On a recent rainy afternoon, a dozen educators and environmentalists from Central New York were standing ankle deep in Charlotte Creek here, collecting water samples in test tubes, petri dishes and ice trays. As the rain pelted the group at a sideways angle, with the creek running faster than usual, Heather Grant, one of the leaders, felt compelled to offer a gentle warning.

“The teacher in me wants to say that the water is still high, so don’t go too far out by yourself,” she said. “Please don’t get washed away.”

It would not have been apparent to anyone watching, but this simple scientific inquiry, 282 driving miles from Perryville in Cecil County, the first town in Maryland to touch the Chesapeake Bay, had profound implications for the health of the Bay — and for the imperative of preparing the next generation to work to combat climate change. The creek runs into the Susquehanna River near Oneonta, about five miles east of West Davenport, and the Susquehanna, the longest river on the East Coast, is the biggest and northernmost source of the Chesapeake Bay, one of more than 150 waterways that feed into the venerated estuary.

Not that very many people know it. The Susquehanna begins at Lake Otsego in Cooperstown, N.Y., a quaint village named for James Fenimore Cooper, author of “The Last of the Mohicans” and other 19th century yarns. It’s also home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which draws a steady stream of tourists. Brewery Ommegang, a giant and popular watering hole, restaurant and event space, is just outside of town in a corn field, its wild success surely a beacon of hope for craft brewers downriver in Maryland.

The only indication that this is the source of the Chesapeake Bay comes from a historical sign in a shady copse in Council Rock Park, which overlooks the lake, three blocks from the Baseball Hall of Fame (or the “B-HOF,” as some locals call it). “This marker signifies the point where the beautiful Susquehanna River begins its 444 mile journey to meet the Chesapeake Bay,” the sign says.

But a number of environmentalists and teachers in this part of the world are taking their responsibility as stewards of the Chesapeake Bay increasingly more seriously. And they are thinking more often about how they can incorporate Bay health into the scholastic curriculum. It can seem at times like a lonely crusade.

“Sometimes up here it’s tough to get students — or anyone — interested in the Bay, which is 400 miles away,” said Jeff O’Grady, program director at the Otsego County Conservation Association (OCCA), a leading environmental group in the area.

For the past three years, OCCA has organized a summertime training for local teachers to learn more about the Chesapeake Bay watershed and to devise strategies for teaching their students about it. Run initially by a group of volunteers, the environmental group, which has been around since the late 1960s, was launched to protect forests in the area. But its size and mission have grown exponentially over the years. Today, nine full-time staffers tackle everything from water pollution to clean energy advocacy to climate resiliency. Three years ago, the group won a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to organize the teacher trainings on the Bay.

“Education is part of everything we do,” O’Grady said.

Maryland policymakers and environmentalists have long been obsessed about upstream pollution that comes into the Chesapeake Bay. But most of their ire and frustration focuses on Pennsylvania, which by all accounts and a series of lawsuits, has been lax, until recently, about its responsibilities to curb agricultural runoff and other pollution that flows to the Susquehanna and its tributaries.

New York is often missing from the conversation. In fact, environmentalists from the area joke about being left off official maps of the Bay watershed and recall a recent document from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation referring to the city of “Binghampton” — a serious misspelling to the locals. That may help explain why it’s so hard for local educators to teach their students and communities about the Bay.

“That’s how little people think about New York and the Chesapeake Bay,” said Liz Brown, OCCA’s clean energy community coordinator, who was co-leader of this summer’s teacher training. “Our portion up here is really critical to the Bay watershed, but it’s obvious why people don’t think of it, because it’s so small in proportion to all the other states.”

Grant, the other co-leader, who is a middle and high school teacher in the Morris Central School District, northwest of Oneonta, recalled fruitlessly exhorting a student to be more curious about the Chesapeake Bay.

“I don’t like oysters,” he replied.

‘We want this to be a place to not let that fleeting idea go to waste’

In Maryland, Bay education is a common and essential thing — and the state has broad benchmarks for environmental instruction that school districts are required to hit. In New York, educators were never expected to think about the Chesapeake Bay until the Empire State signed on to a multi-state agreement to reduce pollution in the Bay more than a decade ago. But there are still no standards or requirements for teaching about it.

For three days teachers participating in the Otsego County Conservation Association training program met in a historic schoolhouse at the Pine Lake Environmental Campus of Hartwick College. Hartwick, a small liberal arts school in Oneonta, just down a steep hill from the bigger campus of the State University of New York at Oneonta, offers housing in small cabins at the environmental campus for students who wish to avoid the hurly-burly of typical dorm living. During the summer, the  environmental campus is used for youth summer camps — and, for the past two years, for the teacher training on the Bay watershed (it was held virtually the first year, due to the pandemic).

The nine teachers participating in the training were at different career stages and came for a variety of reasons. All were clearly committed environmentalists. On the first day, Grant wore a T-shirt that said “Teach climate science” on the front, and on the back said, “Teach climate science for…human health, food security, ecosystems, water resources, wildlife, the economy, our future.”

One member of the group, Amy Favinger, a 4th grade teacher in the Gilbertsville-Mount Upton Central School District, grew up in Baltimore County, taught in county schools, and moved with her family to Central New York during the pandemic after teaching for several years in Northern Virginia. Favinger said the training appealed to her partially out of a kind of nostalgia — she still has family in Baltimore — and partially to network with other educators, because she’s still relatively new to the area.

“Having that connection, living and growing up and teaching in that area, I wanted to figure out how I could use my previous experience to make connections for my students,” she said.

Throughout the three days, Grant and Brown were energetic and enthusiastic guides, mixing wonky science with knowing sympathy about demands and limitations teachers face in their daily lives, coupled with political realities of preaching climate action to reluctant or indifferent communities.

“We’ve got a lot of resources for you guys,” Grant told the teachers, later urging them to think creatively. “We want this to be a place to not let that fleeting idea go to waste.”

One of many messages group leaders attempted to drive home was that any scientific or environmental lesson or conversation, no matter how local, could be tied to broader discussions about the health of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. At one point, Brown and Grant asked each of the teachers to think about environmental challenges near their schools that could warrant academic inquiry — and could impact Bay health.

One teacher mentioned a “sketchy” visible gas pipe on the school property, leaking effluent of unknown origin. Another talked about her school being close to an old dump notorious for its methane emissions. Another talked about wanting to study microplastics in local waterways. And another wondered about the ecological impacts of the highly popular vineyards in the nearby Finger Lakes region.

They also talked about opportunities for civic action, at the school level and in their communities — everything from Earth Day cleanups to planting pollinator gardens to pulling tires out of rivers to advocating for meatless Mondays in the school cafeteria. One teacher, Chad DeVoe, a career counselor from the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison counties BOCES (a vocational educational program), said that when a school field trip was canceled in the late spring due to unhealthy air caused by Canadian wildfires, he urged his students to call the local congressman, Rep. Marc Molinaro (R), to ask his office what he was doing to fight climate change. They never got a particularly satisfactory answer, DeVoe told his colleagues, but it was still a valuable exercise. 

“We do letter-writing [to political leaders on climate change] earlier in the year,” DeVoe he said. “But this is far more effective. The kids loved it.”

Over the three days, the group of teachers took several short field trips on the wooded grounds of the environmental center’s campus, and also received visits from a range of experts and advocates: a scholar on local leaves and an authority on archaeology, as well as the director of an agricultural extension office affiliated with Cornell University, the leader of a regional environmental group that specializes in tree planting, and the district manager of the Otsego County Soil and Water Conservation District.

The quick hike to Charlotte Creek, through a piney forest, was part of an exercise to gauge water quality and monitor macroinvertebrates living near the shore. The teachers and environmentalists examined small critters in the test tubes, petri dishes and ice trays they brought with them, and discussed what they collected: mayflies, stoneflies, and two types of crayfish, among others.

The very same experiments, Brown told the teachers, can be done with their students if there is a stream nearby. “Macros are a good way, especially if you do it year after year, to assess water quality,” she said.

‘We need the next generation to participate’

Any educational endeavor, almost by necessity in modern America, comes with its own jargon and series of acronyms. The three-day teacher training was no exception.

The grant from NOAA that the Otsego County Conservation Association received came from a program the federal agency has established called B-WET, which stands for Bay Watershed Education and Training. B-WET teacher trainings have been taking place throughout the Bay watershed for several years, but the OCCA offering is the first in New York state.

More broadly, the B-WETs borrow from a teaching concept known as MWEEs — Meaningful Watershed Education Experiences, pronounced mee-wees. MWEEs can be any number of things and have existed for decades — many teachers in Maryland know a thing or two about them. The four elements they require, educators say, are issue investigation, outdoor field experience, synthesis and conclusions, and stewardship and civic action. Every conversation during the OCCA session was geared to shedding light on those goals.

On the second day of the three-day training, Elise Trelegan, the B-WET program coordinator for NOAA’s Chesapeake Bay Office in Annapolis, joined the meeting on Zoom from her home on the Eastern Shore. Trelegan told the teachers that the work they are doing in New York is part of a bigger effort; there are 637 school districts in the Chesapeake Bay watershed over six states and the District of Columbia, she said, and the B-WET office has an annual budget of $2.7 million — a pittance in the federal budget — to try to reach them all.

“We recognize that if we’re going to do anything on conservation and stewardship, we need the next generation to participate,” Trelegan said. “We haven’t done a lot of work in New York, so we’re really excited to have you all here. This funding catalyzes this kind of environmental literacy, environmental education, in all these school districts.”

Trelegan also explained that NOAA, like other federal agencies, is increasingly trying to emphasize equity and environmental justice as it funds climate and education programs.

“We’re looking for a long-term commitment from school districts to change the culture on environmental education,” she said. “We see this grant as the beginning of more things happening in New York.”

One teacher asked Trelegan why it took New York so long to “jump on the bandwagon” of providing education about the Bay watershed.

“I think it’s a sort of perception,” Trelegan suggested. “If people don’t see there’s a connection to the Bay, they don’t see how the upstream decisions affect things downstream.”

A teacher told a story that illustrated that very phenomenon. “It’s interesting,” she said. “I ask my students, ‘where do you think our water winds up?’ And they may say, ‘Oh, the Susquehanna,’ or ‘Binghamton.’ They don’t really know it goes to the Chesapeake. They don’t know we’re in the headwaters of the Chesapeake.”

Trelegan signed off of the Zoom, from Maryland, and expressed gratitude to the assembled teachers. “Thanks for doing these jobs and being the role models that you are,” she said.

Throughout the three-day session, there were more reminders of Maryland. At one point, the group watched a half hour video about ongoing MWEEs in three Bay watershed school districts, organized through the B-WET program. One was a high school in Lancaster County, Pa., one was a middle school in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and the third was Lewisdale Elementary School, in Prince George’s County. The teachers in the room watched with great interest as a Lewisdale teacher led her students to Sligo Creek to take water samples and examine the macroinvertebrates they collected.

“Some of you are saying you have a lobster,” the teacher says in the video. “I don’t think that’s right.” Her students laugh.

Speaking to the camera, the teacher says her students’ families regularly use the park by the creek for picnics and other recreational activities and that the program makes them more attuned to their own responsibility for keeping the park and the water clean. And she praises the B-WET grant for helping to frame her lessons.

“The MWEE does not add on to all the standards that I have to teach,” she says. “To me, it frames [the lessons] in a much different way.”

When the video was over, the New York teachers remarked on the diversity of the student populations in the video they saw, especially the kids from Lewisdale, who were primarily Latino. The teachers, whose districts are small, rural and largely white, also wondered aloud about the resources which school districts in the video may have to enable them to run well-organized and successful MWEE programs.

When the three days had ended, several teachers said they learned a lot and planned to apply what they heard to their classroom instruction in the coming school year.

“It’s pretty great,” said Bryan Hill, a science teacher at Penn Yan Academy, a high school in Penn Yan, N.Y. “I think the coolest thing, apart from the litany of resources, is using hands-on activities that show kids environmental stewardship in real-world ways.”

Hill, who dropped out of medical school to teach at Penn Yan Academy, his alma mater, said he was “shocked, given that we have so many bodies of water around here,” that so little attention has been paid to the impact upriver activities have on the Chesapeake Bay. “It’s so easy to be complacent, to say, ‘I don’t know where the water goes.’”

Favinger, the 4th grade teacher who grew up in Baltimore County, was also impressed — and grateful.

“The resources are there,” she said. “You just have to know where to look and what you need to take in. It’s empowering when you get to make the decisions and set up the programs. There’s a way to do this and meet the standards of what you have to teach.”

Several teachers said the MWEEs appear to allow for a level of creativity and flexibility that many academic programs and mandates don’t have.

“This is not marked in stone,” Grant told the teachers. “We’re not going to show up in your schools in October and check back on these.”

All politics, all environmental action and all educational activities may, at a certain level, be local, but the leaders of the Otsego County Conservation Association were quick to remind the teachers about their small but vital place in a vast watershed.

“It’s important to stay focused on your waterway, but also taking a bigger look,” Brown advised. “Not just where you are, not just the Chesapeake Bay, but globally.”

By Josh Kurtz

The new leader of the Maryland Public Service Commission said Tuesday that he plans to convene meetings with interested parties over the next few months to discuss the increasingly controversial issue of where to place renewable energy installations in the state.

Testifying before a virtual hearing of the state Senate Committee on Education, Energy and the Environment, Fred Hoover, who took over as PSC chair in July, said he wanted to “get all the parties together to lower the temperature in some of these siting topics.”

The PSC is Maryland’s chief energy and utility regulatory agency, but it also has a historical role in approving proposals to build energy-generating facilities in the state. Where once that job meant considering and approving large power plants, as the industry evolves the commission now is tasked with becoming involved in decisions about where to place renewable energy installations. Those fights, especially over whether to allow solar projects on land zoned for agricultural uses or forests — and the PSC’s role in them — have become increasingly contentious.

Four years ago, the state’s highest court, then known as the Maryland Court of Appeals, ruled that the PSC can supersede local zoning laws when it came to applications to build large renewable energy installations.

Sen. Brian J. Feldman (D-Montgomery), chair of the Education, Energy and Environment panel, said in his view the court ruling suggested “the PSC is top dog” in these disputes. But he acknowledged that other entities, including the powerful Maryland Association of Counties, may have a different interpretation of the court decision.

“This issue has been very controversial over the interplay between the Public Service Commission and local governments,” Feldman said. “…This is still a muddied water kind of topic.”

Hoover pointed out that any entity applying to build a large renewable energy installation, such as a solar array on agricultural land, still must obtain relevant permits from local governments before they can proceed.

Earlier this month, Feldman, along with House Economic Matters Chair C.T. Wilson (D-Charles) and House Environment and Transportation Chair Marc Korman (D-Montgomery) wrote a letter to Gov. Wes Moore (D) seeking guidance on how the state should approach controversies over renewable energy installations given the necessity of increasing the state’s renewable energy generation to meet aggressive climate goals, among other things. Under legislation required last year, the state is required to hit a 50% renewable energy goal by 2030 and to use 100% clean energy by 2035.

“To achieve these targets, Maryland must dramatically and equitably increase its deployment of solar installations across the State and identify appropriate locations for energy storage,” the committee chairs wrote. They asked Moore to direct several state agencies to coordinate these efforts, “as well as identifying innovative policies being pursued in other states.”

Hoover told senators that his decision to convene meetings on siting was, in part, a response to the lawmakers’ query.

The Task Force to Study Solar Incentives, which was set up by state legislation this year, is also expected to examine this topic in months ahead.

So far, local governments have taken a piecemeal approach to renewable energy siting policies. In 2021 Montgomery County passed legislation effectively limiting the number of solar arrays that can be installed in the county’s vast Agricultural Reserve. Just last month, the Carroll County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to ban large solar projects from being built on land zoned for agricultural use. Next week, the Anne Arundel County Council is tentatively scheduled to vote on amended legislation that could limit the amount of solar arrays permissible on undeveloped land.

Several stakeholders — including leaders of renewable energy companies, environmental groups, agricultural concerns, business organizations and local governments — have begun wondering openly if the state needs uniform standards on where and how to build renewable energy installations. A bill passed in this year’s General Assembly session makes it easier to install solar arrays on industrial lands, public and private rooftops, parking lots and other public facilities. Baltimore County officials, including County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. (D), are participating in a ribbon-cutting Wednesday for a rooftop solar project in Rosedale that will eventually provide power to 6,000 area homes.

But it’s widely acknowledged that some agricultural land will have to be set aside for renewable energy installations if the state is to hit the clean energy goals laid out in the 2022 Climate Solutions Now Act.

Hoover acknowledged the possible need for statewide legislation to quell the siting controversy when he told the senators Wednesday that he may approach them for “a legislative fix.”

The discussion about renewable energy siting came at the end of a two-hour hearing by the Senate committee that enabled lawmakers to learn more about the Public Service Commission and its myriad responsibilities. The Senate panel was renamed and given a new portfolio at the beginning of the year, so many members of the panel are still learning about energy issues. Additionally, three of the five PSC commissioners have taken office in the past few months, as Moore attempts to make the agency an aggressive partner in the administration’s desire to combat climate change.

PSC officials led the Senate committee through discussions ranging from how the commission considers utilities’ requests to raise rates, to how to read an electric bill, to whether utilities are being given too much license to beef up natural gas infrastructure, to some of the particulars on electric supply competition.

“To me it seemed like the right level of high-level and basic,” said Sen. Cheryl C. Kagan (D-Montgomery), the committee vice chair.

By Josh Kurtz

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Hershey Co. on Tuesday pledged $2 million to support Pennsylvania dairy farmers in adopting environmentally friendly practices, part of a larger conservation effort to protect the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

They made the announcement at Central Manor Dairy in Manor Township, a 200-cow operation that has been a member of Land O’Lakes (and its predecessor) since 1943.

The Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, in collaboration with Land O’Lakes, Inc., will use the funding as part of the ongoing “Sustainable Dairy PA” initiative that the agency and the two companies first launched in 2021.

Sustainable Dairy PA participating farmers work with the Alliance to establish best practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve Chesapeake Bay watershed water quality. At launch, the initiative prioritized 119 Land O’Lakes member-owner farms in central Pennsylvania that ship 50% or more of their milk supply to Hershey. Land O’Lakes operates as a member-owned cooperative, representing more than 1,000 farms across the U.S.

Jenna Mitchell Beckett, Pennsylvania director and agriculture program director for the Alliance, told the Capital-Star that the Sustainable Dairy PA program is voluntary for farmers who want to participate.

“The $2M funding from Hershey and EPA will help Land O’Lakes member farms accelerate their sustainability efforts by investing with them in the implementation of manure storage facilities, soil health practices, riparian forest buffers and other efforts to enhance sustainability on farms supplying to Hershey,” Beckett said in an email, “which builds farm resilience, improves water quality, and reduces emissions.” The Sustainable Dairy PA model focuses on all parts of the supply chain working together, she added, rather than the farmers managing everything themselves.

The EPA is supplying $1 million of the new round of funding, with Hershey providing a matching $1 million. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation will administer the portion of the funds provided from EPA to the Alliance, the EPA said.

Since 2018, the Alliance has worked to develop agriculture supply chain programs, with an eye toward improving the member farms’ long-term sustainability, improving soil health, and overall efficiencies.

A report released earlier this year by the Chesapeake Bay Program found that pollution reduction efforts by states in the watershed were “more challenging than expected.”

Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia are responsible for around 90% of the Chesapeake Bay’s pollution, and according to a 2022 report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, while the states were on track to meet their 2025 commitments for reducing pollution from wastewater, agriculture or urban and suburban runoff pollution reduction efforts lagged behind.

“States are not on track to reduce pollution to the levels needed for a healthy Bay, or implement the practices necessary to achieve them by the 2025 deadline,” according to the 2022 State of the Blueprint Report.

Under the terms of the Chesapeake Bay Agreement, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, West Virginia, New York, and the District of Columbia have to reach specific milestones in pollution reduction.

The dairy industry is responsible for roughly 2% of the U.S.’ greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Wildlife Fund.

“EPA’s funding commitment to Hershey, Land O’Lakes, and the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay brings $2 million of much-needed support to Pennsylvania dairy farmers to scale up conservation practices that are good for our farms, climate, local streams, and the Bay,” EPA regional administrator Adam Ortiz said. “With this funding, we are not only investing in the current environment, but into the long-term viability of Pennsylvania farmers – our frontline environmentalists.”

By Kim Lyons