Unlike most urban forests, Baltimore’s tree canopy is growing — albeit only slightly, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Foliage covered 28 percent of the city in 2015, 1 percentage point more than it did in 2007. Those estimates are based on aerial images and data gathered using technology...
A local water quality advocacy group is asking a judge to reject the $1.6 billion sewer repair plan Baltimore filed in court this month unless a controversial provision is removed. The plan commits the city to more than a decade of work to stop leaks from its aged sewer system. But it also says...
A tiny but nonetheless concerning invader has been discovered in the Gunpowder River: the New Zealand mud snail. The Maryland Department of Natural Resources confirmed the species’ first known appearance in the state this month. Gunpowder Riverkeeper Theaux Le Gardeur said he discovered them while...
A coalition of environmentalists, clergy and solar and wind energy companies launched a campaign Wednesday calling for half of Maryland's electricity to come from renewable sources. That would double a policy adopted last year requiring that renewable energy account for 25 percent of the state’s...
Peter Goodwin has spent much of his career engineering ways to restore salmon populations in dammed Pacific Northwest rivers or analyzing the downstream effects of water supply management decisions in drought-stressed California. The closest the University of Idaho professor has come to studying...
A bill to fund the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal programs from December through September 2018 would strip the agency of its power to enforce a Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan, under a provision approved in the House of Representatives. Rep. Bob Goodlatte, a Republican who represents...
A $1.6 billion plan Baltimore officials recently approved to stop sewage from leaking into waterways has been filed in federal court, taking it one step closer to being enforced under the Clean Water Act. The document lays out 13 years’ worth of work needed to prevent millions of gallons of sewage...
Sections of the popular Grist Mill and Buzzards Rock trails in Patapsco Valley State Park were closed Tuesday for a months-long construction project to remove Bloede Dam from the Patapsco River. Closures of the paved trails are expected to last until the spring of 2019, according to the state’s...
In early spring, Don Boesch, Maryland’s top climate scientist, spoke at the State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit in Houston. The conference took place at a downtown hotel next to the Buffalo Bayou, the creek that had meandered quietly across Houston until last weekend, when unrelenting rains from...
Brian Shealey hoisted his young daughter onto his shoulders and walked along a display showing the timeline of the Baltimore region’s wastewater facilities going back more than 100 years. While 2-year-old Hannah was more interested in the band playing behind them, Shealey took time to glance at...
The Trump administration has cut a grant funding the Chesapeake Bay Journal, threatening the future of the publication that covers environmental issues across the estuary’s watershed. Editor Karl Blankenship said the organization is “disappointed that political appointees in the EPA have made an...
Maryland and eight other states plan to further tighten air pollution limits aimed at reducing global climate change. The states are part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which caps carbon dioxide pollution in the Northeast. The states announced Thursday that they plan to reduce the carbon...
Baltimore officials agreed this week to pay $3.9 million to help clean up hazardous pollution from a dump site in East Baltimore. The Board of Estimates, which is controlled by Mayor Catherine Pugh, voted Wednesday to enter into a consent decree with the federal government and state of Maryland...
On the Magothy River people are diving for oysters — not to fry, bake or slurp, but to monitor the health of the river's five oyster reefs. On Sunday morning, Dick Carey, the leader of the all-volunteer dive team for the Magothy River Association, watched the water above the Dobbins Hill reef,...
When Joe Ward crossed the finish line of Sunday’s stand-up paddle board race on Bear Creek, organizers didn’t give him a trophy. Instead, he was handed a trash bag. After finishing the five-mile course in about 48 minutes, the Annapolis man immediately headed back out onto the water to pick up...
A proposed 3.5-mile underground natural gas pipeline crossing far below the Potomac River in Western Maryland would provide a critical link, proponents say, between gas producers in Pennsylvania and manufacturers in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. But opponents are calling on Gov. Larry Hogan...
Officials kicked off a three-year, $430 million project on Thursday that will eliminate miles-long sewage backups that lead to overflows into the Jones Falls and the Inner Harbor. The so-called “headworks project” at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Dundalk will add pumps to move backed-up...
Leafy greens grow profusely at the tiny East Baltimore farm, but not in parallel rows in the ground. They pop out of vertical white troughs that hang from a metal ceiling. Light-emitting diodes glow 18 hours a day, providing the equivalent of full sunshine. Electronic sensors gauge temperature,...
City leaders on Wednesday approved a $1.6 billion plan to rehabilitate Baltimore’s aged sewer system and stop wastewater from leaking into the Inner Harbor by 2030 — 15 years after an earlier missed deadline. The consent agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency will have direct financial...
Gov. Larry Hogan announced plans Tuesday to dredge a small amount of the sediment trapped behind the Conowingo Dam, a test project to determine whether doing so on a larger scale would help improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay. Hogan said the state will ask companies this month to submit bids...
A climate report based on work conducted by scientists in 13 federal agencies is under active review at the White House, and its conclusions about the far-reaching damage already occurring from global warming are at odds with the Trump administration's views. The report, known as the Climate Science...
Baltimore's Board of Estimates is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a $1.6 billion plan to rebuild the city’s leaky sewer system, but the details won’t be made public until then. A summary of the plan obtained by The Baltimore Sun shows some significant changes since a draft of the long-delayed project...
One day after 16 states sued, the Trump administration reversed its effort to delay Obama administration regulations to curb air pollution that forms smog. With no mention of the challenges from states such as California, New York, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington, Environmental...
When Anna Connors hears politicians cast doubt on climate change, it frustrates her. The 16-year-old Park School student has seen it up close — at the edge of the Arctic. “It’s upsetting because we have the data to prove it does exist,” she said. “I guess that lights a fire under me to continue...
The chance to view nature up close and potentially discover a previously unrecorded plant or animal species is what the Howard County Conservancy is offering to the public for the first time at its free Family BioBlitz event on Saturday, Aug. 12. As many as 30 naturalists will be on hand to examine...
An enthusiastic supporter of the president who is mayor of a Virginia island that's sinking into the Chesapeake Bay got a chance to challenge former Vice President Al Gore on climate change during a town hall Tuesday night. Tangier Island Mayor James "Ooker" Eskridge told Gore that erosion is the...
Scientists know, based on data from eight monitoring stations in and around Baltimore, that smog levels are not healthy on many hot summer days. But the air on some blocks is surely fresher than others. Hundreds of simpler air pollution sensors will soon be scattered around the city to show where...
Global Change Research Wetland tries to foresee impact of climate change, but federal funding might be harder to predict
Deep Creek Lake stewards are on guard for an invasion of non-native zebra mussels, but they aren’t about to drain the Western Maryland waterway because of it, as a widely shared article recently suggested. The posting on breakingnews247.net — a website that suggests visitors “write an article and...
Ocean City officials are resisting a plan to build a wind farm off Maryland's coast — among the first of its kind in the nation — and they are taking their fight to Congress. The $1.4 billion project, in the works for seven years, would put as many as 187 wind turbines off the coast of the state's...
The Hogan administration notified the federal Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday that it plans to file a lawsuit alleging the agency has failed to act against states whose smokestack emissions pollute Maryland’s air. In a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, Maryland Environment Secretary...
The Environmental Protection Agency has tapped Baltimore as a possible recipient of a federal $200 million loan to help upgrade the city’s infrastructure to stop sewage from chronically spilling into waterways. The money would be used to improve the city’s wastewater collection and treatment and...
A 1930s-era campground in Gwynns Falls Park will be revived with a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of the Interior announced Wednesday. The campground, which is adjacent to the Cahill Recreation Center and the Jastrow Levin picnic grove, was a Girl Scout camp in the early 20th century,...
Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there's enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study. Plastics don't break down like other man-made materials, so three-quarters of the stuff ends up...
Dave Gertz lives on Valentine Creek on the Severn River, in a house that he inherited from his great-grandfather. Growing up, his great-grandfather told him about the underwater grass that grew near the home, but disappeared within his lifetime. Gertz has seen the grass again in recent years; it...
Marion East, a retired waterman, recalls the “tingling sensation” he felt when he pulled fish out of the Pocomoke River 20 years ago this summer. “When you put your hands in the water, it was about like you were getting a shock,” the Crisfield man said. That was how East, now 73, encountered the...
The log has proved educational, for anglers and biologists alike.
Chuck McMillin reckons he uses the Magothy River more than almost anybody else. The avid kayaker has been exploring the 67 miles of shoreline for more than a decade. But even he learned about new spots after the Magothy River Association recently launched an online water trail guide. The map denotes...
A year ago, Gov. Larry Hogan put out a call for private industry to suggest how Maryland should address the pollution that was quickly piling up behind the Conowingo Dam — a staggeringly expensive problem that many policymakers thought could wait. For nearly a century, the dam had stopped silt...
On one end of this particular food chain are boxes of dinged-up tomatoes, spotty avocados and other perfectly edible yet rejected fruits and vegetables that pile up at the Maryland Wholesale Produce Market in Jessup. On the other end are the estimated one in four residents of Baltimore who live...
Ice oozes across the surface of Antarctica and breaks off into the southern oceans constantly — but not normally in chunks the size of Delaware. So after a massive iceberg separated from the Antarctic peninsula this week, the burning question among glacial scientists is: Was it influenced by warming...
Citing a growing threat to marine life, the National Aquarium in Baltimore and others across the country launched a campaign Monday against disposable plastic products, and vowed to “significantly reduce or eliminate” single-use plastic bottles at their facilities by 2020. The new Aquarium Conservation...
Out for a walk around 6:45 a.m. the morning of July 4, Diamond the American Staffordshire terrier found something unique at a small beach near a marina in Hillsmere — a diamondback terrapin. The diamondback terrapin is the official turtle of the state of Maryland. It has scaly gray and whitish skin,...
John Tyler's family name can be traced through this Chesapeake Bay community back at least 300 years, and as many as a dozen generations. But a few years ago, he feared his generation might be the island's last. Taking stock after Hurricane Sandy washed over the island, the state proposed using...
Gov. Larry Hogan said this week he's against gas drilling off of Maryland's coast, and as President Donald Trump's administration considers seismic testing to search for energy reserves, state officials are asking the federal government to more closely study its impact. The Trump administration...