For McKay Jenkins, no week is complete without getting his hands in the dirt.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the local writer and educator shuffles up and down I-95 in his electric pickup to the University of Delaware, where he teaches journalism in the English Department. But on afternoons in between, he is busy planting trees at the Stillmeadow Peace Park in Southwest Baltimore or tending to the vegetables growing at his Rock Rose Food Justice Project urban farm in Woodberry.

During warm-weather months, he’ll drop off more than 100 pounds of radishes in the spring or sweet potatoes in the fall to community kitchens across the city.

At 62, Jenkins has rooted himself squarely between both worlds, using his professional writing and physical labor to become an environmental steward of the Mid-Atlantic. Though as he sees it, they’re one and the same.

“I never thought of myself as an academic scholar,” says Jenkins, who began his career as a staff reporter for newspapers like the Capital Gazette in Annapolis. “As a journalist, I was always engaged with the world and writing about it, so the transition to doing the work was a very thin line.”

A native of Yonkers, New York, Jenkins knew from early on that he wanted to write books, finding the format of those daily papers constricting. Earning his doctorate at Princeton University, he honed his narrative craft under legendary nonfiction writers like John McPhee, whose meticulous reporting style and interest in nature resonated with Jenkins—a lifelong outdoorsman, who in his spare time can often be found hiking, biking, and paddling down the Susquehanna River. Now an author himself, his books have delved into natural disasters, toxic chemicals, and genetically modified food.

All the while, he’s melded his subject-matter expertise with lived experience. Jenkins, who began working at urban farms during graduate school, has managed various environmental projects in Maryland and Delaware over the past three decades, from working with local Native American tribes on forest regeneration and garden re-establishment to steering food equity initiatives in Baltimore.

Here, in 2019, in a fallow community garden, he launched Rock Rose, where harvests get donated to community partners like Love & Cornbread and Soul Kitchen to be turned into ready-to-eat meals for city residents in need. On the side, he collaborates with other ecologists, educators, and faith-based institutions on a variety of volunteer efforts, from stream cleanups and tree plantings to the removal of invasive plants from local properties and city forests. Oftentimes, he enlists his students to lend a hand, having launched an environmental humanities minor at UD, where he’s taught since 1996.

Altogether, these efforts have helped make his writing feel more actionable—getting “your body into the work itself,” says Jenkins, while also deepening his interest in “peeling back layers” and “trying to reveal systems,” both social and environmental.

To that end, he became a certified master naturalist in 2018 after completing University of Maryland’s certification program, which educates residents on how to identify, maintain, and repair local ecosystems.

That led to his latest book, The Maryland Master Naturalist’s Handbook, an educational guide co-edited with UMD’s Joy Shindler Rafey and published in June by Johns Hopkins University Press. A collaboration with various experts, the Handbook explores the ecological wonders of the Old Line State, from Appalachia to the Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore City, which can be used by researchers and laypeople alike to learn about everything from geology, soil health, native wildlife, and invasive species to citizen science, climate change, and environmental justice.

The goal is to inspire others to help spread the environmental gospel, and in turn protect the place which we call home, says Jenkins, using a fitting literary analogy to convey this point: “It’s like painting the fence in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. You turn people on to this, and then everybody wants to get on board.”

There are goats grazing in a meadow in Northeast Baltimore. There’s also a coop full of chickens with names like Scarlet, Rusty, and Lemongrab. And across 10 acres that were once abandoned by the city, there are crops being planted and a natural forest being tended by dedicated stewards and volunteers. This piece of land, spread across Barbara and Parkwood Park, is BLISS Meadows.

The urban green space in Frankford is the brainchild of Atiya Wells (pictured center) who went to the lot to explore the space after noticing it on Google Maps in 2017.

Wells, a pediatric nurse, had grown up with her grandmother’s garden and worked with plants at home. After reading Leah Penniman’s Farming While Black, Wells was inspired to develop the space, which had been abandoned and overgrown for decades, into a place that could enrich and teach the neighborhood through nature.

“The project evolved organically,” she says. “When I found the land, it was initially just to steward the forest. And then, as I was walking, I noticed that [an additional] two and a half acres were vacant as well. I thought, well, we can wrap this all together in one package and create a space for environmental education in the city.”

That environmental education includes urban ecology, farming, animal husbandry, and more, all informed by the community around BLISS, which stands for Baltimore Living In Sustainable Simplicity.

Dr. Rose Brusaferro, (pictured right), the farm’s environmental education programs specialist, says that it’s the engagement aspect—the way they assess neighborhood needs to inform projects, from the building of outdoor classrooms to what crops they put in the ground—that has made BLISS such a success.

“I’m most proud that some things we’ve grown this season, we’ve been able to donate to people who need it the most right now,” says Jordan Bethea, farm manager, (pictured left), with a portion of the farm’s yield going to neighbors and a local community refrigerator. “For me, the most powerful success is delivering [food] to people who are actually going to make use of it, to pare down a small part of their grocery bill, and make sure families are fed.”

The BLISS team is hoping that this space can become a model of what can be done with abandoned lots and homes in Baltimore and beyond.

“I want people to see that neighborhoods, especially predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods, have the power to change their communities for the better,” says Wells, whose work garnered her a lauded fellowship with OSI Baltimore in 2020. “You are the people you’ve been waiting for. Just go out there and do it. If there’s something that you want to change, just start. And eventually the people who you need to reach will find you.”

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.

Nature News

Have you ever seen the alarming photos of what a supermarket produce section would look like without bees? If not, here you go:

So we all get that bees are critical agents in the food chain, right? Well then, one local beekeeper has some bad news for us.

Bill Castro, who runs Bee Friendly Apiary out of his home in Southwest Baltimore, says more than 56 percent of managed honeybee colonies in Maryland were lost in 2016. This follows a three-year average loss of 54 percent.

“This means that beekeepers in Maryland spend over $1.13 million every year to replace approximately 7,600 lost registered honeybee colonies,” writes Castro in an email. “If managed honey bee losses are this high, how do we think that wild native bee populations are fairing?”

The statistic Castro cites comes from Bee Informed Partnership, a collaborative effort among academic institutions, agriculturalists, scientists, and apiary owners to better understand honey bee declines in the United States. The troubling figure reinforces worries about worldwide losses from so-called Colony Collapse Disorder—an inexplicable dying off of hives—that researchers theorize is caused by pesticide use, parasites, and loss of habitat. However, recent stories indicate that the problem may not be as dire as previously thought.

In any case, local bee populations seem to be among those still suffering.

One step the average citizen can take to help the bees is to stagger garden plantings, so at least some flora is always blooming throughout the season. Bees begin foraging in early spring and continue until late fall. However, many garden plants and agriculture crops bloom only in the spring or fall, leaving the bees with little to sustain them the rest of the year.

Your local garden center can probably help you pick plants preferred by pollinator, which include bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and several other insects. Or, if you want to be super eco-friendly, Herring Run Nursery in Baltimore City can provide expertise in creating a pollinator garden using only plant species native to Maryland.

BGE took a small but symbolically significant step toward pollinator preservation in mid-November when it announced a partnership with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources to return approximately 200 acres of utility-managed land in state parks to natural meadow habitat.

“This partnership benefits the state, our customers and, most importantly, the pollinators that are vital for a healthy environment,” said Derrick Dickens, vice president of Technical Services for BGE. “Changing the way we manage these electric rights of way will encourage the return of pollinators and native ecosystems, while still ensuring that power lines are safely maintained.”

Sustainability Shorts

After discontinuing its composting drop-off program for several months while it overhauled its system, Real Food Farm is once again accepting food scraps at its Clifton Park location. The farm’s new system—developed in tandem with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and Urban Farm Plans—follows a co-op model that asks participants to take a one-hour training course before joining and then volunteer one hour per month to maintain membership. Once joined, members can drop off kitchen scraps any time and take home finished compost to fertilize their own gardens. If residents would like to participate but don’t have time to volunteer, Real Food Farm also accepts compost via Compost Cab, a collection service that operates in the Baltimore and D.C. metro areas.

Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of all food in the U.S. goes to waste, ending up in landfills where it decomposes and emits methane, a greenhouse gas several times more potent than carbon dioxide. Composting is one way to divert unused food from landfill. Gleaning—the process of collecting excess food in order to feed food-insecure populations—is another. There are several local organizations that facilitate gleaning, including Gather Baltimore, Hungry Harvest, and the Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network.

Visiting Laureate

On Wednesday, the famed poet, environmentalist, and farmer Wendell Berry spoke at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about finding hope and sanctuary in a simple life lived in harmony with the natural world.

“I can’t give anybody hope,” said Berry, who spoke as part of a celebration marking the 20th anniversary of the school’s Center for a Livable Future. “Hope has to come up out of you … To find something worth hoping for is a very good place to start. There are things worth hoping for, there are good people, this is still a very beautiful world.”

A recap of the talk, which was led by journalist Eric Schlosser, can be found here.