A national wildlife refuge that attracts tens of thousands of visitors each year to the Chesapeake Bay may be forced to close to the public soon. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering shuttering the Eastern Neck National Wildlife Refuge because it lacks the funding to hire a new refuge manager.
Only on Smith Island would someone get choked up about a jetty, a constructed wall of stones that functions like a bulwark against waves and water currents. Since 2015, federal, state and local sources have invested about $18.3 million in three separate projects on and around Smith Island, adding about two miles of reconstructed shoreline, several acres of newly planted salt marshes and hundreds of feet of jetties to preserve the island that is slipping away into the Chesapeake Bay.
All sides in the debate over capital punishment claim to “know,” as one of my correspondents claimed, that death penalty is or is not a deterrent. For it to be a deterrent for capital crime, murderers would have to think that they might be caught and that the venue in which they are caught will effect the ultimate punishment. Further, they need to be convinced that such a penalty is not infinitely delayable. In states that it takes a decade or more from conviction to execution and/or those in which capital punishment is rare to nonexistent, there can be no deterrent from the death penalty.
Decades of work to improve the health of the Anacostia River are beginning to pay off, according to a report released Wednesday by the Anacostia Watershed Society. The river earned a “D-minus” on its annual report card, its first passing grade in the decade since the nonprofit began issuing report cards for the waterway that runs through Maryland and the District of Columbia into the Potomac River.
After two years of meeting behind closed doors, some of the people who’ve been lobbing verbal grenades at each other over oyster restoration — watermen and environmentalists — have buried enough of their differences to agree on a wide-ranging set of recommendations for restoring oysters in a pair of Eastern Shore rivers while also aiding the industry that depends on harvesting them.
My Life in Progressive Politics: Against the Grain by Joseph D. Tydings with John W. Frece, Foreword by Joe Biden. If you read but one political autobiography in the next 10 years, make it this one, for sure!
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the murder and death of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy as he campaigned for the presidency. Towson author Blaine Taylor, who has a forthcoming biography of Kennedy, here reviews three books on Kennedy that came out this year.
The owner of Conowingo Dam is challenging conditions the state of Maryland placed on the hydroelectric facility’s continued operation, saying the pollution cleanup ordered by the state imposes an “unfair burden” that would cost “orders of magnitude” more than the dam is worth.
As in so many other places around the Chesapeake Bay, oysters are now scarce in Breton Bay, a short, relatively wide tributary of the Potomac River that zigzags south like a question mark from Leonardtown in St. Mary’s County. But the bivalves may return to this picturesque and comparatively remote estuary if a proposal by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources comes to fruition. State officials have nominated Breton for an ambitious effort to restore its long-dormant oyster reefs.
April showers bring May flowers — and mosquitoes. This spring, a team of researchers with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science is looking into whether the annual onslaught of those pesky blood suckers can be curbed by some tiny, shrimplike critters called copepods.
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