The Sassafras River, mid-May. Tulip poplars and black locusts in full and fragrant blossom. Local watermen offloading tons of catfish as hungr… Read Story
Chesapeake Born
A column by Tom Horton
Jam the cow has decided she feels like getting milked. A handsome Jersey, a breed prized for its high-quality milk, easy calving and all-aroun… Read Story
Water’s way: slow and swampy, spread out and oozy, soaking in, life affirming, purifying, beautifying. Read Story
No surprise, I am a promiscuous hugger of trees. But what tree would I drive five hours to embrace? What single species would lure me to the o… Read Story
“Think globally, act locally.” It’s hard to improve on that environmental dictum of uncertain origin. Have broad vision and context, but start… Read Story
“So you can enjoy this any time, but the rest of us have to wait till you invite us along.” Read Story
This is the story of a gift of Chesapeake waters, no less important than any bounty of seafood. Read Story
After three years in the literal middle of Chesapeake Bay, doing outdoor education from Smith Island for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation during … Read Story
Behold the concrete road culvert: straight and narrow and lifeless, having whisked the previous day’s rains from oceans of hard-baked asphalt … Read Story
Just as an earthquake mercilessly exposes shoddy building standards, a crisis like the current pandemic lays bare societal flaws. Both present… Read Story
Nearing yet another majestic tree, light and birdsong sifting through its boughs, I get my hopes up that it’s not doomed like so many we’ve pa… Read Story
Photographer Dave Harp and I began our cool, April morning paddle (kayaks 6 feet apart, of course) down one of the Chesapeake’s biggest ditche… Read Story
The Man Who Planted Trees is the compelling tale by writer Jean Giano of his meeting a shepherd wandering the wrecked landscapes of France aft… Read Story
“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
In a classic case of confusing root causes with symptoms, an environmental report on the United States’ rising contribution to climate change … 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
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