Chesapeake Born

 “We know that our high-technology society is handling our environment in a way that will be lethal for us. What we don’t know — and had bette… Read Story

They might seem an odd couple, Crassostrea virginica and Castor canadensis — the Eastern oyster and the North American beaver. Read Story

I was just 33 when I met her, turning 50. A 40-year relationship ensued — intimate, though I shared her with so many others. And now we’re parting. Read Story

“…to see the running of the old eels and the young shad to the sea is to have knowledge of things that are as nearly eternal as any earthly li… Read Story

Always, I’ve assumed knowledge equals power. If you do the science that makes sense of a mysterious world, it enables you to comprehend your p… Read Story

In the beginning was the Word .… and the word was Full. Read Story

It was the best day I would spend in a “classroom,” drifting through the summer wetlands of the Patuxent River as the “professor” stood tall i… Read Story

Notes to myself on preparing to teach my Chesapeake Bay course at Salisbury University for the 10th year: Read Story

“Harry Hughes Horton.” Sounds good, don’t ya think? A missed opportunity that I’ll explain in a bit. Read Story

In the spring of 1987, I made the best move of my life — to remote Smith Island, MD, whose fisherfolk had endured for more than three centurie… Read Story

A tale of two gases: both colorless, odorless and essential to life; now also both imperiling life as humans boost them to unnatural levels. Read Story

“Why will you ask for other glories when you have soft crabs?” Read Story

Surveying the current wreckage of federal environmental policies, I’ve wondered: Close to half a century out from the first Earth Day — April … Read Story

My hope for America’s future? With any luck it’ll be a yawn. Read Story

The essential landform around the Chesapeake Bay is peninsular, from Virginia’s Northern Neck between the Potomac and Rappahannock to virtuall… Read Story

It was a year ago, a sunny summer morning overlooking the Choptank River… We were discussing what it has all meant, studying the Chesapeake Ba… Read Story

“Hey there, thanks for making my property worth even less.” You get these calls and emails when you make a movie that raises public awareness … Read Story

I grew up middle class but land rich: roaming hundreds of acres of woods and marsh, hunting properties owned by my dad’s poultry company and h… Read Story

Combing the beach, I stoop to pick up an essay for my upcoming college nature writing class. It’s a reddish, roundish pebble, tumbling in the … Read Story

The piney woods stretching for miles around us smell springy, as warm winds melt the last of a big January snow. At the crest of a rise, Bobby… Read Story

The phone number sticks in my memory, the number I called the most in some 35 years of environmental reporting for the Baltimore Sun. It wasn’… Read Story

It’s a chill November morning, the rising sun sloshing light on the tree tops. Larry Walton and I are about a half-mile into the woods that li… Read Story

Come ride bikes with me. Don’t dismiss as idle our idyll through an ideal autumn “leafscape” today, for our pedaling shows the way to a better Bay. Read Story

If you’re not yet worried about Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s abandonment of Smart Growth, you might want to read a new study on how Dumb Growth… Read Story

When I began a documentary film this year about climate change and the Chesapeake, I knew that even though local residents were affected by it… Read Story

People are surprised when I say that for my profession of environmental writing, I read as much as I can absorb about economics and business. Read Story

It’s just a crease in the landscape, a gully incised by a hundred thousand years of rains, knifing toward sea level through bluffs bulged up b… Read Story

The smell of the piney woods and the call of bobwhite quail; tracks of my toy wagon in the soft sand road bordered by ditches alive with tadpo… Read Story

The views expressed by columnists do not necessarily reflect those of the Bay Journal. Read Story

It has been my joy and anguish through the last five decades to keep track of little Dipping Pond Run, a rare and trouty tributary of Baltimor… Read Story

Saving the Bay is obviously about improving water quality, but equally tricky is the business of managing how much seafood we extract from tha… Read Story

Protecting the environment is usually easier to the extent we can link it to human health concerns. The tough federal Clean Air Act, for examp… Read Story

Critics claiming Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s rollback of modern septic tank requirements will modestly increase Bay pollution are misguided. Read Story

The oysters came up in the dredge like I hadn’t seen them in 50 years (and rarely even back then): huge and clumped together and bedecked with… Read Story

Some days, you hit it right. I offer into evidence Tuesday, June 7, 2016. Towing a fine-mesh net for plankton in a Virginia inlet, our apparat… Read Story

It was 1983, and a top Pennsylvania environmental official was preparing to address a press conference in Annapolis on the new, cooperative ef… Read Story

If you walked alone and untutored through the tall pines, century-old oaks, big beeches and sweetgums of the forest, near where the Eastern Sh… Read Story

For decades, authors grounded in ecology and environmentalism have produced excellent — and widely ignored — forecasts of the end of economic … Read Story

Out on Virginia’s York River, we had just finished filming a movie about crabs the way we began it in the winter of 2015: men and women of sci… Read Story

A few autumns ago, I took the students in my Chesapeake Bay class at Salisbury University to Smith Island to discuss how rising seas, accelera… Read Story