After decades of no progress in the Chespeake cleanup, feds and states are taking another whack

After decades of halting progress in curbing pollution in the Chesapeake Bay (actually regress would be more like it), president Obama  issued a executive order in 2009 specifying tougher new standards on pollutants flowing into the bay.  

The specifics of the plan were called too timid by environmentalists such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, but industry called them too aggressive, according too the WaPo at the time: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051202469.html

The Obama order imposed new pollution limits on the states in the Chesapeake watershed. States are responding by imposing limits on pollution in cities and counties throughout the watershed  Municipalities in turn are are responding by doing things like imposing limits on farmers waste and controlling storm waters to reduce sediment into the Bay, and installing water treatment plants to cut down on nitrogen and phosphorus emissions.  .

The Bay is supposed to bw subject to a "pollution diet"  Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL), "a historic and comprehensive “pollution diet” with rigorous accountability measures to initiate sweeping actions to restore clean water in the Chesapeake Bay and the region’s streams, creeks and rivers," according to the EPA. http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/pdf/pdf_chesbay/FinalBayTMDL/BayTMDLExecutiveSummaryFINAL122910_final.pdf

So the recent report on the health of the Bay was a disappointment: The Chesapeake Bay Gets Bad Report Card: For the first time in 4 years, the Chesapeake's annual report card showed a... http://bit.ly/lIZtob 

Housing prices continue to fall

The NY Times has the story:
Despite record low mortgage interest, a decline in foreclosure activity (which should support prices), the Case/Schiller index of home prices hover at one-third below their peak. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/business/economy/27econ.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Ace

Underwater grasses decrease dramatically in the Chesapeake Bay

A survey of underwater grasses in the Chesapeake by scientists reported last week (according to Baynet) that underwater bay grasses, which serve as habitat tor fish and blue crabs and food for turtles in the  estuary, have decreased significantly. In the bay's midsection, which includes three Southern Maryland counties and the Patuxent and Potomac rivers, the loss was 35,446 acres or 11 percent of the total.

The health of the underwater grasses is linked a key indicator of the bay's water quality.

They attributed the decline to last summer's heatwave early in the growing season.  

The story is here:

http://www.thebaynet.com/news/index.cfm/fa/viewstory/story_ID/22213

Way to go, President Yudhoyono!

Way to go, President Susilo Banbang Yudhoyono! Indonesian's president agrees to a two year moratorium on forest cutting, according to the World Resources Institute  (WRI): http://bit.ly/ii3mz0

Bumblebees Are Declining

A team of ecologists did a large survey of bumblebees and found that half of the once-common species they looked for were gone.  A parasite may be causing the declines. 

"We've lost a lot of bees. There are whole regions where we can't find them any more," says entomologist Sydney Cameron of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Cameron and her team picked eight of the nearly 50 bumblebee species in the United States. All eight had been historically common, but four had appeared to decline in recent decades.

First, the researchers figured out the geographic ranges and relative abundance of the species over the past century by creating a database of collection records from 47 museums and other institutions, which covered nearly 78,000 bees in all. Then the researchers hit the road, caught 16,788 bumblebees in 40 states, and brought them back to the lab.

The Tragedy of the Chesapeake Bay

The Bay is going downhill by every measure, from loss of oysters to loss of clear water to loss of underwater grasses.So the giant estuary that for centuries provided sealife in abundance to humans has been snuffed out in the past few decades--in my memory--by suburban development and heedless waste disposal. 

Most of the tributaries are no longer swimmable because of too many E. Coli from untreated waste of humans and farm animals.

The Bay itself gets too much nitrogen and phosphorus (known collectively as "nutrients") and sediments from these sources and others (air pollution from cars and trucks, deposited on pavement along with oil other nasty things). In total they cause the development of algae blooms and other conditions, which in total create anoxic (oxygenless) conditions.  Huge anoxic "dead zones" in the deeper waters of the Bay, suffocating fish and crabs and other life. 

The combined lobbies of suburban developers, corn farmers and food processors like Purdue and Smithfield are at work in Richmond and Annapolis and other state capitals in the watershed  to weaken legislation to clean up the waters.

If the environment had such a well funded lobby, it would make a serious difference.. 


One thing we would do is impose sediment and nutrient budgets on the waterways, as they do in Seattle and elsewhere, and as called for in the Chesapeake Bay Program (a partnership of localities , states and the US EPA intended to clean up the Bay. ). 

The Developer Next Door

Poor Marty Smith (the developer next door).  He is forced to live next to riffraff like Ann and me, with all our compost bin, our giant mulch piles and hundreds of plants. 

In building his giant house (see "Marty and his Macy's Day Parade Balloon"), he bulldozed the little bungalow next day and the eradicated all plant life except a huge Amur honeysuckle bush.  He scraped and leveled the land, removing dozens of nice plants and everything else interesting (like a big old gatepost, which he had yanked up and sent to the scrap yard). 

His house and concrete driveway cover every square foot of the lot, to the point that Arlington County so-called "Zoning Enforcement Office"delayed his moving in for two months and fined him a certain sum (he says $400K) to compensate the county for the loss of tree canopy .  As a developer he knows how to work around the

Throughout this process he critiqued our style of landscaping in a very irritating way.  "I saw a big rat out in your alleyway."  (You're the one who drove it out of its home in Norma's shed. "Why do you have those piles of branches?" (It's called mulch-- Our approach is kind of the opposite of his).


He lives there with a somewhat younger wife and a toddler son.  I have never had a conversation with him, in more than two years.  I'll say "hi Marty, Isn't a beautiful day?"  He looks at me with that predator's gaze, and falls quickly into silence, and duck back into his garage. 

Fracking is is where we get half our gas.

The natural gas industry has been getting some bad press, focused on its use of hydraulic fracturing in producing natural gas from shales.  Fracking, as it's called, is considered a revolutionary technology, in a good way.

Wikipedia says 

Shale gas is natural gas produced from shale. Shale gas has become an increasingly important source of natural gas in the United States over the past decade, and interest has spread to potential gas shales in Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. One analyst expects shale gas to supply as much as half the natural gas production in North America by 2020.^[1]

^{But the movie "Gasland" which got raves at Sundance Festival makes a case for abandoning it.  (It's a documentary that features a man  IGNITING HIS KITCHEN TAP , and other scary things, including an EPA employee complaining about EPA studies that were postponed. ). It is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phCibwj396I&NR=1}

The oil and gas industry has put out a slick rebuttal,--the Truth About Gasland-- which you can also see on You-tube: http://bit.ly/f6RjSj

John Dawson diagnoses the problem with our watersheds

In short, too much suburban development:

http://severnapark.patch.com/articles/how-did-our-environment-get-in-this-mess

Ancient Tsunami Warnings Were Ignored in Japan

From @Skytruth:  Ancient stone tablets recorded tsunamis: :http://twitter.com/#!/SkyTruth