Blog

What an exciting season it was for Stream ReLeaf! This season saw a jump in demand for the ReLeaf program – with three dozen residents planting over 1,300 trees and shrubs. With each of those 1,300 plants that were installed, the environment benefits. How? In immeasurable ways, but let’s start off with some of the biggies: Stream buffers help prevent streambank erosion. The vegetation traps much of the sediment, nutrients, and other pollutants, preventing them from entering our waterways. In addition to stabilizing the soil, the plants utilize most of the trapped nutrients. (Note: An effective buffer will use of to 80% of the phosphorous and nearly 90% of the nitrogen, two of the biggest pollutants of the Chesapeake Bay.)

Well, we weren’t coastal or international, but we were out there. As part of this world-wide effort, some great Howard County volunteers spent a few hours on a Saturday morning cleaning up a stream and the stream banks around it. One interesting thing about the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC) is the data collection. Usually when we do our Howard County cleanups we track the weight of trash and recycling and the number of volunteers and their hours. This works for us and is pretty efficient and useful. The ICC (the cleanup, not the road) provides clipboards and data cards for tracking very specific information such as the number of cigarette butts. Sigh. Believe me, it is difficult to carry a

Before we get into what green infrastructure is or what it means for you and your backyard, let me first provide you a little insight into the painstaking process that we went through to produce something fun for you to play around with. (Trust me; it’s pretty cool – even the County Executive is using it.) After over a year of painstaking mapping in our Arc GIS system (mostly because our server was slower than 90’s dial-up internet speeds which led me to consider launching my computer through the window on an average of once per hour), we finally, FINALLY have a draft Green Infrastructure Network map! I can’t tell you how exciting it is to have completed a draft

Last week, while making my way across the office parking lot, admiring the rain gardens in full growth and ready to catch the next round of storm runoff, I noticed what looked like a mottled, polished stone in the sea of asphalt. Getting closer I realized this was no stone… it was moving. When close enough to identify, I quickly reverted back to my childhood fascination with insects and was in awe of my latest find. You see, I grew up in a time before organized sports consumed weekends and long before video games were the after school activity of choice. With so much ‘free time’ on our hands and living on the edge of suburbia, my friends and I

Here in Howard County we have a great school sys­tem, well funded and rec­og­nized as one of the best in the coun­try. Peo­ple set­tle here because of the qual­ity of our schools. Long ago as a com­mu­nity we com­mit­ted to pay for good schools. We spend more than half of every tax dol­lar to fund our schools and as a result our chil­dren ben­e­fit from a first rate edu­ca­tion. We all pay for our edu­ca­tion sys­tem whether we have kids or not, whether they are of school age or not. Why? — Because we value edu­ca­tion as a key aspect of our qual­ity of life. As a county and state, we also show a strong alle­giance to the Chesa­peake Bay

Congratulations to Howard County’s newest Green Schools! Howard County now has 42 official “green” schools, the most recent 9 being selected earlier this year. What does it mean to be a green school? In Maryland, it means that these schools have completed a 2-year process of integrating green practices and education into the way they do things. Then they put together an application that was reviewed and approved by the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education (MAEOE). This is a big accomplishment and takes a lot of effort by teachers, students, and volunteers. This program is great because it sets up a structure and guidance for how to go about “greening” your school. Many people have good intentions to

Students Branching Out is a Howard County project to involve students in local tree planting projects. The most recent site was at Glenwood Middle School. This was a new twist on the project because it was the first time that we planted trees on school grounds. That made involving the students easier, since all we had to do was walk across the school fields to get there. Despite some weird weather we had in December – freezing cold and snowy, then warm and the ground too squishy to deliver the trees – we were able to get 3 classes of students from Glenwood Middle to work around their jam-packed school schedules to plant trees with us on December 20 th

Given Mother Nature’s recent outbursts in this area, let’s talk about being prepared. Whether we’re facing another snowpocalyspe, hurricane, earthquake, flood, or even an afternoon electrical storm, it’s easy to be prepared while still being “green.” Having witnessed the chaos that ensued in the Twitter world just before Irene hit (i.e.“[insert name of any store here] in #HoCo just ran out of water, milk, toilet paper, generators, and batteries!”) it seems that often in quick preparations we grab the easiest thing off the shelf instead of thinking long term. Plan now, think through what you really need, and you’ll find yourself at home with a stack of good library books instead of elbowing people for that last bottle of water

This blog is a repost of content from sustainable stormwater. Visit the link below to learn more about them. http://sustainablestormwater.org/ After a winter as harsh as the one we’ve just experienced, one question lingering in our minds is, what is the environmental impact of all that road salt ? Maryland’s State Highway Administration reports using 480,000 tons of salt this past winter. The average for the previous 6 years is about 211,000 tons. As snow melts, it carries road salt into waterways that are normally fresh water. Salt laden snowmelt can flow directly into streams, or partially infiltrate into the ground via roadside stormwater facilities. Streams are fed by groundwater that flows to the surface. According to a report by

For many years, I guest lectured in a course entitled “The Politics of Conservation”. My role was to describe the local government environmental agenda to a class of undergraduates who, like most average folks, were pretty naïve as to the workings of government in general. Yet, knowing the importance of the how and why we at the local level conduct our business, I always started my lecture by describing the three distinct levels of government. To do that, I used a metaphor that revolved around the Thanksgiving holiday. So as we all make final preparations to celebrate Thanksgiving, and likewise begin to address some significant environmental mandates, I figure this is a great time to share my metaphor with you