The Bay Journal

6 days ago | bayjournal.com | Lara Lutz

Laws are not the only way that policies are set within a state. The agencies tasked with enacting the laws also have authority to iron out details that are not specified within the laws themselves. This is called the administrative rulemaking process, and it offers another opportunity for the public to help shape policies that impact the environmental health of their waterways, forests, air quality and communities.

1 week ago | bayjournal.com | Lauren Hines-Acosta

Editor’s note: This interview is featured in the new season of our Chesapeake Uncharted podcast, which will be released May 21 as a companion to our film, Chesapeake Rhythms. The film explores wildlife migrations in the Bay region. Twenty years ago, Tom Horton was kayaking on the first day of spring. While paddling, he found a small bush sprinkled with monarch butterflies. He persuaded his friend, Dave Harp, to go there the next morning before sunrise.

1 week ago | bayjournal.com | Jeremy Cox

If the District of Columbia were nine times larger, it still wouldn’t equal the area of forests lost to saltwater intrusion along Maryland’s coasts in the past decade alone. Every July, when Heather Disque surveys the landscape from her state-issued Cessna, she documents thousands more acres of trees in death throes. It’s only a matter of a few years before they wither into desiccated husks and topple over, she said. By then, the ground itself likely will be wetter, having converted to a saltmarsh.

2 weeks ago | bayjournal.com | Jeremy Cox

Investigators believe they have identified a potential source of the groundwater contamination that has threatened dozens of household water systems near a Perdue Farms soybean plant in Salisbury, MD, with “forever chemicals.”Consultants are pointing to firefighting foam as a likely cause, the poultry giant said in an April 17 statement. The company said a fire-suppression system in service in 2019 discharged foam on the property but didn’t specify how much was released at the time.

2 weeks ago | bayjournal.com | Lauren Hines-Acosta

Virginia’s Rappahannock Tribe has regained almost 1,000 acres of ancestral land along the cliffs that line the tribe’s namesake river. With the new plot of land, the tribe now stewards 1,435 acres along Fones Cliffs. The area has one of the largest concentrations of nesting bald eagles in the mid-Atlantic, according to the U.S. National Park Service. The site was also home to three of the Rappahannock communities that encountered and resisted Captain John Smith in 1608.