q. i. f?

While the storm-water rules would apply nationwide to new development, Jackson said the agency would consider writing more stringent requirements for the six-state bay watershed because storm water is a significant and growing source of pollution fouling the estuary. EPA will weigh imposing new mandates to reduce storm water in existing communities and on redevelopment projects as well as new construction, Jackson said.

From a short Sun update on big intervention coming from the federal government, in response to appeals for action in defense of the beleaguered Chesapeake Bay. Stricter runoff rules are a key component of the measures — to the dismay of (among others) a lot of builders and developers.

It’s not clear what the executive order’s direct impact might be on the 17 million people who live in the bay watershed, but it could lead to new requirements for upgrading sewage treatment plants and other utilities and limits on developers and on farmers and homeowners who fertilize their fields and lawns with nutrients that seep into the bay.
   The announcement came at a meeting of the Chesapeake Executive Council, the body of elected officials from the 64,000-square-mile bay watershed that has overseen the cleanup effort. The group, whose members include the governors from five states and the D.C. mayor, conceded last fall that their states were woefully short of goals established in 2000 that were to have been met by next year.

From a Washington Post article this week, about President Obama’s action giving new protected status to the bay and its tributaries, thereby shifting responsibility & enforcement power from the state governments in the region to the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Bay states subject to the TMDL will rely on Low Impact Development (LID) in place of traditional best management practices to reduce sediment, nutrients and peak flows from new construction sites and from redevelopment in urban areas.
   To use LID techniques — which include permeable pavements, green roofs, rain gardens, swales and other devices that allow the storm water to seep into the ground — builders will need to obtain more information about the building site than has been required in the past. Many builders have limited experience with choosing and installing LID devices and estimating the associated costs — including the risk of their failure — and providing for their maintenance.

In an item from its news service this week, the NAHB alerts builders & developers in the six-state Chesapeake watershed of sweeping changes ahead, as federal agency EPA looks toward applying TMDL regulatory status to the natural system’s region as a whole.

Oysters filter nutrients and sediment from the water — the pollutants most responsible for the bay’s degraded condition. In the late 1800s, when commercial harvests topped 100 million bushels a year, the bivalves were so abundant that scientists estimate they could filter all the bay’s water in less than a week.
   But overfishing, loss of reefs on which oysters can grow, and a pair of diseases, MSX and Dermo, have reduced the bay’s population to just 1 percent of historic levels. Harvests in recent years have fallen below 100,000 bushels, despite a replanting effort that has put hundreds of millions of hatchery-reared oysters in the bay.

Summary of a century’s change in the Chesapeake, from an item about reform of state strategy for oyster fishing & aquaculture in Saturday’s Sun.

The five properties in line to be purchased have some of the richest bird and wildlife habitat in Maryland and more than 19 miles of shoreline along the Potomac River, officials said. One tract, 4,800 acres in Worcester County, is the largest privately owned forest in the state, according to Nat Williams, Maryland director of the Nature Conservancy, which helped negotiate the deal.
   Four other tracts of woodlands, fields and wetlands in Cecil, Charles and St. Mary’s counties have been owned since the early 1600s by the Roman Catholic Jesuit order. Their purchase was arranged with the help of the Conservation Fund, another national land preservation group. The fund’s Pat Noonan said the land deals represent “a once and forever opportunity.”

From a Thursday Sun article about recent moves in the state-level land-preserve game in Maryland. (The Jesuit angle is interesting — a reminder of Maryland’s pre-U.S. history, its origin as a New World destination for English Catholics.)

Mentioned at the end of the piece is the state’s environment & natural resources policy education tool, green.maryland.gov. A variety of intriguing stuff there, contrived to give a picture of the state-level view of principal areas of environment action — land use & development, watershed & bay recovery, &c. The ‘Greenprint’ land preservation map feature is noteworthy here. A nice discovery for me, following the post of last week about international non-governmental program Green Map’s recent introduction to Maryland.

I learn today of the international Green Map movement & of the push made, this past year, to see Baltimore become a participant. Green Map is a fascinating educational development, a system designed to provide local groups with a versatile, universal toolset for raising environmental awareness, both at the level of understanding ecosystem and at the level of building community action. Wish I’d come across it before now.

The Baltimore Green Map site offers this audio clip of a local radio show interview, about 8 min. — a nice overview of the way the system is being applied in our area so far.

Baltimore Sun reports today that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation‘s going to sue the EPA for not doing enough. Not that the EPA’s the only party to past bay & watershed cleanup deals accountable for lack of follow-through. But the CBF evidently has seen a need now to take on government in the courts, and it’s the feds, they’ve concluded, against whom “the strongest legal case could be made for failure to uphold pollution laws.”

CBF, Annapolis

This summer, the veteran waterman steered his workboat to a spot off Point Lookout, near Maryland’s southern tip, where he had set his crab pots. He pulled them up to find they were filled with dead crabs.
   Norris has worked the bay for nearly 20 years, and he has long known about “bad water” — oxygen-deprived swaths where little can live. But this was the first week in July. He had never seen bad water so early, or in so many places.
   “It’s disheartening,” he said, “to say the least.”
   During the past 25 years, several billion dollars in state and federal funds have gone to bay cleanup programs. A large chunk of that — including money from Maryland’s landmark flush tax — has paid for improvements to sewage treatment plants. Other money has gone to farmers to plant cover crops and conserve land.
   Environmental experts say those steps have helped to hold the line — that the bay would be in even worse shape without them. But it has not gotten better.

The Sun has a new two-part look at the sinking health of the Chesapeake and at watershed woes doing it harm — with emphasis on Maryland’s own watershed & river problems. (The Chesapeake watershed covers an area from central New York to southern Virginia.) The first article, run today, details ongoing river pollution problems in Maryland. And it comes with video coverage, if that’s your preferred medium.

It seems that streams have a magnetic pull on tires. Even new tires on display inside auto dealerships, I imagine, secretly dream of being embedded in the bottom of a stream, longing to be in the company of crayfish and trout. . . . No one knows how many tires line our waters, but estimates for the stockpiled waste tires around the U.S. range from 500 million to 3 billion.

A good reminder (for those of us not already involved in cleanup in some fashion or other) of the effects of the terribly wasteful way of living we’ve learned, broadly speaking, as a society, from an op-ed by a college student conservationist run in today’s Sun.