains that even old-school watermen see the value in hatchery-raised product; they use spat-on-shell larvae in restoration projects that are planted each spring. This helps rebuild wild oyster reefs for watermen to harvest.

“Ferry Cove was born out of the realization that Horn Point couldn’t keep up,” he says. “[Ferry Cove] is going to be a savior not only to aquaculture but the public fisheries as well.”

After decades of decline, oysters are staging a comeback. The DNR estimates there were more than 12 billion oysters in Maryland’s waters in 2024. Sanctuaries (where oysters cannot be harvested) have proven successful, and the bivalves are showing signs of resistance to diseases that once decimated them.

Michael Roman witnessed that resurgence first-hand as the director of Horn Point from 2001 to 2023. He says the importance of aquaculture was always apparent.

“If you go to Massachusetts and Maine or Washington state, aquaculture is the dominant way to get oysters,” he says.

He explains that there are parts of the Bay where wild oysters would sink into the muddy bottom, but they can grow in aquaculture float cages. Thus, “Aquaculture has maximized and expanded the potential of oysters in [the] Bay.”

Today, Roman is on the Ferry Cove board of directors. He wanted to bring his experience to the growing enterprise and, given that it’s a nonprofit, “It’s almost like it’s a hybrid between a private, for-profit hatchery as well as a place that does experiments,” says Roman. “[It does] more than figure out ways to improve the way they produce oysters.”

Abel says the hatchery is called Ferry Cove Shellfish for a reason. Right now, it’s working with academic partners on ways to re-invigorate the soft-shell clam and even how to raise soft-shell crabs via aquaculture. They are also experimenting with fabricated shell to set larvae on, as finding the recycled real stuff is difficult and expensive.

“The goal is to support aquaculture by providing the industry with [oysters] primarily, but then expand to other shellfish with the focus on providing entrepreneurial opportunities, supporting rural parts of Maryland, and then also looking at different ways to help restore the Bay,” Abel says.

The value of shellfish aquaculture is rising. The DNR estimates the economic impact in Maryland is more than $13 million per year. Cassandra Vanhooser, director of economic development and tourism in Talbot County, explains that for the more than 500 working watermen in the county, “Ferry Cove is essentially supporting jobs.”

And oystering is a heritage industry, part of the cultural fabric that gives the area its sense of place.

“When I go to Ferry Cove, I see the future,” she concludes. “Their work marries science and heritage—strengthening our working waterfronts, enhancing oyster restoration, and expanding a vital, sustainable industry.”

That industry will increasingly lean on private enterprises like Ferry Cove as federal and state funding become less reliable, says Harrison.

“And this is when we need funding, because the Bay is doing better,” he says. “We just need more money to put more things overboard. Then maybe the Bay can get back to how it was when I was a kid.”

TikTok phenom Luke McFadden doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about how things have been done before. Nor does the Glen Burnie-based waterman worry what others think, never reading the comments of his 1.4 million followers. Instead, @fvsoutherngirl—his handle is named after his fishing vessel—is happy to trailblaze his own way in the estuary’s traditional seafood industry, using his viral feed to share posts about crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay, rebounding wild oyster populations, and issues with invasive species like blue catfish. And he’s reaching not just his Pasadena neighbors at the mouth of the Patapsco River, but people around the world.

How did you get into crabbing?
I’m first generation. My parents don’t even own fishing rods. But I always loved the water and the outdoors. I saved up and bought my first boat when I was 11 out of the Pennysaver, an eight-foot rowboat. I paid $175 and got a set of oars from my grandmother for Christmas. I’ve been on the water ever since…My parents also had a friend named CJ who was a professional waterman, and as soon as I was old enough, he’d let me work in the yard, fixing crab pots. I was 12 when he first let me out on a real crab boat. I started working for him in the summers as crew until I was 18, when I moved out and bought my own boat. It was a slow crawl of a start. You name it, I’ve broken it or had to build it.

What’s it like to be a waterman at the mouth of the Patapsco?
It’s a total anomaly to be a waterman here. There are very few marinas that will even let you tie up a crab boat. If you have crab pots in your yard, people call the county on you. It’s not easy. And the biggest hindrance to crabbing on the Upper Bay is the wastewater treatment plant out of Baltimore City. If we have a heavy rain, because of the sewage, we’ll have an algae bloom that kills off the fish and crabs. We have to move all of our gear to get to clean water.

How does your approach as a crabber translate to social media?
There’s a lot of “that’s the way we’ve always done it” in the crabbing industry. But I always ask myself, “How could this be better? Where is there room for improvement?” I’m willing to innovate, even if it’s a total failure…That’s what people see in my videos. I don’t only show the successes.

How has social media changed or supported your crabbing business?
I was trying to devise a way to sell all of my crabs direct to the public, to cut out the middleman. So I just started making videos about crabbing. It didn’t catch on at first, but I treated it like crabbing, like a job—I knew it would be hard for a while. A couple videos went viral, and then things just took off. Now I ship crabs all over the lower 48. I livestream crabbing in real time every day. You can watch us crab, order the catch, and have them two days later.

For 28 years, Michael Buckley introduced listeners to new kinds of music and interviewed some of the region’s most fascinating people as part of his weekly Sunday Brunch radio program on Annapolis’s late WRNR 103.1 FM. A blend of musical genres and a celebration of the Chesapeake’s vibrant culture, it was a beloved weekly ritual for listeners across Maryland.

Five years after launching the show, Buckley would incorporate a regional interview into each broadcast called “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay,” ultimately interviewing hundreds of the estuary’s most notable subjects, from watermen and environmentalists to Civil Rights leaders and Indigenous tribe elders.

The station went off the air in February, but in Buckley’s state-capital studio, the music and stories play on. Listened to archived episodes via voicesofthechesapeakebay.net and tune into his new show, Americana Voices, on Saturdays at 2 p.m. via 88.5 FM.

What got you interested in interviewing people?
When I was 16, I dropped out of high school and hitchhiked across the country for eight years. I learned how to talk to people. When they pick you up, they want you to talk about yourself, but then it gives you a chance to interview them, too. It taught me a lot. But as time went on, I started to feel like I’d missed a lot by not going to school. I thought knowledge should be shared, it should be available to people of all ages, and we can all learn from each other.

You don’t have a background in broadcasting, but you worked with WRNR for 28 years. How did you get started?
I was running the big music store at the flagship Borders [in Montgomery County] and I put together music programs on new releases, with one panel discussion about the radio revolution. Later, I ended up having a meeting with Jake Einstein [who founded WHFS and later WRNR] and ranted about all the music that wasn’t getting played.

He listened to me contentedly, and after about a half an hour, he said, “You should have a radio show—do you have a tape?” I didn’t. But I said, “Yeah, I got a tape,” and I went home that night and used all these different artists, and he loved it. He put me on Sunday mornings, for a five-hour show, 7 a.m. to 12 noon. And I did that until WRNR went out of business.

What was your vision for the Sunday Brunch?
I have this philosophy, which is free form: a DJ should pick the music right on the spot while they’re doing the show. So I did my thing; I wanted the world to have the experience of listening to all different kinds of music—classical, jazz, folk, blues, mixed together in harmony and in one place…I wanted to get people to look at things from a variety of points of view, and I had a captive audience. The interviews for “Voices of the Chesapeake Bay” were based on this common passion for this Bay that we live around. Everybody’s got a great story to tell. Everybody has twists and turns in their lives that lead to extraordinary moments in a lifetime.

What do you think as you look back at 28 years with WRNR?
Each show is like my child—I can’t pick a favorite. But I’m blessed to have done all of these interviews. I’m enchanted with this country that we live in, which is so rich in stories, so massively beautiful. I wanted to find out if people are basically good people, and I think I’ve found that people are genuinely friendly, impressive, approachable. For me, it’s one form of living a full life. I have gotten to interact with and encourage people to have an awareness of how rich their lives are.

As curator of American art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Virginia Anderson is particularly focused on the last few words of its mission statement—to create “a museum welcoming to all,” with a goal of assembling exhibitions that center on the voices and experiences of historically marginalized groups.

One of the keys to that success? Her BMA colleagues.

“There are so many things you have to balance as a curator working with different departments to make the art and the narrative shine,” says Anderson, 51, formerly assistant curator at the Harvard Art Museums. “I’ve experienced collegiality at every museum I’ve worked in, but I think intellectual resourcing is having a moment.”

Comparing notes and research with colleagues across multiple departments allows Anderson to present exhibitions of American art that showcase a more inclusive art history, both in the selection of objects and in the display itself. Since arriving at the BMA, she has curated four exhibitions—two solo shows, with works by female contemporary artists, and two group shows, showcasing art movements, such as women modernists. And each has been created with the help of her first hire—curatorial assistant Sarah Cho, an art history major hired straight out of Princeton University.

The duo’s most recent collaboration is the first time that Cho has fully stepped into the role of co-curator. Three years in the making and up through October 2, Beatrice Glow: Once the Smoke Clears occupies three galleries in the museum’s Contemporary Wing, showcasing cross-disciplinary works by the bicoastal artist-researcher, including the first-ever virtual reality-sculpted and 3D-printed objects exhibited at the BMA. Glow examines histories of Indigenous, Chinese, and Black communities as they relate to the Chesapeake Bay tobacco trade, recasting the white depiction of the region’s history.

Anderson and Cho hope that people will attend the exhibit, read the accompanying wall text, and be inspired to continue learning more about the substance of Glow’s work.

“What Virginia and I wanted to do is spotlight aspects of Beatrice’s research,” says Cho, 26. “One of the major goals of Beatrice’s work is highlighting solidarities between Asia and the Americas.”

Both women are the exhibit’s co-curators—or “thought partners,” as Cho describes them—but they’re quick to point out that Glow’s exhibition would not have been possible without the entire museum staff.

“The museum can function as a kind of lab,” says Anderson. “Just as within the sciences, you have collaboration and research from a team of people that supports a particular project or angle of inquiry…This collaborative approach to research can only benefit our audiences.”

In the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, where Maryland waters idly slip into Virginia, time stands still on the remote archipelago of Tangier Island. An hour’s ferry ride from the mainland, there are no cars, no hospital, two churches, one schoolhouse, and limited cell phone service, where voices still lilt with the hint of an English brogue.

It’s a place so small—shrinking more and more each year in part to climate change—you can almost see across it, and when visitors arrive, some can’t help but feel a sense of voyeurism, having ventured out so far to set eyes on this bygone way of life, which might actually disappear in the next half century.

Not Jay Fleming, though. Wearing a pastel sun shirt, Under Armour sneakers, and polarized sunglasses, he whips up to the Tangier pier on a borrowed golf cart and shoots the breeze with a pair of locals picking leftover crabs on their lunch break. The 34-year-old Annapolis photographer with some 10,000 book sales and 18,000 Instagram followers is somehow not an outsider here.

“He calls me ‘shithead,’” says Fleming with a boyish grin, nodding to an old timer at the oil shop before peeling off to grab his gear and head north to nearby Smith Island. His boat—a sleek gray Privateer with a 200-horsepower Suzuki motor—is meant to cut through the capricious waters of this widest part of the Chesapeake, and coming here for more than a decade, he now knows the channels, shallows, and tides, plus the best spots for finding arrowheads and foraging wild asparagus. After weeks between the islands, though, he’s now eager to get home, having just wrapped a string of six workshops and the final photographs for his upcoming book, Island Life.

“I haven’t driven a car in a month,” says Fleming, his skin tan and dark curls tangled as he steers into the wind toward the Maryland line. “Smith Islanders call this my peeler run”—comparing his recent work hustle to the waterman’s shoulder season of soft-crab harvests—“I’ve made some real friends here.”

This place, these people, the water. It is all peak Jay Fleming. A rightful heir in the lineage of iconic Chesapeake Bay photographers—A. Aubrey Bodine, Marion E. Warren, Robert de Gast, David Harp—he has spent the past decade gaining a loyal following for his visual storytelling that offers windows into the nation’s largest estuary that even many lifelong residents have never seen: underwater terrapins, newborn egrets, shedding blue crabs. Moonlit lighthouses, Bay Bridge sunrises, a haunting series on the last house of Holland Island. Now, as his time on Smith and Tangier shows, his bread-and-butter is the people of the Chesapeake.

“I’m not reinventing the wheel, people have done what I’ve done before,” says Fleming. “But rather than carry a torch, I’m trying to find a way to make my own work stand out.”

His work—low to the water, soft light, vibrant colors, strong reflections—has become almost instantly recognizable, and in part that is because of his commitment to capturing the image by any means necessary—on land, underwater, by kayak, in airplanes, through storms, before sunrise, even neck-deep in pound nets full of menhaden.

This aquatic comfort zone makes sense once you learn about Fleming’s upbringing. Growing up between Annapolis and Lewes, Delaware, he has been a lifelong river rat, swimming and fishing and boating as far back as he can remember, with his own kayak at the age of 15 scratching a growing itch to explore the water further. On evenings and weekends, he’d head out with rolls of film and a hand-me-down Nikon from his father, Kevin, an award-winning photographer for National Geographic, who also had an affinity for the great outdoors.

“. . . RATHER THAN CARRY A TORCH, I’M TRYING TO FIND A WAY TO MAKE MY OWN WORK STAND OUT.”

Equal credit goes to his mother, Carla, a director for the Department of Natural Resources, where Fleming interned in high school. After graduating with an economics degree from St. Mary’s College—“I was going to be a biology major but almost failed my first semester”—and a stint with the National Park Service at Yellowstone where he ran a gillnetting boat to catch invasive lake trout, he landed back at the DNR in seafood marketing. Here, he helped launch the “True Blue” program to promote local sourcing and got inspired with the idea for his first book.

“And the rest is recent history,” he says, now shooting on a digital Nikon D850.

But for three years, Fleming shadowed watermen and captured hundreds of thousands of photographs to create Working the Water, a photojournalistic narrative of the people—from watermen to crab pickers to boat builders—who make their livelihoods on the Chesapeake. Since its self-publication in 2016, it has become a coffee table staple around the watershed, initially selling out in its first 40 days and now in its fourth printing.

Those watermen, in particular, have become a niche for Fleming, and their notoriously cautious communities have largely welcomed him with open arms. He has been invited to birthday parties and church services, taken the local preacher out snorkeling, and often eats seafood with the family of Mary Ada Marshall, his sort of unofficial godmother and the high priestess of Smith Island cakes, whom he also hires to teach his workshop students—mostly amateur photographers—how to make the classic dessert. Many wear the honor of being featured in a Jay Fleming photograph like a badge, with his images framed in households, displayed at funerals, and used at farmers market stands to help sell their fresh-caught fish.

“Catchin’ red drum out here!” calls out local crabber Allen Marsh, looking up from his docked workboat on Smith Island’s tiny hamlet of Ewell as Fleming ambles in alongside him just before sunset.

“Any big ones?” asks Fleming, who has grabbed his own fishing rod in hopes of an evening catch.

“About 10 pounds,” says Marsh, before turning back to the work at hand.

The next morning, Fleming will shadow Marsh’s soft crab harvest, as he has many times before, seamlessly maneuvering around the long iron chain of the scraping dredge with barely a ripple, just another fish in the water as he sets his boat in neutral and slides between the bow and stern to get his shots.

“When Jay shows up, there’s low tides and no crabs,” cracks Marsh as he sifts through his haul for market-size soft-shells, finding a few keepers.

“People have this preconceived notion that watermen are tough to get along with, and I don’t think that’s the case—as long as you don’t demonize what they do,” says Fleming. “I don’t have a political agenda or an environmental agenda. I just show things as I see them. I hope my work can be an educational tool and help people make their own opinions.”

Of course, given his public following and proximity to the water, it would be easy for Fleming to become a voice for either of these Chesapeake stakeholders—the watermen or the environmentalists—particularly as the two parties continue to quarrel over the management of the bay’s natural resources, and while the estuary’s overall health continues to ail, receiving a “C” on its latest annual report card by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.

“The bay is in trouble and humans are the cause of it,” says Fleming, “but I’m just a fly on the wall.”

Still, it was these undeniable changes that brought him down to the islands in the first place, drawn by a Facebook post featuring pictures of old headstones washing away on the now-abandoned Tangier “Uppards.” He arrived with his kayak via the mainland mailboat, paddled north to this spit of marsh, and camped out overnight to capture the drowning cemetery at low tide.

“I DON’T HAVE A POLITICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL AGENDA. I JUST SHOW THINGS AS I SEE THEM.”

“Maybe I have a knack for photographing things that are on the edge,” says Fleming, pointing to the images in Island Life, a visual narrative over a decade in the making of these last two inhabited off-shore islands. “I hate to say it, but these photographs will be historical in 50 years. An inventory of what’s here now.”

Which is in part what keeps him out here, on the water—this idea of documenting the way things were. At some point, he would like to create a series on issues the Chesapeake faces, such as pollution: “You’d be amazed at how many balloons you find out here,” he says. Or invasive species: “Blue catfish are a big threat to the ecology of the bay.”

For now, he’s all packed up and headed back to his car in Crisfield—his boat’s hull full of backpacks, camera cases, and a single, safely secured Smith Island cake—navigating the swells of northeast wind gusts, soaking wet by the time he reaches shore. This weekend, he’ll make his way down to Chincoteague, Virginia, for two more workshops, then get to work on final proofs for his new book.

“Every day is different,” says Fleming. “It’s definitely better than sitting behind a desk.”

Back in his office in Stevensville, a salon wall of framed photographs showcases his own work, plus magazine covers, pictures with Governor Hogan and Senator Van Hollen, and a candid shot alongside Art Daniels, the late Deal Island skipjack captain and first waterman to take Fleming under his wing.

Shelves of vintage cameras and oyster cans mingle with boxes of his dad’s old slides, while a massive Epson printer inches out images to be framed and hung in homes, offices, and restaurants like the True Chesapeake Oyster Co. in Baltimore.

Island Life will hit stores in October, but on this July afternoon, red pen marks dot a draft of its 280 pages, with Fleming having spent the weeks after his return from the islands sifting through images, writing captions, and taking the occasional nap. Come fall, he’ll host book signings and museum exhibitions, with most of the word spread through social media, where, even in a sea of images, his followers only continue to grow.

“Facebook and Instagram have been such incredible tools to reach people,” says Fleming. “I can run my social media from my boat.”

He relishes that freedom, the ability to be his own boss and dictate his own schedule—following the weather or harvests or next whim of inspiration, which doesn’t seem to be drying up anytime soon. This month, he’ll visit Maine to shadow lobstermen for his next book on the fisheries of the Atlantic Coast. But these local waters will still always be home.

“There are so many ways to tell a story here,” says Fleming. “I’ve been able to see so many things I wouldn’t have otherwise, and it’s given me a better understanding of the Chesapeake Bay. But anybody could do what I do, really. You just have to go out there and see it.”

This spring, one saving grace during the spread of the coronavirus across the state has been access to Maryland’s great outdoors. And now with Governor Hogan’s eased restrictions on many outdoor activities, as well as the stay-home order lifted for non-Baltimoreans, there are plenty of ways to safely get some more fresh air. Here’s the latest on getting outside during the continuing times of COVID-19. One key takeaway: not all has returned to normal.

PARKS

Maryland’s dozens of state parks offer a great escape during the times of a global health crisis. From the mountains of Western Maryland to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, most have remained open throughout the coronavirus pandemic, but several previously closed locations will now reopen as well, including Sandy Point outside of Annapolis, Assateague on the Eastern Shore, and Swallows Falls in Western Maryland.

Plan ahead for potential filled-to-capacity closures at the likes of Patapsco Valley, North Point, and Gunpowder’s Hammerman Area, as well as continued closed portions, such as the Houck Area of Cunningham Falls in Thurmont, certain trails at Elk Neck in Cecil County, and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park in Cambridge. All visitor’s centers, administrative buildings, nature centers, and most concessions also remain close, while playgrounds have reopened for kids and families. All visitors are encouraged to social distance, as well as provide their own soap or hand sanitizer, stay home if sick, and visit parks close to their homes.

Meanwhile, all Baltimore City and County parks are still open to the public, as they also have been throughout the pandemic, with social distancing and face coverings encouraged, though the use of playgrounds and exercise equipment continues to be prohibited. The Canton, Latrobe, and Howard Street dog parks are limited to a maximum of five visitors at a time, while the Patterson Park dog park is limited to 10.

CAMPING

If one thing is certain in these uncertain times, there’s never been a better one to sleep under the stars. With the wide-scale reopening of state parks, several state-owned campgrounds, which typically make up some 2,000 campsites, will also begin reopening on a gradual basis for tent and RV camping, though cabin rentals currently remain closed as locations consider reopening strategies. All campers must be with immediate family members or people with whom they reside, in groups of no more than 10, and abiding by social distancing guidelines. For reservations, visit the Department of Natural Resources’s website.

BEACHES

With the announcement of the lifting of the state’s stay-home order, we could almost feel the traffic begin to build at the Bay Bridge. Though previously closed in their entirety, all state-owned beaches, including Hammerman Beach at Gunpowder Falls, as well as Hart-Miller Island, Calvert Cliffs, and Assateague have now reopened, though do note that the latter’s National Seashore is still off-limits. Under social distancing guidelines, most forms of outdoor exercise can resume, such as walking, running, swimming, and fishing. But leave the seating home, as chairs, blankets, and picnics are still prohibited.

Meanwhile, Ocean City has reopened to the general public with social distancing and gathering limitations in place. It’s largely business as usual, besides beachcombers being encouraged to remain at least six feet apart and in groups no larger than 10. Lifeguards are on duty for swimming, boardwalk restaurants are open for carryout, and lodgings have since reopened to visiting guests. Up the road, however, out-of-state visitors are still prohibited from the likes of Dewey, Rehoboth, and Bethany beaches until at least May 31 under Delaware’s stay-home order, which remains in place. Many restrictions apply to locals, as well, such as bans on sunbathing, swimming, and surfing.

BOATING

After weeks of pressure on Governor Hogan, recreational boating is back on the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding waterways. In addition to personal watercraft like kayaks and canoes, the use of both motor and sail boats is once again permitted after a brief hiatus during the recent stay-home order.

All boaters must be with immediate family members or those with whom they reside and in accordance of social distancing guidelines. Regardless of vessel size, parties larger than 10 are prohibited, as are gatherings on the likes of piers, boat ramps, beaches, or via raft-ups, in addition to docking at waterfront restaurants. Many marinas have already reopened, though they may do so at their own discretion, so be sure to call ahead. Be it on water or land, recreational fishing has reopened, too, where standard rules and regulations still apply.

GOLF

If there was ever an ideal sport for social distancing in the great outdoors, golf would be it, and sod is once again soaring across the state, with Maryland courses now permitted to reopen at their own discretion. Open greens in the Baltimore area include Bulle Rock in Havre De Grace, Rocky Point in Essex, Greystone in White Hall, and Fox Hollow in Timonium, as well as all Classic Five courses, with tee times reserved online and all high-touch items removed from clubhouses, cars, and ranges. Restrictions and safety measures vary from location to location, though all golf carts are limited to two players from the same household.

Visual Art

Grace Hartigan: Works on Paper

Track the evolution of 20th-century artist Grace Hartigan through decades-worth of watercolors, collages, and paintings at C. Grimaldis Gallery starting this month. The local gallery has represented Hartigan’s estate since 1979, and this new exhibition covering 50 years of her works will offer visitors the chance to experience her early contributions to Abstract Expressionism all the way through the vibrant, representative pieces that marked her later career. Nov. 14 through Jan. 11, 2020. Opening reception Nov. 14, 6-8 p.m. C. Grimaldis Gallery, 523 N. Charles St.

Literature

Brown Lecture Series: Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead is a literary force, and his latest offering, The Nickel Boys, based on a true story of a Florida reform school and the lives it affected over a century, is a must-read. Pick up your copy of Whitehead’s hard-to-put-down novel, and then stop by the Central Library to hear from the award-winning MacArthur Genius himself. 7-8:30 p.m. Nov. 14. Enoch Pratt Free Library, 400 Cathedral St.

Jubilee: A Celebration of Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking with Toni Tipton-Martin

Welcome author and recent Baltimore transplant Toni Tipton-Martin to her new home by attending this lunch and discussion toasting Jubilee: A Celebration of Recipes from Two Centuries of African American Cooking, hosted by the D.C. chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier. Tipton-Martin’s new cookbook is a lesson in both great meals and underrepresented history, and the luncheon is sure to include wonderful discussions of both. 12-2 p.m. Nov. 23. Gunther & Co., 3650 Toone St.

Music

WTMD First Thursday Festival

Did you skip the rainy WTMD First Thursday Festival at Canton Waterfront Park in September? If so, you missed out on a doozy of a lineup and an incredible night out. Whether you’re looking to get your chance to listen to those sets or relive the magic, Maryland Public TV and WTMD are here to help. The two local stalwarts have partnered to turn the concert into a 1-hour special set to premiere on MPT Nov. 7, with a simulcast of the performances by Robert Randolph, Super City, and Emily Wolfe on WTMD. 10-11 p.m. Nov. 7 on MPT and WTMD.

Caleb Stine & The Revelations Album Release Party

It’s a known fact that Caleb Stine is a Baltimore treasure. Join the celebrated songsmith and friends for an evening of good vibes and new tunes at the Creative Alliance to welcome his latest album into the world. Also on hand will be Arty Hill, the Honey Dewdrops, Ben Frock, and other local favorites. 8 p.m. Nov. 23. Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave.

Theatre

Freedom: An Evening of LGBTQ Storytelling

Gather your people and settle in to listen to eight LGBTQ storytellers present their personal interpretations of the theme “freedom.” Come early to mingle and listen to live music at the cocktail hour, then sit back and enjoy these sometimes heartfelt, sometimes humorous, tales. 7-10 p.m. Nov. 16. Baltimore Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.

Fluid Movement’s 20th Birthday Galapalooza

Grab some glitter and head over AVAM to help Fluid Movement cap off their 20th birthday festivities with what’s sure to be an unforgettable night of quirky company, good eats, and joyous dance and musical acts from the quintessential Baltimore performers. Get a VIP ticket to enjoy an extra hour of signature cocktails and snacks, as well as a bonus performance before the dance party gets started. 7-11 p.m. Nov. 23. American Visionary Art Museum, Jim Rouse Visionary Center, 800 Key Hwy.

Film

The Chesapeake Bay: A Look Back in Film

Sail back to days gone by with this presentation of ‘70s and ‘80s 16mm films celebrating Baltimore and the Chesapeake at the Heron Room. Local film presenter Bob Wagner will screen the archive footage that covers everything from growing environmental concerns in the bay to a crab race and Ms. Crustacean 1985. 6:30-8:30 p.m. Nov. 18. The Heron Room, 3000 Falls Rd.

FACE OF DANGER

In mid-August, the Trump administration announced that it would make changes to the Endangered Species Act, which has been called the nation’s “bedrock conservation law” and is credited with saving the grizzly bear, the American alligator, and the bald eagle from extinction since its inception in 1973. The new rules, expected to go into effect this month, would make it easier to remove species from the endangered list and weaken protections for those that are threatened. For the first time, it would also allow for economic considerations when evaluating the necessary level of protection for a given species—which opponents of the revisions believe would open up critical habitat for mining, oil and gas drilling, and other development—while also making it harder to consider climate change and its potential threats to wildlife in the process. According to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Chesapeake Bay’s 64,000-square-mile watershed is home to 113 animals and 46 plants currently protected by the Endangered Species Act, including Atlantic sturgeon, freshwater mussels, and the leatherback sea turtles.

SHELL UNCERTAINTY

After it was reported last winter that wild oysters had been overharvested in more than half of Maryland’s public oyster beds in the 2017-2018 season, the Department of Natural Resources is now considering cutbacks to the upcoming annual oyster harvest, according to the Bay Journal. Last November, the DNR, in consultation with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, released a stock assessment that found the shellfish’s adult population to be half of what it was in 1999, even after periods of decline and rebound in the interim. According to the Journal, officials have told the state’s Oyster Advisory Commission that they are considering a shorter harvest season—which typically runs from October 1 through March 31—as well as reductions of up to 20 percent for the daily commercial catch limit, which in recent years has been a bushel a day. They also suggested the possibility of prohibiting the harvest of certain oyster beds due to unusually low populations. New regulations will be announced in the coming weeks by public notice.

A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT

This month, the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy, a Baltimore County nonprofit that works to preserve and restore the Gunpowder watershed, is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Founded in 1989, the organization has preserved 1,600 acres of land and hosted hundreds of tree plantings and stream cleanups throughout the region of the Gunpowder River and Falls—which runs through Baltimore, Harford, and Carroll counties before reaching the Chesapeake Bay. On Saturday, September 14, their environmental stewardship will be celebrated with an annual evening fundraiser gala at the Conrad’s Ruth Villa waterfront park in Middle River.

GREEN PARTY

Also on Saturday, September 14, Blue Water Baltimore will be hosting its annual fundraiser, the Blue Water Bash, at Barcocina in Fells Point. The nine-year-old organization works to restore the quality of Baltimore’s waterways with community projects, a native plant nursery, and myriad volunteer opportunities such as tree plantings and storm drain stencilings. From 1-5 p.m, there will be food, drinks, music, and a silent auction all to benefit the local environmental group.

DOWN THE DRAIN

A recent report by the Environmental Integrity Project found that a large amount of sewage pollution in the Chesapeake Bay comes not just from the continued overflows of Baltimore City, but even more so Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Raw sewage can introduce harmful bacteria into the waterways that can be harmful to humans who come into contact with the water and affect local ecosystem. In 2018, nearly 1.4 billion gallons of sewage and stormwater flowed from the commonwealth’s state capital into the Susquehanna River, aka the main source of fresh water for the upper Chesapeake, compared to Baltimore’s 260 million. Last year, Harrisburg authorities released a new $315 million plan to reduce such pollution over the next two decades, but Maryland’s Governor Larry Hogan has since called on Pennsylvania, whose latest cleanup plans still fail to meet nitrogen reduction goals by 2025, to increase its efforts toward bay health.

PLANNING AHEAD

Late last month, Maryland submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency the final plans for its part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan—a multi-state clean-up initiative developed to reduce pollution in the estuary by 2025. Considered an “aggressive but achievable” strategy by the Department of Natural Resources, this third phase identifies local and state-wide strategies across multiple sectors—such as upgrades to stormwater and septic systems, improved land conservation and land management in agriculture, and greenhouse gas and emissions reductions in transportation, to name a few—to meet the initiatve’s goals in six years’ time. For the first time, it also factors in potential impacts posed by climate change, as well as considers ways to reduce the heavy pollution of the Conowingo Dam on the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay.

IN BLOOM

On the eve of fall, social media feeds will soon fill with a steady stream of selfies, engagement shots, and photographs of friends and families in front of the seemingly endless sunflower fields at Clear Meadow Farm on Jarrettsville Pike in Monkton. Every year, locals and tourists flock to this rural farmland in Baltimore County to watch the rolling hills turn gold as thousands upon thousands reach their peak bloom. This year, expect that moment to arrive at the end of the month, much like that of the Maryland Agricultural Resource Council in Cockeysville, where, for a small fee, visitors can pick-your-own from sunrise to sunset. Meanwhile, this weekend, giant flowers are already open at the aptly named Sunflower Garden on Manchester Road in Westminster.

SO LONG STYROFOAM
Maryland has become the first state to ban Styrofoam food and drink containers. Half of Maryland residents currently live in areas where the polystyrene is banned, but in mid-March, the House of Delegates made it official, banning the containers statewide. There will be a one-year period to phase out the material, but after that, violators will have to pay a $250 fine. In Baltimore, the city’s various trash wheels have collected more than 1 million foam containers since they began cleaning waterways in 2014.

THE BIRDS ARE BACK
In mid-March, birdwatchers along the Chesapeake Bay started to notice the reemergence of one of our state’s more surefire signs of spring: the osprey. The watershed is home to the largest breeding population of these birds of prey, who return to the local waterways each year to hunt and nest. Meanwhile, in Baltimore, on the first day of spring, the city’s famed peregrine falcon couple, Boh and Barb, laid their first egg of the year atop the Legg Mason building in Harbor East. They fledged four baby hawks last year.

STRIPED BASS BLUES
According to a new stock assessment released in February, the state’s famed striped bass are in trouble and overfished. Rockfish have had somewhat of a rocky history here in Maryland, with overharvesting in the 1980s leading to a nearly six-year, zero-catch moratorium. The populations rebounded in the late ’90s, only to decline again. Recent restrictions have not had a large enough impact on the populations, and some experts expect that this new assessment will lead to more reductions.

R.I.P. HARRY HUGHES
Harry Hughes, the 57th governor of Maryland and a pioneer of Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts, passed away earlier this month at the age of 92. Across two terms, from 1979 to 1987, Hughes would become one of the bay’s greatest champions. The Eastern Shore native initiated the multi-state-federal partnership that is the Chesapeake Bay Agreement, which continues to improve the health of our nation’s largest estuary. He cut back on pollutants, limited shoreline development, and also imposed the aforementioned moratorium on striped bass. Governor Larry Hogan called him “alongtime friend and Maryland legend whom I deeply admired.” Flags were flown at half-mast in his honor.

FUNDING IN FLUX
Meanwhile, it’s starting to feel like Groundhog’s Day again with the Trump administration once again calling for federal funding cuts for Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts. For the third year in a row, budget cuts have been proposed to the Chesapeake Bay Program, which coordinates the partnership between multiple federal agencies and watershed states to monitor, assess, and improve the bay’s health. Like last year, the 2020 budget, released in mid-March, would reduce Environmental Protection Agency funding for the program by 90 percent, from $73 million to $7.3 million, providing no explanation. Governor Hogan has asked Congress to not only block the reduction but increase bay funding by $90 million.

RAMPING UP RENEWABLE ENERGY
Last week, the Maryland Senate approved legislation that would greatly increase the state’s renewable energy requirements. The Clean Jobs Act would require that half of the state’s electricity come from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2030, while also increasing related jobs. The current statewide goal for renewable energy is 25 percent by 2020. In 2017, renewable energy accounted for 10 percent of Maryland’s total net electricity generation. However, after similar legislation failed in the House, it is unclear whether or not the bill will be approved in its next phase.

LIVESTREAM SEWAGE
Last week, after heavy rains, more than 22 million gallons of sewage-tainted water flowed into the Jones Falls and Herring Run. Just days before, the Baltimore City Department of Public Works announced the launch of a new live map of sewage pollution. Going forward, the DPW will issue public alerts when overflows reach or exceed 10,000 gallons to abide by state and federal environmental regulations.

Between the parades, restaurant specials, and pub crawls in our St. Patrick’s Day Roundup, it might be hard to come out the other end of this weekend without feeling a bit green. If you want to avoid the shamrock-clad crowds, check out these alternative events happening around town.

EAT

March 16: Drag Me To Brunch

El Bufalo Tequila Bar & Kitchen, 2921 O’Donnell St. 11 a.m.-3 p.m. $20

We can’t think of a better way to start the St. Patrick’s Day weekend shenanigans than with a good ol’ fashioned drag brunch. After noshing on Tex-Mex brunch dishes like spicy chorizo omelets and breakfast tacos, dance along with local queens like Sarah ‘Nade, Virya Shavasana, and Victoria Bohmore as they sashay around El Bufalo Tequila Bar & Kitchen. With bottomless mimosas, tequila sunrises, and Bloody Marys flowing throughout the show, you’re guaranteed to be dragging your feet once it’s time to go back out to the Canton Square.

DRINK

March 16: Unicorn Farts Release Party

DuClaw Brewing Company, 8901 Yellow Bright Rd. 2-3 p.m. Free.

This weekend marks the release of DuClaw Brewing’s unicorn-themed beer in support of the city’s LGBTQ community, and their team of brewers is kicking off the celebration (literally) with an ode to Baltimore Pride’s annual high-heel race. Venture out to Rosedale to participate in a one-of-a-kind 20-meter dash to honor the brand-new glittery ale, Sour Me Unicorn Farts, and then spend the rest afternoon enjoying live music and eats from local food trucks. Show the crowd of onlookers what stilettos are made for and trade in your sweat for 16 ounces of shimmer at the finish line.

SEE

March 16-April 13: Louie’s Cafe Bookstore Exhibition

Creative Alliance, 3134 Eastern Ave. 6-8 p.m. Free.

Before Station North’s worker-owned Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, there was Louie’s, a beloved bookstore cafe which was the first of its kind when it opened in 1981. This Charles Street staple served as a hub for Baltimore’s artist community, and now, 20 years after its closing, 25 of Louie’s previously featured artists are hanging their masterpieces on the walls of the Creative Alliance to revive the glory of this cultural epicenter. Whether you’re a former patron or just want to revel in this piece of local history, experience its opening on Saturday night and stick around for eats by James Beard Award-winning chef Spike Gjerde and tunes by Ava Oelke with Swing Theory.

HEAR

March 15: Haint Blue

Metro Gallery, 1700 N. Charles St. 8 p.m. $10.

Heavy thunderstorms are in Friday’s forecast, but don’t let that stop you from jamming out with this righteous Baltimore-based septet during the release party for their first full-length album, Overgrown. Pack the Metro Gallery to hear bold anthems and vulnerable ballads from this rising Americana-folk group as well as sets by local artists Caleb Stine and Cora Sone that will have you rockin’ no matter how loudly the thunder rolls.

DO

March 8: Baltimore Oyster Gardening

Downtown Sailing Center, 1425 Key Hwy. 9-11 a.m. Free.

Who knew mollusks needed gardening? This Saturday, head down to Lighthouse Point to help ensure that the 250,000 oysters planted around the Inner Harbor are living their best lives. Show your appreciation for these Chesapeake Bay VIPs by cleaning out their cages and learning about how important they are to the ecosystem. And though you’re bound to get dirty (RIP to your T-shirt), the day’s work will leave you feeling happy as a clam.

BAD GRADES
After records rains and subsequently excessive runoff pollution in 2018, the Chesapeake Bay’s biennial report card was released earlier this month with a downgrade to a D+ from a C- in 2016. At the time, the grade was the highest grade received since the assessment was launched in 1998 by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. While the recent change was the first time the score had declined in a decade, there were some signs of improvement, such as increased oxygen levels throughout the estuary’s waterways and survival of underwater grasses despite the weather-related diluge. The CBF continues to stress the importance of watershed-wide cleanup efforts and the persistence of environmental regulations currently threatened by the Trump administration.

FARMERS UNITED
In mid-December, Congress approved the 2019 Farm Bill, which will allocate some $867 billion in federal subsidies to American farmers. In addition the bill legalizes hemp and provides permanent funding for programs such as farmers’ market promotion, organic farming research, and organizations working to train the next generation of farmers. The state of Maryland has more than 12,000 farms across some two million acres of land. The bill has also preserved the Conservation Stewardship Program, which works with farmers to strengthen their conservations efforts. It also triples the amount of funding available for the Regional Conservation Partnership Program, which locally works to reduce farm runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. The Farm Bill is the largest source of funding to help with such efforts throughout the watershed, providing upwards of $130 million to regional farmers each year to improve their environmental impact.

DNR CHANGES
Earlier this month, Governor Hogan nominated Jeannie Haddaway-Riccio to be Maryland’s new secretary to the Department of Natural Resources, which oversees fishing, hunting, boating, parks, wildlife, waterways, and forests throughout the state. Scheduled to start in February following confirmation by the Senate, she will replace Mark Belton, who stepped down from him position shortly after the New Year to resume his former post as Charles County administrator. Haddaway-Riccio currently serves as Hogan’s deputy chief of staff, where she advises on environment-related issues. She also represented the Eastern Shore in the House of Delegates from 2003 to 2015.

OUT OF THIS WORLD
We’ll consider space news environmental news for the time being as, just this week, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft mission released the first detailed images of the Ultima Thule—a small, two-sphered object located on the edge of our solar system and the most distant object ever explored in space. While Ultima Thule is located in the Kuiper Belt some four billion miles from Earth, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in in our backyard of Laurel designed, built, and currently operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and also manages the mission. With the first photographs received around 5 a.m. on January 1, the lab celebrated with flyby festivities on New Year’s Day.

URBAN FOREST
Blue Water Baltimore has worked to transform a controversial stretch of highway median into a verdant greenspace in the heart of West Baltimore. Over the past two years, the local nonprofit and other citywide volunteer efforts have planted nearly 500 trees in the middle of U.S. Route 40 between Fulton Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard, aka Baltimore’s “Highway to Nowhere,” which historically displaced more than 1,000 residents, most of whom were African-Americans, in the mid-20th century. The first two phases were completed with help from Volunteering Untapped, community residents, and local school groups, while the third and final phases were completed this past November with the Baltimore Tree Trust and Bon Secours Clean and Green Landscaping Team. The trees will be watered in the summertime by the Baltimore City YouthWorks program.

IN SESSION

As a new legislative session began in Annapolis last week, a number of environmental issues are on the docket for consideration by local lawmakers. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation is seeking legislation to protect Chesapeake Bay tributaries selected for large-scale restorations from future oyster harvest, as well as the development of a new fishery management plan for the bivalves. Meanwhile the Clean Energy Jobs initiative aims to increase the state’s renewable energy goals, which currently includes receiving 25 percent of Maryland energy from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2020, to half of statewide energy being renewable by 2030, followed by all by 2040. Following similar legislation in states such as Pennsylvania, local environmentalists are also pushing for a state constitutional amendment that guarantees Marylanders the right to uncontaminated water, breathable air, and a healthy environment.

GOING GREEN

Late last month, Maryland helped form the Transportation and Climate Initiative, a landmark coalition of Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, along with Washington, D.C., that aims to set regional limits on emissions from cars, trucks, buses, and other modes of transportation. The agreement aims to recognize the role of transportation in climate change and to create a regional policy that would cap and reduce the emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, through initiatives such as new bike lanes, improved public transit, and zero-emission vehicles. In similar news, Maryland utility companies have just received approval to install more than 5,000 electric vehicle charging stations throughout the state.

CLEAN WATERS

Just weeks after the Trump administration announced plans to rollback protections for some of the nation’s waterways, Maryland, along with five other Chesapeake Bay watershed states and Washington, D.C., received $13.1 million in grants for environmental projects, including water quality improvement and wildlife habitat, from the Environmental Protection Agency and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Maryland received approximately $5.9 million of these funds for environmental efforts, many of which include farmland runoff reduction, the largest source of pollution in the estuary.

Move over New Mexico and South Carolina, Maryland is coming for your top spots when it comes to best-looking license plates in the country. Maryland’s newest specialty plate features Sandy Point State Park with a blue crab and the Bay Bridge in the distance—we got artsy with it—to raise awareness for the Chesapeake Bay Trust.

It’s been 28 years since the foundation debuted the very first bay license plate and 14 years since it’s had an updated design. With the help of Tina Cardosi, president of TM Designs and the plate’s designer, the trust was able to unveil the most recent design at Sandy Point State Park last month.

“A lot of folks thought that it was time for a new design,” said Jana Davis, executive director for Chesapeake Bay Trust. “We have a lot of new technologies now—both in the art realm and design technology—so we know wanted to give people something new and fresh.”

After more than a year of scouting and reviewing 250 designs from all over the state, Cardosi’s TM Designs had the winning combination. (Even Pennsylvania is envious of our latest plates!)

“One of the first things that came into my head is I really wanted to do something that had an underwater theme to it,” Cardosi says. “That was one of the concepts that we proposed from the very beginning.”

The new plate not only features an eye-catching design, but also an updated catchphrase to accompany it. The older plates read “Treasure the Chesapeake” with the newest version urging residents to “Protect the Chesapeake”—in case you needed a firm reminder that we need to keep it clean.

“By choosing these bay plates, drivers help to get kids outside on field trips and trees and gardens planted across our communities,” Davis said. “All of which helps the bay and its contributing rivers and streams.”

This specific plate is popular among Maryland motorists with more than 330,000 bay plates on the road to date. Drivers can now purchase the most recent ones for $20 from the MVA, the Trust website, car dealerships, or tag and title agencies. The funds will go to support K-12 outdoor education, environmental restoration projects, and community engagement in natural resources. So, it’s aesthetically pleasing and benefits a great cause.

Hopefully with this new design—along with the basic Maryland flag plates and the orange and yellow agriculture plates—we can climb a little higher on Thrillist’s list of license plates where we are currently ranked at 50. We can’t blame them, we’ve had some pretty bland designs over the years.

See what we mean?

More than 20 years ago, long before farm-to-table became a catchphrase, there was John Shields, who traveled up and down the Chesapeake Bay meeting with oystermen, fishermen, and growers, and helped define modern-day Mid-Atlantic cuisine.

With the release of his latest cookbook, The New Chesapeake Kitchen, the veteran author and owner of the newly named Gertrude’s Chesapeake Kitchen is once again reimagining regional fare, not only because the bay has changed, but because he has changed.

“Seven years ago, I had a heart attack,” say Shields. “I had to be really mindful of what I was eating. That got me thinking about how we’ve eaten for thousands of years, and it has been primarily a plant-forward diet.”

To that end, he calls the recipes in his new book both “bay- and body-friendly.” We sat down with Shields to talk about his latest venture, how he got his start in the field, and keeping company with John Waters.

Why did you want to write this book?
The idea for The New Chesapeake Kitchen came about 10 or 12 years ago. I started making notes of what I was eating and where I bought it, and I asked myself if what I was purchasing was benefiting the community. Also, I don’t want to sound morose, but it’s the thing I want to leave—it’s my legacy.

Where did the book’s name come from?
I looked at what went wrong and where we are and what could possibly be a vision for the 21st century. We have to keep one foot in the past to see our way forward, but we need to have a whole new look at the way we eat—a lot of the fish that we used to have in the bay aren’t here. Some of the protein is so precious that we can’t eat it the way we used to. Then we have some species that weren’t here before. We have to take a snapshot of now.

How do you want people to use the book?
It’s a cookbook, and there are a lot of fun recipes, but I also hope that they notice the way it’s put together. I’ve separated the recipes by cooking techniques because I think it takes us back to the idea of plant forward. The idea is to stretch the protein. If we made crab cakes, that could be $60 a pound right now, which would feed three people. But if you turn it into soup, you could make something that is quintessentially Chesapeake and feeds eight to 10 people. It’s bay- and body-friendly.

Why did you thank your cardiologist, Sonia Baker, in the dedication to the book?
There were some not-great things happening with my heart, and I was having a hard time finishing the book. She said to me, ‘Now, listen, it’s a book. How many of these have you done? Just finish it up—you know how to write a cookbook.’

Why did you want to be a chef?
I was working at some clubs in Cape Cod playing the piano. I was with John Waters’ repertory company—we are still friends. A friend of mine, who was a sous chef at the Provincetown Inn, broke his ankle. He said, ‘Hon, you have to go up and cook tonight.’ They brought out these big mesh bags of garlic. I had never seen a whole head of garlic in my life—I was Catholic. That’s really how I started cooking. There was no thought at all.

Recipe: Crispy Rockfish Tacos

This is some of the Chesapeake’s plant-forward eating at its best. A whole slew of wonderful vegetables coming together, all wrapped in a warm corn tortilla, with crispy pieces of the Bay’s favorite finfish, the rock—a.k.a. striped—bass. This dish works well for a party if you set up a taco station with all the ingredients, allowing guests to make their own. Serves 4.

Ingredients

• 1 pound rockfish filet
• 1 cup flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• ½ teaspoon chipotle powder
• ½ teaspoon paprika
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• Oil for frying
• 8 fresh small corn tortillas

Lime-Jicama Slaw

• 1 cup shredded cabbage
• ½ cup shredded jicama
• ¼ cup chopped green onion
• ¼ cup julienned carrots
• 1 tablespoon chopped cilantro
• ¼ cup mayonnaise
• Juice of 1 lime

Avocado Cream

• 2 ripe avocados
• ½ cup sour cream
• Juice of ½ lime
• Pinch of ground cumin
• Salt, to taste

Directions

In a bowl, combine the cabbage, jicama, green onion, carrots, and cilantro. In another small bowl, combine the mayo and lime juice. Pour over the top of the vegetable mixture, tossing to coat well. Refrigerate for one hour before serving.

Cut the rockfish filets into 1½-inch chunks. In a bowl, mix the flour with the salt, cumin, garlic powder, chipotle powder, paprika, cayenne, and black pepper and blend well. Heat oil to a depth of 1½ inches until quite hot. Dust the rockfish pieces with the flour mixture and shake off excess. In batches, fry fish until golden brown and cooked through. Remove the pieces of fish with a slotted utensil and allow to drain on paper towels.

While cooking fish, heat a dry (not oiled) cast-iron skillet and warm the tortillas for about 30 seconds on each side. Wrap tortillas in a damp towel and keep warm while heating the rest of the tortillas. To assemble the tacos, place a spoonful of slaw in the center of each tortilla, followed by several pieces of fish and a dollop of Avocado Cream. Remove the skin and pit from the avocados and place the flesh a bowl. Mash the avocado and then add the remaining ingredients.

Garnish with a teaspoon of salsa, plus radish. Serve lime wedges on the side.

This excerpt is taken from The New Chesapeake Kitchen by John Shields. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press © 2018. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Renee Brooks Catacalos knows a thing or two about local food. She served as the deputy director of Future Harvest-Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture, published and wrote for Edible Chesapeake magazine from 2006 to 2009, and has eaten almost exclusively locally for over a decade.

Her first book, The Chesapeake Table: Your Guide to Eating Local, will be released in October and outlines why she’s been hooked on the local food movement from the start, which foods you can only find in the Chesapeake region, and how you can benefit from the fruits—literally and figuratively—of local farmers’ labors.

You’ve been working with local food for years now. Where did you start?
My interest in local food started as a consumer, actually. I’d lived abroad in my twenties in places where eating local is pretty common, but when I moved back to DC in 2001, farmers markets and “eat local” campaigns were really starting to take off. I was a little skeptical at first, but I found that shopping and eating locally was a lot of fun. It was so interesting to find out where the food comes from and talk to the suppliers about how they grow and care for it all, and it all tasted incredible, like noticeably more flavorful than food from a lot of grocery stores.

In addition to taste, what are some other benefits of eating locally?
There are so many! The health and environmental benefits are some of the most important for me, because when you buy locally grown food, especially meat, you’re choosing not to support industrial farms that use a lot of toxic chemicals. There are even socioeconomic benefits. Right now, eating locally is a little more expensive, but in order to allow a broader range of people access to healthier, seasonal, well-raised food, we have to buy it so that it’s economically viable for the farmers to continue making it and eventually lower the prices.

Giving up the convenience of going to the nearest supermarket and eating largely locally grown food can seem daunting.
Yeah, lots of people are definitely daunted by it beforehand, mostly because they feel like they don’t have the time, the know-how, or the money to do it. But it’s really like any other food-specific commitment, like being a vegetarian, or a vegan, or kosher, or gluten-free, except this one doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Even if you just get to the farmers’ market once a month to buy a box of peaches or if you know the grocery store stocks local honey, that’s a great place to start.

What does The Chesapeake Table bring to the conversation about local food?
One of my biggest frustrations with other books on local food is that so many of them take a really broad, national viewpoint, and that’s hard to translate into a real game plan for consumers. That’s why I wanted to take this regional focus and be much more specific about the Chesapeake region, because there is so much the Chesapeake offers us in terms of local food. My book also comes from a consumer perspective, which is sort of rare. I don’t work directly in the industry anymore, and it’s hard to balance a job that is not related to food with trying to shop and cook and support the local food system, but it gave me a unique perspective.

This book isn’t everything you’ll ever need to know about local food, but I thought it could give people a good starting point with information about the local food system and the Chesapeake region, and hopefully it’ll prime them to keep learning on their own.

So why is the Chesapeake such a great place to eat locally?
I don’t think people appreciate how special the Chesapeake Bay actually is. Because it’s a mix of salt and fresh water, it creates such a fertile place where so many kinds of food can thrive. The seafood, of course, is the sweetest and the biggest because they put on fat during cold winters, and because this climate gets four distinct seasons, we get this extensive range of seasonal produce. Basically, we have anything except tropical foods. You can source almost a complete diet from this region.

What about Baltimore specifically?
Baltimore has a level of infrastructure to support the local food industry that a lot of other cities don’t have yet. In the past decade, the city has started to put money toward funding local farmers, and that’s legitimized that system in both a symbolic and a tangible way. Also, because of its size and diversity, both in the foods that are sold and the people that buy them, the Baltimore Farmers’ Market is one of the best I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot.

You’re from D.C., but do you have favorite places around Baltimore to eat local food?
Well, of course, I love Woodberry Kitchen and Gertrude’s, but farm-to-table doesn’t have to refer to that new American kind of food. Ananda in Howard County is an Indian resturant, and they have their own garden. There’s also a great website called Chesapeake Farm to Table that’s run by of Calvert’s Gift Farm in Sparks, and it lists a bunch of restaurants around Baltimore that source their food straight from that farm.

The term “farm-to-table” is everywhere now. How do you distinguish what’s legitimate?
The farm-to-table claims can get so ridiculous! I’ve seen peach gummy candy—obviously not farm-to-table since it’s entirely chemicals—labeled as “locally sourced.” A good way to know for sure is just to ask. If restaurants are serving local food, they should easily be able to tell you where the ingredients came from.

Unfortunately for Baltimoreans, most crab cakes are not made entirely with local blue crabs, so if you want something that you can know for sure is straight from the bay, buy crabs in the shell, in their whole, full glory. They taste so much fresher, and then you know exactly what you’re eating because you can see it.

Why is now the right time for this book?
Anniversaries are definitely times to reflect, and it had been about 10 years since I’d gotten into local eating when I came up with the idea for The Chesapeake Table. I started doing a lot of research and thinking a lot about what had changed in the decade, especially as I left the industry and began to look at things as a consumer.

I really am committed to the local food system, and I wanted to contribute something to it that would help it grow. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I’m just bringing light to how much work people are doing to bring local food to people’s dinner tables, and I’m trying to show people that even the tiniest things can make a big difference.

Baltimore was making a bad impression. John Kellett was sure of that. Walking to his job as the director of the Baltimore Maritime Museum, his path took him across the footbridge connecting Harbor East and Pier Six. And most days, the Jones Falls flowing underneath looked like a conveyor belt of trash, full of debris sucked downstream from the river’s 40-square-mile watershed.

As an environmental scientist, marine educator, shipwright, sailor, and general Chesapeake Bay-niac, Kellett knew better than most how fouled local waterways were. But it still pained him to see the region’s economic and cultural anchor so degraded. And he could tell that others noticed, too.

“Every day, I’d hear the tourists say, ‘Ugh, this harbor is full of trash. It’s disgusting,’” he recalls, now more than a decade removed from this galvanizing moment. “And I actually called the city and said, ‘We have to do something about this.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re open to ideas.’”

In truth, the city was trying to do something. It’s just that its efforts weren’t particularly effective. A boom had been installed at the mouth of the Jones Falls to corral debris. But every time it rained, trash would overwhelm the boom and escape into the harbor. Once the trash was in the harbor, the city would sometimes send out trash-skimming boats. But these boats were able to gather only a small fraction of the trash at a time, and they required human operators, making them costly to run.

There had to be a better way, Kellett reasoned, so he began brainstorming. Then he hit upon an idea so simple that he couldn’t believe it hadn’t been tried before.

“All you really need to do is get the trash out of the water and put it somewhere where it can be transported,” he explains. “So it sort of dawned on me that we could use the flow of the river that brings the trash as the power to pick the trash out of the river. And that’s where the idea of the waterwheel came from.”

Twelve years and a few pairs of googly eyes later, Kellett’s crude waterwheel idea has begat three lean, green, trash-collecting machines known to Baltimoreans as Mr. Trash Wheel, Professor Trash Wheel, and Captain Trash Wheel. Stationed throughout the Inner Harbor at the outflows of the Jones Falls, Harris Creek, and a stream in Masonville Cove, respectively, these contraptions function much as Kellett envisioned: Booms funnel trash toward the “mouth” of the machine while the current, supplemented by solar-powered motors, turns a wheel. Power from the wheel then activates a conveyor belt, which, in turn, slowly lifts the trash out of the water and drops it into a dumpster. The trash is then transported by the city and burned in the incinerator, generating electricity. It’s remarkably low-tech—and remarkably effective. Collectively, the trash wheels have removed more than 859 tons of trash from Baltimore’s Inner Harbor since 2014.

But what Kellett couldn’t envision when he conceived of the trash wheels was just what a source of fascination they would become. Thanks to savvy marketing and the public’s hunger for environmental success stories, the machines have attracted the kind of following usually reserved for human celebrities—or at least Apple products.

Besides glowing coverage in outlets ranging from NPR and National Geographic to Business Insider and Gizmodo, the trash wheels have accrued tens of thousands of followers on their various social media accounts. Additionally, they have inspired two local beers, several novelty T-shirts (“Stay Trashy, Baltimore,” “Feel the Churn”), a holiday sweatshirt (“Trashing Through the Snow”), a theme song, and, as of this spring, an official do-gooding fan club (The Order of the Wheel). In short, they have become the region’s most unlikely aquatic icons since soft-shell crabs.

“It’s kind of become a national and international sensation, which is not what I expected,” admits Kellett, a 55-year-old father of two with a laconic drawl and steely blue eyes. “I thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to clean up Baltimore Harbor and try to make a difference right here.’ It’s sort of like, ‘Act locally, think globally’—although I wasn’t even thinking globally. I had global thinking thrust upon me.”

Most days, you can find John Kellett puttering around Locust Cove Marina, the tiny boatyard he and his wife, Pamela, co-own in Pasadena. Here, amongst the clutter of boats, trailers, and assorted spare parts, is the headquarters of Clearwater Mills, the company Kellett founded soon after his a-ha moment in 2006. These days, business is booming. There is talk of a fourth trash wheel for the city, to be stationed where the Gywnns Falls empties into the Middle Branch of the Patapsco. And beyond Baltimore, there are projects brewing in locales from New York City to Newport Beach, California.

But Kellett acknowledges that arriving at this point was not easy. After his initial flash of inspiration, he constructed a six-foot-long working model that he tested in the Inner Harbor. He invited employees from then-mayor Martin O’Malley’s office and the Department of Public Works out to see it, and they agreed it had potential.

“So it sort of dawned on me that we could use the flow of the river that brings the trash as the power to pick the trash out of the river.”

“They looked at it and said, ‘Yeah, it’s a pretty cool idea, but since it has never been done before, we don’t feel like we can finance an experiment,’” Kellett recalls. So Kellett went in search of funding, landing in front of Bob Embry, president of the Abell Foundation, the area’s largest private foundation with a focus on funding local projects. A meeting with Embry went well, although Kellett wasn’t so sure at first. “I thought he was thoroughly unimpressed, but, the next day, I got a call saying, ‘We’d like to work it out so we can finance your idea.’”

Behind his poker face, Embry says he saw the project as “an appealing experiment” with “the potential to be marketed to other cities.” He offered Kellett $375,000 to build a prototype with the agreement that, if it were successful, the city would purchase it and the Abell Foundation would recoup its investment.

Kellett and his business partner, Daniel Chase, built the first full-scale trash wheel in six months, producing a 32-foot-long contraption with the machine’s inner workings concealed underneath a shed-like structure.

It made its inauspicious debut in the Jones Falls in February 2008. “The prototype didn’t receive a tremendous amount of attention,” Kellett remembers. “People thought it was kind of interesting, but they didn’t think it was any big deal.”

Included in the not “any big deal” camp were some members of city government, who felt that the trash wheel was underperforming and unreliable. Kellett, meanwhile, argued it was performing admirably, given that it was handling approximately four times more trash than had been anticipated.

After eight months, the city relocated the trash wheel to the outflow of the Harris Creek in Canton—a move Kellett likened to putting it out to pasture—and a years-long tussle about its efficacy ensued.

Kellett refers to this time as “the lean years.” Still, he never lost faith in his invention. And he had some key allies in his corner.

Among those allies was the team at Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore, a nonprofit that promotes the Inner Harbor and its adjacent neighborhoods.

“They said, ‘This machine is doing a great job. We’ve never seen the harbor cleaner. We want a waterwheel back at Jones Falls,’” Kellett recalls. So in 2013, armed with lessons learned from the prototype and $750,000 in funding from various public and private sources—including Waterfront Partnership—Kellett and Chase set out to reinvent the trash wheel. (Waterfront Partnership owns and operates both Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel. Captain Trash Wheel is owned and operated by the Maryland Port Administration.) They added more heft (wooden and plastic dock floats were replaced by steel pontoons), more solar panels (three panels ballooned to 30), and, with the help of Ziger/Snead Architects, adopted a sleeker, more eye-catching design. Gone was the Unabomber cabin-ish garden shed. The new model was all exoskeleton, a primitivism that somehow read as futuristic.

On May 9, 2014, the new-and-improved trash wheel went into the Jones Falls next to Pier Six. Two weeks later, it was famous.

Adam Lindquist just wanted to make a little video. As director of Waterfront Partnership’s Healthy Harbor Initiative, Lindquist leads efforts to make the Inner Harbor swimmable and fishable by 2020, and he wanted his family and friends to see his newest pollution-fighting tool. So on May 16, 2014, he climbed aboard the trash wheel and filmed a short clip of it in action.

“I put it up on my YouTube page, and over the course of a week, that video went to number one on Reddit and received over a million views,” Lindquist says, still incredulous four years later. “It was at that point that we realized that we need to do something more to capture the viral nature of the device.”

Waterfront Partnership solicited ideas from local marketing agencies. One firm, What Works, suggested anthropomorphizing the trash wheel and giving it a Twitter account. One of the company’s then-employees assumed the Mr. Trash Wheel persona, and on July 15, 2014, Mr. Trash Wheel sent his first tweet: “I love it when kayakers come visit me in the Harbor! Just don’t get too close or you could end up in my belly!” (Since 2015, Robyn Stegman has been the voice of Mr. Trash Wheel. She now voices Professor Trash Wheel, too.)

The feeds provide a steady stream of water quality factoids, silly memes (Mr. Trash Wheel wielded a lightsaber on Star Wars Day), and cheerfully irreverent asides (“Do people really still drink diet root beer? If you’re going to litter, please send something tastier.”)

And, occasionally, internet gold just falls into their laps.

Headlines ensued after the trash wheel picked up a live ball python in August 2015. A few months later, a drawing of the trash wheel sporting a pair of googly eyes proved so popular that Waterfront Partnership added the peepers to the actual machine. In 2017, inspired by the snake incident, Peabody Heights Brewery created Mr. Trash Wheel’s Lost Python Ale, with proceeds benefiting the Healthy Harbor Initiative.

On May 9, 2014, the new-and-improved trash wheel went into the Jones Falls next to Pier Six. Two weeks later, it was famous.

“We keep thinking, ‘Oh, we’ve got our 15 minutes of fame,’” says Kellett, “But we’ve had that like a dozen times. You never know where it’s going to come from.”

With each new round of publicity comes another chance to raise money, discourage pollution, and improve water quality.

Waterfront Partnership keeps a running tally of the debris collected by the wheels on its website. So far, the machines have munched more than 10 million cigarette butts, 796,214 polystyrene cups, and 852,261 chip bags—among other items.

Having such exact data has been useful for policymakers, says Del. Brooke Lierman, who represents much of waterfront Baltimore in the 46th District and has spent the past two legislative sessions championing a statewide ban of expanded polystyrene foam food containers. Though a statewide ban has yet to pass, Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and Baltimore City have approved local bans.

“The trash wheels make understanding the amount of trash more accessible. . . . That is an important part of proving to skeptical policymakers that there’s a real need to act,” says Lierman.

Because the trash wheels are such effective anti-littering ambassadors, there is a small chance that they could one day render themselves obsolete. Until then though, Kellett and others are happy to have them.

“To see the trash come down the river . . . and realize that before this machine was in, that trash would have been scattered around the harbor,” Kellet says. “That’s really rewarding.”

On the walls of a second-floor classroom in The Green School of Baltimore hang hand-drawn welcome cards, scribbled in crayon and colored pencil. Each is different, decorated with waves, grasses, and fish, but one image is constant: a prominent, bright green turtle. 

These cards are for the class pet, Hidey Hermit Crab, who is, in fact, a diamondback terrapin. Once prolific along the Chesapeake Bay, this speckled-skin turtle with an iconic shell was designated the Maryland state reptile in 1994 but has since been classified as a threatened or endangered species in some East Coast states, though its populations do seem secure along our local estuary.

For now, at least, Hidey is hiding safely beneath faux grasses and a plastic rock in Diana Duce’s first grade classroom as part of the National Aquarium’s decade-old Terrapins in the Classroom program, which brings the elusive turtle right before her students’ eyes. Each fall, more than 40 Maryland schools (elementary through high school) receive hatchling terrapins—then the size of a quarter—for students to observe, study, and learn from throughout the year. Since 2008, the program has raised more than 400 terrapins with the goal of inspiring a future generation to feel connected to the Chesapeake Bay.

“We’re hoping that, by understanding the impact that the bay’s health can have on this animal, the students will want to be lifelong stewards of their environments,” says program director Marcie Orenstein. “It has even encouraged some students to pursue careers in environmental science and veterinary medicine.”

This month, once the terrapin has grown, some of Ms. Duce’s students will then hop on school buses, throw on life jackets, and head out on boats bound for Poplar Island on the Eastern Shore. Here, the turtle, having been tagged at the aquarium for future research purposes, will be released back into the waters from which it came.

On these trips, “some students get to experience the Chesapeake Bay for the first time,” says Orenstein. “Through this program, they can see the effects of erosion and pollution and really understand how their actions, even in the schoolyard, can impact these natural habitats and the animals that live in them.”

Watching the turtle swim away can be somewhat emotional for the kids, who write good luck notes and throw going away parties before their departure. “I’m going to be happy but also sad,” says Brooklyn O’Neal Dorsey, 7, echoing the shared sentiment of her classmates, “because I really love him and he’s my friend.” For that, Ms. Duce makes sure to remind her students of what an amazing thing it is that they have done. “We’ll stop and say, hey, Hidey is back in the wild now,” she says. “I wonder where he is today. I wonder what he’s doing.”

GRASS IS GREENER
According to a new study published in the premier Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts have contributed to a major influx in important underwater grasses. Between 1984 and 2014, nitrogen levels fell 23 percent while acres of submerged vegetation, long considered a key indicator of bay heath, more than tripled to nearly 100 square miles. Researchers directly correlated this resurgence with recent cleanup initiatives, such as the pollution reduction efforts that were established in 2010. High-nutrient pollution can cause algae blooms that block sunlight from or smother the grasses, which remove carbon dioxide from the water and act as habitat for other aquatic creatures. That being said, the Trump administration’s 2019 budget is currently considering cuts to regional water cleanup efforts like those on the Chesapeake Bay.

HOORAY FOR THE BAY
At the beginning of the month, the Environmental Protection Agency reversed its decision to cut federal funding for the 27-year-old Chesapeake Bay Journal. Last year, the EPA abruptly announced its $325,000 cut half-way through its six-year grant with the environmental publication, inciting public outcry over the potential detriment that the Trump administration’s budget could cause the restoration efforts of the Chesapeake Bay. The Bay Journal, which receives another two-thirds of its funding from other sources, sued the agency in hopes that it would disclose an explanation. Under pressure from Senator Democrats, the EPA restored the grant just shy of four months later on March 1.

GUIDING LIGHT
In early March, the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks announced that a portion of the Wyman Park Dell would be rededicated the Harriet Tubman Grove in honor of the iconic, Maryland-born abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor. The wooded area formerly included the contest the Lee Jackson Monument, which was removed by Mayor Catherine Pugh in August 2017. The Harriet Tubman Tree Fund was also announced, with a goal of planting young trees to help sustain the native canopy.

BIRD WATCHER
With spring officially sprung, Great Blue Herons are back in action, and the Chesapeake Conservancy makes it easy to watch their ways. Installed last year, the non-profit’s webcam takes viewers behind the scenes of one of the water birds’ Eastern Shore rookeries. The same organization that brought us peregrine falcons Boh and Barb of downtown Baltimore now brings you a treetop view of these majestic creatures, including one couple named Eddie and Rell. Any time of day, they can be found feeding, nesting, or tending to their young. Watch the live-stream via their website, and also tune into the conservancy’s other cameras, including one for ospreys Tom and Audrey on Kent Island.

HIT THE GAS
In mid-March, state regulators approved a new natural gas pipeline beneath the Potomoc River. Helmed by Canadian energy company, Columbia Gas, this controversial project led to five arrests during a sit-in protest just two days earlier. While opponents vehemently oppose the pipeline, the Department of Energy claims that the project will meet a slew of precautionary environmental requirements so as to not threaten the river, or that of ground or drinking water.

APPLES TO APPLES
In late March, Civic Works’ Baltimore Orchard Project announced the upcoming launch of Moveable Orchards, a new initiative that brings portable fruit trees to the city’s vacant lots and community gardens in underserved neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester. The program hopes to provide a sustainable source of nourishment for local residents, as some 23.5% of the Baltimore’s population lives in food deserts, according to a recent study by the city’s planning department and Johns Hopkins University, the majority of whom are African-American. They plan to officially launch on Arbor Day on April 27, having currently raised nearly $7,000 of their raising $15,000 crowdfunding goal.

BOOK WORMS
As a veteran journalist and environmental radio host on WYPR, Tom Pelton has become a go-to source when it comes to conversations surrounding the Chesapeake Bay. His new book, The Chesapeake In Focus: Transforming The Natural World, brings together those years of experience in a rumination on ways to save our state estuary. He also celebrates other great local conservationists, like Bonnie Bick and Michael Beer. Catch a reading and book signing at the George Peabody Library on April 18.

The Chesapeake in Focus: Transforming the Natural World

Tom Pelton (Johns Hopkins University Press)

In this book, Pelton, one the country’s leading environmental journalists, offers us a wealth of knowledge about the Chesapeake Bay, collected from his more than two decades of reporting on this ecological, cultural, and historical treasure (you may also know him from his show Environment in Focus on WYPR). His book is part history of the bay’s watershed region, part political history of its preservation, and, to a lesser extent, part personal history, as Pelton draws gorgeous imagery of scenes he’s experienced as an avid kayaker on the bay’s waters and tributaries. In total, he paints a compelling portrait of what it is he wants to preserve. Divided into four sections (The Waters, The People, The Wildlife, and The Policies), the book covers a lot of ground, from Baltimore’s sewage issues to the over-harvesting of wild oysters. The highlight, perhaps, comes toward the end, when Pelton proposes 10 realistic steps for bay restoration. We should listen to him.

Art-Activism: The Revolutionary Art, Poetry, & Reflections of Aaron Maybin

Aaron Maybin (self-published)

Some may know him as a former NFL linebacker. Others know him as an arts educator and activist. In his debut book, Baltimore’s Aaron Maybin combines his artwork—paintings, drawings, and photography—with his poetry and short essays, which are gritty and raw but also vibrant with an almost palpable energy. The works serve as Baltimore-centric meditations on what it means to be an activist, and Maybin’s voice is both vulnerable and strong as a black man born and raised here. He quickly moves from politics to religion to class to race, not only acknowledging current problems faced by local African Americans but also offering solutions and alternatives for a brighter future through grassroots efforts. Portions of the book act as anthems for a community that is rising up to meet the challenges they face, so that their children and children’s children might one day live in a better world.

Why did you write this book—or why now? It seems like it was a long time coming, comprising years of research and reporting.

It’s essentially the culmination of 20 years of my writing and thinking about the Chesapeake Bay. If I drop dead tomorrow, I wanted to leave something that represented what I honestly thought about something I love.

Over the decades, I’ve learned a lot through reporting—through radio shows and for the newspaper [The Baltimore Sun] and for some other publications—and I wanted to do the best I can to express the unvarnished truth about this great cultural, ecological masterpiece. I hope that this book is my contribution, in the years ahead, of what one person who has spent a lot of time researching and writing about the bay thought about what needs to be done.
 

Did you grow up around here?

I grew up just north of Chicago on Lake Michigan, and I loved growing up on Lake Michigan. I used to teach sailing, and my family had a summer house on Lake Michigan, so I spent a lot of my time as a kid outside on the water—fishing, swimming, sailing. I used to teach sailing. Boating has always been a huge passion of mine. I’m a big kayaker. . . . I got a job at The Sun in 1997, and I moved to this area and raised my family here.
 

Something that struck me in reading your book is that the Chesapeake Bay is really a historic and geographic treasure, one of the world’s “ecological masterpieces,” as you put it, and not simply a resource. You go so far as to say that its destruction is almost a religious crisis.
I think that life in the Chesapeake Bay is sacred and should be protected and honored in a way that it’s not today. For generations, the culture of the bay was to exploit the bay, and in doing so, we’ve destroyed much of this beautiful treasure that defines the state we live in. Chesapeake Bay cleanup is a social problem—yes, almost a religious crisis—because in the end, what we need, I believe, is more faith and more trust.

We’re up against not just a water pollution problem but the Trump administration and a political wave coming through our country that worships the commercial acquisition of money and power over all else and is fundamentally selfish and destructive—not only to nature and the bay but to humanity itself. So I view this as an issue far more grave than just the bay. We need to save ourselves by rebuilding a basic confidence in the ability of people to work together through our democratic government to make the world a better place.

You give some examples in your book of “ordinary” people who did amazing things to help the bay, like Bonnie Bick.

Bonnie Bick! A Southern Maryland preschool teacher, with really no money at all. Some people ridicule environmentalists as being rich people or elitist—well look at Bonnie Bick. Through a passion for forests and wild spaces, she personally saved thousands and thousands of acres that were going to be bulldozed for development. . . . Her story really shows how one person can make a difference. You really can change the world around you if you’re willing to work without much pay and with great passion for what you believe in.
 

The “Lorax of Baltimore” was another great example of that.

Yeah! Michael Beer was a neighbor of mine here in Evergreen. You know, a lot of people sit on the couch or move to Florida or just vacation when they retire. No. Michael Beer, after he retired, became a new man and a passionate protector of the river, Stony Run, organizing festivals and fundraising events and cleanups that really did a lot to clean up an urban stream. It’s another example of how people can each be little soldiers in this war to protect our beautiful world.
 

What do you see your role being in all of this?

What the bay really needs is truth telling. We’ve had a lot of murkiness, not [only] in the bay, but in the reporting on it. My conclusion is that the bay’s biggest problem is not poultry manure or even human waste but hogwash. We need to tell the truth about what’s really happening, and I think that’s my role. The Chesapeake Bay restoration effort is very much like a country club where everyone knows each other and everyone gets along, but you’re never going to solve a problem if you can’t talk candidly about it. It’s not politically correct among the environmental community in Maryland to talk about some of the things that I talk about, but I think we need to address some of these failings in the bay restoration efforts if we’re ever going to improve them.

Some of the things I recommend in the book are controversial. For example, I recommend a ban on all wild oyster harvesting. Only 1 percent of our oysters are left. If we only had 1 percent of our grizzly bears left, we wouldn’t keep hunting grizzly bears. We need to stop dredging for oysters in the bay entirely until the oyster population can rebuild itself. Watermen are already moving toward oyster farming, which is a terrific alternative and does not harm the bay, and it actually can be more lucrative than the harvesting of wild oysters.

The bay is a huge component of America’s history and culture, too.

Absolutely. The Chesapeake Bay is the artery into which both slavery and democracy came into America. It’s the passageway through which tobacco and our first commercial success as a nation flowed. It’s the place where factory farming was invented, with the poultry farms of Perdue on the Eastern Shore. It’s really a meeting of north and south, of saltwater and freshwater, and of all the fundamental ideas about American freedom and slavery and democracy and capitalism —they all mix in the Chesapeake Bay.

And that’s why it’s extraordinarily important for people to learn about the bay, understand the bay, and protect the bay, because the bay is at the core of what it is to be American. If we disregard it as a resource we use to make money, or dredge up oysters or dump our pollution into, essentially we are dumping on our own heritage and who we are as a people, so we need to respect ourselves by respecting the Chesapeake Bay.
 

Is there any one action that you encourage the layman to do to help the bay?

The blunt truth is, the one action you can take is to vote for liberal democrats who believe in environmental regulation. People like to tiptoe around that and pretend that somehow maybe by driving less or using less water or changing lightbulbs, you’re going to make a difference. That’s not what’s going to make a difference. I mean, people should, in their own lives, do what they can to limit their own footprint, but the bigger picture is, we need to vote for politicians who will put public policies in place that will regulate, on a massive scale, pollution. And that includes at the federal level.

Anyone who voted for Donald Trump put a dagger in the heart of the Chesapeake Bay. The Trump administration is trying to destroy years of progress on the bay by taking away pollution limits that have been very effective and by basically destroying the EPA, which is the only agency that can really control pollution over a multi-state area. . . . There’s been a lot of demonizing of the term environmental regulation and these false claims that it kills jobs. Economists have come to the conclusion that environmental regulations are not job killers—they create jobs just as often as they destroy them. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only two-tenths of one percent of all layoffs in the United States are caused by regulations of all kinds, including environmental regulations. . . . So when you ask what can people do, people need to vote—for strong environmental regulations, strong environmental law enforcement, more government funding for environmental programs—and if you don’t think that’s necessary, you’re fooling yourself.
 

You make that point in your book, that through three decades of trying to “save the bay,” this is really the only thing that’s worked. What are some things that haven’t worked?

Buying a Chesapeake Bay license plate does not help the bay. I think it’s a classic example of a feel-good program. In a way, it’s a distraction, because it’s counterproductive. Oftentimes these voluntary programs are substituting for the regulations and enforcement that are really needed.

A state-led voluntary approach was a failure. In 2010, the Obama administration shifted directions, and for the first time imposed a federally led EPA pollution limit system for the whole Chesapeake Bay region. And that is working. For the first time, we’ve seen real improvements in the bay’s health.
 

You sprinkle so many lovely little narratives into your book, scenes from the vantage point of your kayak, describing the bay and the rivers leading into it. Was this intentional, to give the reader some passages showing the beauty of what it is you’re trying to save?

Yes. The book has a fair amount of numbers and facts and policy discussions, which can be hard to swallow and can be tedious to some people, and I really wanted to bring to life why it matters, why we care. So I wanted to have examples of the great beauty of the Chesapeake Bay, examples of people who have dedicated their lives to protecting the Chesapeake Bay, and also colorful examples of life in the bay—blue crabs, the sturgeon, the striped bass—so that we can see what’s at stake.

Those kinds of scenes—paddling out on the James River at night among the bald cypress trees—I included in the book to make people understand that the Chesapeake Bay itself is a living character. It’s like a person that we need to understand and love so that we have the heart to fight and try to protect it.  
 

Meet Tom Pelton at his book launch on March 21 at Peabody Library in Mount Vernon. He’ll sign books at 6 p.m. and give a talk at 7 p.m.
 
 

Inside Mt. Vernon Marketplace, Tj Tate walks up to the counter at The Local Oyster and peruses the menu. 

“Where are your shrimp from?” she asks in an accent still colored by her Kentucky roots. “Gulf of Mexico,” the woman behind the counter replies. “That’s what I thought,” Tate says, “and I bet I know the fisherman who caught them.”

If Tj Tate had her way, we’d all be asking where our seafood comes from—and we might even know the name of the fisherman who caught it, as well. Tate is the National Aquarium’s first director of seafood sustainability. She was hired more than two years ago to get the word out that, yes, seafood tastes great and is good for you, but more importantly, if we keep harvesting fish as we have been doing, there won’t be enough left for our grandkids to enjoy.

“When you think about the number of people who are going to be on this planet and what they’re going to eat in 20 years, some people are going to be lucky enough to still be eating shrimp from the Gulf of Mexico,” she says. “We’ve got to start working toward a system of sustainability.”

Highlighting sustainability—in this case seafood that is either caught or farmed in ways that consider the long-term vitality of species and the health of the ocean—is a decidedly different tact for the National Aquarium, an organization better known for educating visitors about marine life than advising them on which fish they should be eating. Until Tate started her job in March 2015, the institution had no programs to instruct its 1.4 million annual visitors on what to do about it. Dubbed Seafood Smart, the aquarium’s new program hopes to create a sustainable seafood movement on the Chesapeake Bay and beyond.

“There was a need for someone to reach the consumer, to fill the gap, to work with industry and watermen. The National Aquarium had the position to be that unbiased voice for a really big region,” Tate explains.

 Aquaculture, the honchos at the aquarium believe, is the best way to preserve our wild fisheries. “Aquaculture is a way to ensure our oceans are healthy and our people have sustainable protein,” says Kris Hoellen, the aquarium’s chief conservation officer and Tate’s boss. “That’s a different place for the aquarium—it’s about making conservation relevant.” 

If Tj Tate had her way, we’d all ask where our seafood comes from.

What that means for Tate is working to shift the entire regional seafood supply chain, from the watermen who catch or grow it to the seafood distributors who sell it to the chefs who cook it, and, ultimately, to the consumers who demand it. But, if there’s one thing Tate has already learned, bringing new ideas to a region steeped in tradition is easier said than done.

Back at The Local Oyster, Tate squeezes lemon juice on a half-dozen Skinny Dipper oysters, grown in St. Mary’s County. She adds a dollop of cocktail sauce to each one and slurps them out of the shell like it’s second nature. With her long strawberry blond hair and a quick smile, Tate has the easygoing manner of someone who’s spent the last 20 years on boats.

At 48 years old, she’s a salt-sprayed ball of energy, talking about her 6-year-old daughter one minute (“The only fish she’ll eat is halibut. Halibut!”) and firing off statistics the next: “There are more than thousands of types of seafood that we could be eating, but most people typically only eat five to 10 of some species—that’s just silly.” She seems as if she could get along with anybody, which, in this job, might be her most important asset.

“To be able to communicate what’s important about sustainable fisheries to watermen and the folks in the seafood industry is super important, but it’s a different conversation than one you have with a chef or someone wandering into the aquarium,” says Patrick Hudson, co-owner of The Local Oyster and the farmer who grew the bivalves Tate is eating. “She’s got to wear different hats and make some progress on sustainable seafood in the Chesapeake Bay, which is sometimes much more of a battle than people realize, particularly in Maryland where you have a really conservative group who have been in the industry for generations.”

Tate didn’t grow up around the water. She was raised in a small town in western Kentucky, miles from the sea. The first time she went fishing with her father, she caught a tire. As a teenager, she thought about becoming a marine biologist, but instead majored in communications and worked at a radio station in her hometown. (“Yes, I was known as Tj the deejay,” she quips.)

But something about the ocean, where she vacationed every year as a kid, kept calling. She decided to go back to school for another bachelor’s degree in biology and then a master’s. She settled in Florida and worked for an environmental consulting group before taking over as executive director of the Gulf of Mexico Reef Fish Shareholders Alliance, an organization that works to protect sustainable fisheries and the fishing industry in the Gulf. There, she made a name for herself as a savvy advocate, one who helped defeat a Florida congressman who wanted to reallocate fishing rights held by commercial fishermen to recreational anglers. She also helped start Gulf Wild, a national initiative that let consumers trace a tag on a fish to learn exactly where it was caught, who caught it, and by what method.

“Organizing fishermen is harder than herding cats,” says Buddy Guindon, a fisherman out of Galveston, Texas, and president of the alliance board, which hired Tate. “She was able to coordinate the fishermen, implement sustainable fishing practices, and create change in the Gulf.” 

But like anyone who stirs up the pot, she made a few enemies along the way. Disgruntled fishermen accused her of “stealing quota,” which refers to the amount of a particular fish watermen are allowed to catch in the Gulf. Someone tried to spread a rumor that one of her board members had fathered her child. Through it all, Tate remained resolute. 

“Fishermen are either the biggest part of the solution or the biggest part of the problem,” notes Tate. The problem in the Chesapeake Bay is a general distrust by watermen over rules and regulations restricting the catch. And sustainability remains a dirty word among some watermen.  

Robert T. Brown, head of the Maryland Watermen’s Association, says that regulators base catch limits on “guesstimates” of fish and crabs, rather than hard science. It’s the watermen, who have plied the bay for generations, he says, who know best about the fishery—and how to sustain it. “The scientists are doing the best they can with what they’ve got, but the problem is, it’s still a guesstimate. We do have a sustainable fishery. If we didn’t, we’d be out of business.”

For her part, Tate says her position at the aquarium doesn’t involve being an advocate or taking sides so much as being a facilitator or an educator. “Now I don’t feel like I’m pushing an agenda,” she says. “I feel like I’m protecting a whole area. We want to help people make better decisions. To me that’s the coolest thing. Nobody wants to throw stones at an aquarium.”

When Tate arrived in Baltimore, it didn’t take her long to assess the state of affairs in the bay. “You’ve got amazing seafood and an amazing cultural heritage, but you’ve got a lot of consumers who aren’t eating the seafood,” she says. “They think crabs and that’s it. You’ve got a watermen community that’s fractured—they want to be doing the best for the bay because they want to have a future—but they are still trying to figure out what that means.”

When it comes to sustainability practices, Tate estimates the Chesapeake is about 20 years behind the Gulf, which in turn, is about 20 years behind methods employed on the West Coast. “I expected more people to be on the seafood-sustainability bandwagon a bit, but they’re just not thinking about it,” she says. “Even though there’s all this great seafood, there’s a disconnect. [In Baltimore], you don’t have a lot of fish houses lined up where people see the commercial boats like in Maine or the Pacific Northwest. You see shrimp boats in the Gulf all the time, so you think seafood. One reason why farm to table is doing so well is you see farmers at farmers’ markets, you see the farms. You don’t see fishermen.”

Tate is working
to shift the entire regional seafood supply chain.

In her first few months on the job, Tate met with key players to see how they could work together. And along the way, she’s helped watermen like Billy Rice, who fishes blue catfish on the Potomac River, get a better price for his haul. Blue catfish is an invasive species, so, as Rice says, “It’s actually something [the Department of Natural Resources] wants us to get out of the water.” Tate arranged for chefs and wholesalers to go out on Rice’s boat to witness his work, establishing the kind of relationship that farmers have with buyers of their produce. “She’s been a huge help,” says Rice. “The Chesapeake needs someone like Tj. She can take the message to watermen that you can’t do business like you did 30 years ago.”

Getting chefs, supermarkets, and consumers to demand the bay’s less popular seafood will help create new markets for watermen, while taking pressure off the celebrated species like rockfish. “We put a lot of stress on serving the sexy fish populations, but we fish them to death,” says John Shields, who loves putting what he calls the “trash” fish of the Chesapeake—yellow perch, hardhead catfish, white perch—on his menu at Gertrude’s periodically. He believes other chefs shouldn’t be afraid to follow his lead, particularly when it comes to serving blue catfish. “There’s a percentage of chefs who are already on board, but many chefs, they’re already stretched to the limit. They’re happy if they can get the salmon in, much less worry about where it comes from. But as they learn more about the issues involved, they’ll get on board.”

With recent news reports about slave labor used in Asian fisheries and health and safety concerns about aquaculture overseas, overcoming the stigma of farmed fish is another challenge facing Tate. Up to 90 percent of our seafood is imported, she says, yet the United States has some of the world’s largest wild fisheries and some of the best-managed fish farms. But Americans like their cheap imported fish. Sustainably caught or grown fish will cost more, explains Hudson, who says he has to charge more for his Skinny Dipper oysters than watermen harvesting the wild varieties. Tate will have to convince chefs and consumers the expense is worth it, and convince watermen that the added investments will pay off.

For chefs like Spike Gjerde of Woodberry Kitchen, paying more—and charging more—is a no-brainer. “We have some of the best fish and shellfish in the world and it should command a premium,” he says. “Anything that’s higher quality that requires more work to get, that value should go back to the watermen.”

For now, oysters are the primary crop for aquaculturists around the bay, but Tate says there’s no reason rockfish or other species couldn’t be farmed. Hudson, who at age 31 represents a new breed of forward-thinking farmers, is experimenting with seaweed and soft-shell clams, while he and his father are helping to raise tilapia in an aquaponics facility in Bel Air.  “It’s an ‘and’ not an ‘or,’” says Hoellen. “It’s aquaculture and wild-caught because if the wild-caught can’t be consistently supplied in our restaurants and retail outlets, then it doesn’t stay on the menu. You need both to keep both industries moving.”

Now all Tate has to do is convince people to ask for sustainable seafood. “Nobody is going to do it unless you have someone lighting that spark,” says Shields. “If there ever was a cheerleader for this region, it’s Tj. She was a very good catch.”

Bay Watch 

Spring has brought with it a flurry of good news about the bay. First, using sonar technology, scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center found that the Choptank River has more river herring in it than previously suspected. Then, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources found that reproductively viable female crabs are at their most plentiful since 1990 and that the amount of underwater grass in Maryland’s portion of the bay reached a record high of 59,277 acres in 2016. Furthermore, in late April, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation seeded 3 million baby oysters in the Patapsco River, hoping to return oyster shoals to the urban waterway. All of these rehabilitative milestones indicate that federally overseen pollution control programs are stabilizing the bay after decades of environmental decline. And though it briefly looked like funding for those measures would be threatened by the Trump administration’s proposed EPA budget cuts, Congress decided to maintain program funding for the coming fiscal year. 

Following such a streak, the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science issued a report this week awarding the bay one of its highest-ever health grades. Though on its face an unimpressive C, the grade represents drastic improvement since the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science began evaluating the bay in 1986 and a 1-point improvement over last year’s score. As with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation scorecard—another important third-party bay evaluation—the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science grades the bay in several categories and then aggregates those scores into an overall mark. 

“I really believe we’re at a tipping point,” Nicholas DiPasquale, director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program office in Annapolis, told The Sun. “Once you reach a point where you’ve overcome the inertia of the system, these indicators start building on each other.”

A third regional water quality scorecard, this one measuring the health of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and its tributaries, will be released on Monday by Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore. 

On Your Bike 

National Bike to Work Day is next Friday, May 19, and the Central Maryland Metropolitan Council has collected a handy list of nearly 40 official events on its website. The events range from bike safety checks to commuting convoys led by experienced cyclers and designed to introduce newbies to the ins and outs of bike commuting. Though Baltimore City is hosting the greatest number of events, Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Howard, Carroll, and Harford counties are represented, too. Bike to Work Day grew out of National Bike Month, which began in 1956. It promotes the benefits of cycling, which include physical fitness and reduced vehicle emissions and air pollution. 

In The Air 

Speaking of reduced vehicle emissions, The Sun has a good rundown of where the Baltimore region stands in terms of air quality. In short, the Maryland Clean Air report found that, overall, air quality was better in Baltimore in 2016 than it had been in previous years, but that ozone levels ticked up. Ozone is ground level smog created when particles from vehicle and power plant emissions interact with sunlight. It can be harmful to humans—particularly the very young, very old, and very sick—and is the cause of the Code Orange and Code Red air quality alerts that are sometimes issued. 

“We’re making clean air progress with strong partnerships and steady investments, but more is needed regionally and nationally to sustain our pace and protect our health,” Maryland Department of the Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles said in a statement. “Marylanders’ hearts, lungs and waterways will benefit from smart actions at home and in upwind states to keep improving our air quality.”

Birdcam Season Soars 

And now, as they say, for something completely different. Naturalists from all over the world delight each year in the Chesapeake Bay’s springtime birdcams—and this year is no different. The Chesapeake Conservancy hosts live streams of three of the most popular:

The peregrine falcon cam atop 100 Light Street in Baltimore City, which is capturing the growth of four furry fluffballs.

The great blue heron rookery on the Eastern Shore

And the osprey cam on Kent Island 

There is also another osprey cam, this one following a nest with three eggs at Severna Park High School

Follow along as the birds raise their families and the chicks eventually fly the nest. Happy spring and happy birding! 

On a late September day, Stephen Godfrey squints in the morning sunlight as it dazzles across the Chesapeake Bay. The sun-bleached beach stretches north and south as far as the eye can see, and while the tide is considered low, it laps at Godfrey’s ankles and licks up toward the top of his black wellies.

Still, he pushes on—down the beach, through the waves, under fallen trees, steadily over slimy, slippery rocks—all beneath the majestic cliffs that tower over him like a divine being. Finally, he reaches his destination, squatting down to inspect the base of the cliff.

To understand the history of Calvert Cliffs, one must go back even further, long before the birth of the Chesapeake Bay. Some 200 million years ago, the East Coast was connected to the supercontinent Pangaea.

“When we crashed into Africa, the Piedmont and Appalachian Mountains were gigantic, alp-like peaks,” says Godfrey. “When the continents pulled apart, the mountains began to erode as we pulled further away. They eroded and eroded and made the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Some of that mountaintop was taken off to make where we stand today.”

Over the millennia that followed, the Susquehanna River carved away at this low-lying land, flooding and receding with the climate, its little trail eventually backfilling to create the wide and splendid Chesapeake and, in turn, through waves and wind, the Calvert Cliffs.

But as the rising waters continue to work their erosive magic on the cliffs’ facade, the loss is also a gain as new fossils fall out of the receding ridge. Be it by shell, bone, or tooth, more than 600 Miocene species have been identified, representing nearly every animal phylum. That includes some 400 species of mollusks, like the iconic Ecphora gardnerae gardnerae, a caramel-colored spiral snail shell that is now Maryland’s state fossil. Even the occasional ancient land mammal has been discovered in this Darwinian domain—mastodons, rhinoceroses, tapirs, horses, dogs—most likely washed offshore during a violent storm or sudden flood.

Spotting something in the sand, Godfrey picks up a black, twig-like object, lifting the specimen into the air and rolling it around in his fingers before tapping it to his front tooth. “Ah,” he says, identifying the specimen as the tooth-like dental plate of a Miocene stingray. He knows its age because of the dark color, dense heft, and glassy timbre of its tap—all qualities obtained over the passage of time. Another means of distinguishing an ancient fossil from an average objet trouvé is rather simple: knowing what species no longer reside here or even exist.

A few steps later, he spies a puzzle-like piece of ancient leatherback turtle shell, followed by the base of a prehistoric dolphin skull. Up ahead, a man is slowly wading through the waves, a gnarled walking stick in hand, his curly salt-and-pepper tufts of hair windswept from the breeze. He is Pat Gotsis, a noted collector and friend of the museum, and as the two men exchange greetings, Gotsis shows Godfrey his morning’s finds, pulling out a pocketful of pristine sharks’ teeth—megalodon, mako, sand tiger, snaggletooth—which abound if you have the eye.

Since he retired this past September, Gotsis has watched the tides and walked the cliffs almost every day. At 55, he knows the terrain like it was his own property, having grown up here, collecting fossils along the banks since he was 10 years old.

“It’s peaceful,” he says. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

Through the years, Gotsis has seen the cliffs evolve from his personal playground into a collectors’ paradise, and he has amassed a collection in the thousands along the way, including his most prized possession—the teeth of an extinct squalodon, or shark-toothed whale.

“As the years went by, it just got to be second nature,” says Gotsis. “I thought I would grow tired of it, but I haven’t yet.”

Godfrey and his two-man team at the Calvert Marine Museum rely on a large network of beachcombers like Gotsis who report and donate fossils. Most of the cliffs are now private property, but many of the best collectors have approval for perusal from generous property owners. They’ve helped Godfrey locate giant finds, like the virtually complete skeleton of an ancient baleen whale. Still, public access points exist in multiple locations, including the beloved 1,300-acre Calvert Cliffs State Park.

On any given day, from dawn to dusk, a handful, if not dozens of treasure seekers walk the strand, their gaze lowered and eyes focused on the miscellany in the sand. Some even sport shovels and sieves, but fossil collecting from beneath the cliffs is off limits, due to the danger of landslides.

“A lot of these collectors have a real eye for it,” says Godfrey. “They spend more time along the cliffs than I do.”

The museum’s collection continues to grow, but out here, admiring the miles and miles of untouched beauty, looking across the bay to a side he cannot see, Godfrey knows the Calvert Cliffs are not infinite.

The ebb and flow of the Earth’s climate also brings real concerns for property owners who reside along the cliffs. Every year, the water eats away at their shoreline—inches, sometimes feet—and edges toward their homes. Some residents are even rip-rapping their waterfronts to slow the rate of erosion, their rocky blockades forever cutting off accessibility for exploration and excavation.

“It’s a resource that is dwindling,” says Godfrey. “We see our access to certain sections of the cliffs as sort of doomed.”

For that, he knows he has to keep going—there is so much more to discover.

“There are still plenty of things we don’t understand about the universe,” says Godfrey. “We would be foolhearted to say we know all there is to know.”

Back in the basement of the Calvert Marine Museum, the small collections room is illuminated in fluorescent light, featuring aisles and aisles of filing cabinets filled with fossils, each drawer home to hundreds of razor-sharp sharks’ teeth or countless bits of blackened bone. At last count, the collection held more than 100,000 specimens.

Surrounded by boxes of yet-to-be-archived fossils, Godfrey gently holds an unknown object in his hands, brought in by a diver from a river in Virginia. It’s part of an ancient skull but features an unusual, spur-like knot he’s never seen before, and that’s a good feeling. Godfrey revels in being stumped.

“That’s when the creative juices start to flow,” he says. “Like, this is something different. This is something new.”

Buried Treasure

Explore Miocene fossils from the Calvert Marine Museum’s personal collection.

What’s your role in the organization? I am the Director of Advocacy and the Baltimore Harbor Waterkeeper, so I run our waterkeeper program. I started full-time in January.

What’s a waterkeeper? Overall, a waterkeeper is an advocate for clean water, someone who really is a watchdog for our watershed. I honestly don’t think there is one cookie-cutter model for how to be a waterkeeper. I happen to be an attorney. You don’t have to be an attorney. We see people who have more of a background in science. But the person who holds the title waterkeeper really is the spokesperson for those waterways. We are part of an international organization, the Waterkeeper Alliance. There are over 300 waterkeeper organizations in 35 different countries.

So what does Blue Water Baltimore’s waterkeeper program do? We have a couple of scientists on staff and we go out [into streams and the harbor] to do water quality sampling. We post all of the data that we get on a website called Harbor Alert. The general public can go online and learn about the water quality. Then we also have an advocacy program, where we work directly with government agencies. We work in Annapolis on legislative initiatives and then, in some cases, we bring lawsuits that hold polluters accountable when they’ve broken the law.

The waterkeeper program is just one of many programs Blue Water Baltimore runs. What are some of the other initiatives? We also have an urban forestry program where we go out and plant trees. We run the Herring Run Nursery that sells native plants. Stormwater—or rainwater that comes down over hard surfaces and washes chemicals and trash directly into the harbor—is a big problem. So we often work with faith-based organizations, places of worship, churches, schools, to help them design rain gardens and install less asphalt, things like that. All of our volunteer and education outreach programs are free. We have a calendar of different volunteer events.

You mentioned working in Annapolis. The state legislature is in session right now. What are Blue Water Baltimore’s legislative priorities for this session? We really focus on the main threats to the greater Baltimore area: stormwater runoff, sewage spills, and trash. Trash is a huge source of pollution in Baltimore, and there are steps that we can take to reduce that trash. One is the bill that’s in front of the legislature right now to phase out what’s called expanded polystyrene [aka Styrofoam food packaging]. It’s the second-most collected form of trash that we see in Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel. The first is cigarette butts.

Why polystyrene? What’s so bad about it, aside from its abundance? Not all trash is created equal. [Polystyrene] is almost impossible to clean up because when it gets wet it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces. Those tiny pieces have chemicals in them and they absorb 10 times more chemicals than other forms of plastic. So what you end up with are tiny little toxic balls of polystyrene that really never leave the environment. The marine animals do eat them and then absorb the toxins and then if we fish and we eat them it can come back to us. There’s a lot of interest in this, the idea of the traceability: Do the chemicals bio-accumulate and then get passed to humans? Frankly, as a mother, I would just follow the precautionary principle. If I had the option to feed my child a fish that ate plastic and one that didn’t, I would choose the one that didn’t. I don’t have to wait for a study to tell me.

What’s the chance of the bill passing? It’s hard to speculate. We have a lot of great bipartisan support. It’s been heard in two committees, so we’re expecting a vote. It is important to note that [polystyrene] laws are in place in Price George’s County and Montgomery County, so Baltimore is really the remaining large populated area in Maryland that doesn’t have this. The bill that would really just level the playing field across the state.

In some ways, it’s curious that we have the trash problem that we do. The vast majority of Baltimoreans probably would say they love the harbor and the bay, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into action and behavior. What’s the disconnect? Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t necessarily understand the way our storm drain system works. We’ll see some folks who are trying to be helpful sweep trash down into the storm drain and assume that the storm drains go to a collection system, but that’s not true. We have a three pipe system underground in Baltimore. We have a drinking water pipe. We have our sewage pipe, and then we have our storm drains and storm water collection pipe. And our storm water collection system literally goes, untreated, directly into the harbor. So it takes all of the trash, all of the chemicals that get washed down from cars on the road. So a lot of it, I think, is an education campaign to try to get people to understand how the system works.

How do you reach people who think that this is boring, do-gooder stuff? It’s a multi-pronged approach and we try to meet people where they are. We try to get them to understand that it does affect us all. So some people might not be concerned that the trash is getting into the harbor, but if they learn that their children in school are being served hot lunches on these expanded polystyrene trays and the EPA has found that [those trays] leach styrene, which is a suspected carcinogen, into the food, then they might care very much because they care about the health and safety of their children. I think it’s trying to identify what issues are important to people and helping them to understand that the work that we do really does touch every aspect of your life, even if you don’t necessarily go out and fish and swim.

How much of a problem are sewage leaks in Baltimore City? We hear about them all the time. It is a huge problem. As I mentioned, Baltimore does have a three pipe system, so there is a separate pipe for sewage, but it is extremely old and the pipes do burst a lot. In 2016 there were 484 reports of sewage overflows in Baltimore City, so that’s more than one a day. It was something like 11 million gallons of raw sewage. We also have many instances of raw sewage backing up into people’s basements. The city is currently working on upgrading its sewage system.

Right. The city was supposed to have it done by 2016. The city entered into a public consent decree agreement with the EPA and Maryland Department of the Environment [MDE] in 2002. They were supposed to have completed the work by 2016, but they failed to meet that deadline and they’ve asked for an extension. Blue Water Baltimore, along with some partners, submitted very robust comments regarding that consent decree in 2016, and we actually filed a motion in court to formally intervene. That motion was approved, so we are now considered a third-party intervener to that case. We are currently in confidential settlement negotiations to work that out.

Negotiations for what, exactly? The negotiations are for a new set of plans, which include not just deadlines but interim deadlines, water quality monitoring, there are a lot of specifics. So that’s currently being worked out and we’re happy to have a seat at the table. Ultimately, all parties share the same goal, which is to clean up the sewage as soon as possible.

What has been the hold up on the city’s part? Is it mismanagement? Is it a lack of funding? Because it’s before my time I wouldn’t want to speculate. It’s certainly a sensitive topic.

Turning to national news, the Trump administration’s proposed 2018 federal budget would eliminate funding to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup program, which doles out grants and coordinates cleanup efforts among the six states and District of Columbia whose waterways feed the bay. What effect would this move have on the bay, which is finally showing signs of improvement? Obviously, that’s a serious concern. I think it’s important to note—not that I’m not alarmed by it, because I am—but that budget is largely symbolic and expresses the direction and priorities of the new administration. That in and of itself is very concerning. That said, it really is Congress that sets the budget, so all hope is not lost yet. But without having strong federal leadership to get all of the different states to enforce and comply and meet the benchmarks that they need, reaching our goal will be much more difficult.

It’s not just the Chesapeake Bay Program that would be cut. The EPA itself would sustain deep cuts. Furthermore, Scott Pruitt, the EPA’s new administrator, doesn’t believe the EPA as we know it should even exist. In general, how bad a time is it to be a clean water advocate? The news coming out of Washington every day is certainly bleak. And yes, it can be very overwhelming at times—just the number of threats that we have to clean water. It’s a unique situation. But again, I think it just underscores how much more important it is to focus on the local level and the changes we can make here—and there’s a lot we can do.

Will Baker was literally standing in a tree when he was asked to join the Chesapeake Bay Foundation some 40 years ago. As a tree surgeon, he was working on the property of a CBF trustee (and now mentor) who looked up at him and said, “Will, would you like to save the bay?”

Baker, who went on to become CBF president at age 27, has watched the now 50-year-old nonprofit, which focuses on education, advocacy, litigation, and restoration for the Chesapeake, blossom from a 22-person team in an old church annex in Annapolis to a 200-person staff with more than 200,000 memberships across the mid-Atlantic.

“Since we started, the Chesapeake Bay has really emerged as a national treasure,” says Baker. “I often say the bay sells itself, both in terms of reasons for concern and worry, and for love and determination to make it better.”

CBF, known for its blue-and-white bumper stickers and biennial State of the Bay reports (last year: a slightly encouraging C-), has become the largest organization dedicated to saving the bay. Through the decades, it has helped protect tidal wetlands, create critical areas for shoreline development, and drastically reduce pollution throughout the watershed, including here at home with Blue Water Baltimore and the Waterfront Partnership.

“We’re lobbyists in the broadest sense,” says Baker. “You have to be determined and keep fighting.”

And while there have been some positive changes, including improved water clarity and regrowth of underwater grasses, Baker says more work needs to be done. “We’re starting to see major, systemic improvements, but it’s nowhere near enough.” He hopes Gov. Hogan will place more emphasis on pollution reduction, fisheries and habitat restoration, and oyster sanctuary protection in the months ahead.

“I love this job because it’s big enough but small enough to think you can really make a difference in a lifetime,” he says. “I am so glad I looked down from that tree and said yes.”

Field Notes is a monthly roundup of environmental news from around the area. If you have a story you’d like considered for a future Field Notes, email mamy@baltimoremagazine.net. Put “Field Notes Suggestion” in the subject line.

Bay Watch

When is a C- a cause for celebration? When we’re talking about the Chesapeake Bay’s health grade. Late last week, the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation released its report on the bay’s overall health in 2016, granting the estuary its highest grade since the foundation began issuing reports in 1998.

The report divides data into three main categories—pollution, habitat, and fisheries—then grades various indicators within each category to calculate an overall score out of a possible 100 points. This year’s overall score was a 34, which equates, in this specially weighted grading system, to a C-.

Except for a slight decrease in the amount of forested buffers, the bay showed improvement or remained steady across all sectors. Especially notable is the 10-point jump in the health of the blue crab population and the continued hardiness of the rockfish population, which garnered an A-, the scorecard’s highest individual grade.

But while things have improved, there is still a long way to go to reach that 100-point A+ (which would be like restoring the bay to how it was in the 1600s). Particularly troubling are the pollution scores, with nitrogen and phosphorus levels still earning F and D grades, respectively. (Excess nitrogen and phosphorus contribute to algae blooms that block sunlight and create dead zones in the bay. Certain algal blooms can be toxic to humans and pets, as well.)

The largest sources of nitrogen and phosphorus are agriculture runoff (particularly chicken manure and fertilizers), car and power plant emissions, sewage plant discharges, and suburban and urban stormwater runoff. Attempts to curtail the nitrogen and phosphorus runoff have resulted in controversial measures such as the Bay Restoration Fee (the so-called “flush tax”) and the much-maligned Stormwater Utility Fee (aka the “rain tax”).

But along with a suite of other actions that have been folded into a federally coordinated multi-state initiative called the Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint, there is a view that the oft-maligned fees are having a positive effect.

“We believe the Bay is reaching a tipping point,” the report’s introduction states. “As this report shows, the evidence is there. We are seeing the clearest water in decades, regrowth of acres of lush underwater grass beds, and the comeback of the Chesapeake’s native oysters, which were nearly eradicated by disease, pollution, and overfishing. . . . The bottom line is our report provides hope and promise for the future.”

Full report here.

So, That Was Christmas

And what have you done? Left your tree in the corner, dropping needles by the ton.

Don’t worry, Baltimore City Department of Public Works will be collecting Christmas trees with your regularly scheduled trash pickup throughout the rest of January (excluding Monday, January 16, because of Martin Luther King holiday). All tinsel and ornaments must be removed before pickup. Or, if you want to divert your tree from the landfill and turn it into free mulch for future garden projects, bring it to the the Southwest Citizens’ Convenience Center at 701 Reedbird Ave. in South Baltimore, Monday through Saturday (excluding the MLK holiday), from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Residents should bring their own containers for the mulch. DPW also would like to remind everyone that wrapping paper and many packaging materials are eligible for standard curbside recycling. An extensive list of recycleable items can be found here.

Baltimore County is also collecting old Christmas trees, beginning this week. Detailed instructions can be found here.

Anne Arundel County regulations can be found here.

Howard County runs a free mulch program similar to Baltimore City’s, as well as curbside pickup and recycling drop-off. Details are here.

Legislative Briefing

Last week, Gov. Larry Hogan announced his environmental priorities for the 2017 session of the Maryland General Assembly, which starts Wednesday at noon and lasts for 90 days.

Hogan wants to spend $65 million over three years on a variety of programs that focus on “targeted investments and market-based solutions to protect and preserve Maryland’s environment and natural resources.”

Forty-one million of the $65 million he has earmarked comes from a 2012 settlement with Exelon Corp. and must be invested in Tier 1 renewable energy projects. (Tier 1 renewables include solar, wind, and certain biomass and waste-to-energy methods.)

The rest of the $65 million would be distributed among four initiatives: increased tax credits and rebates for electric cars and charging stations, a $3 million investment in the state’s green jobs-training program, $7.5 million for a new clean-energy startup incubator at the University of Maryland, and up to $10 million in funding for a pollution credit-trading program.

But as The Sun pointed out in a recent editorial, those pet projects might not get much traction in the Democratic-controlled legislature. Instead, the General Assembly might focus on its own green agenda, which includes possibly overriding Gov. Hogan’s veto of a measure that would have boosted the state’s required quota of Tier 1 renewable energy from 20 percent to 25 percent by 2020. The legislature and the governor are also due for a reckoning about hydraulic fracturing, aka fracking. The controversial practice, in which a solution of water and chemicals is blasted into bedrock to release deposits of natural gas, is under a moratorium in the state while officials investigated its potential environmental impact. (It has been implicated in water and air pollution, as well as drilling-induced earthquakes.) But the ban expires this year and Hogan and the legislature will need to decide whether or not to allow it and, if so, how strictly it should be regulated.

Energy Star

Kudos to Columbia’s Wilde Lake Middle School. When the newly constructed school opened last week, it did so as the state’s first “net-zero energy” school. This means that, over the course of a year, the $33 million building will generate as much energy as it uses. The energy efficiency is achieved through both low-tech and high-tech means. There’s the school’s 2,000 solar panels, geothermal heating system, and lights that automatically dim when conditions are sunny.

But, as Scott Washington, the Director of School Construction for the Howard County Public School System, said in a video update on the project this fall, “Number one is the building orientation and envelope. That means how the building is situated on the site, as well as the envelope that the building is made out of—the roof structure, the wall structure, how insulated they are.”

The school also boasts an “energy kiosk” in the main hallway, which allows students to see, in real time, how much energy the building is using and generating. The school replaces the 48-year-old Wilde Lake school, which will be razed to make room for new playing fields and a bus loop.

Great Vertical

Time to add another entry into the city’s ever-growing register of urban farms.

Last month, a trio of organizations led by a Canadian agriculture technology companysigned a letter of intent to start a vertical farming operation in East Baltimore. The triumvirate is led by a Canadian agriculture technology company Arcturus Growthstar Technologies Inc., which procured financial backing from the Columbia-based venture capital firm CBO Financial to lease 25,000 square feet of indoor space from the local nonprofit Volunteers of America Chesapeake. The farm will grow greens like lettuce, basil, oregano, and cilantro in a climate-controlled environment and will offer agriculture job training to ex-offenders participating in Volunteers of America Chesapeake’s workforce re-entry program.

The $6 million project joins other agriculture and food system-related ventures popping up throughout East Baltimore. In the parking lot of the American Brewery building, another vertical farm, Urban Pastoral, grows greens in a LED-light-laden shipping container. Down the road, Walker Marsh raises cut flowers for market at Tha Flower Factory, a half-acre parcel where vacant rowhomes once stood. And in late September, the long-awaited Baltimore Food Hub broke ground at its 3.5-acre site at the corner of East Oliver and North Wolfe streets. The $23.5 million project, spearheaded by American Communities Trust and local workforce nonprofit Humanin, will eventually host job-training facilities, communal incubator space, and an excess of land to be dedicated to urban farming.