O’Malley Piles On

By Tom Horton | November 22, 2011 |

(Posted by Tom Horton.)

Governor Martin O’Malley presumably thinks he’s helping Maryland poultry growers and processors by pressuring the University of Maryland’s environmental law clinic to drop out of a lawsuit aimed at stopping chicken farms from polluting.

But the pollution is real, it’s substantial and it’s not going to get better until the governor and agricultural interests acknowledge we have a problem with too much poultry manure.

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The Bay Is Not Improving

By Tom Horton | April 4, 2011 |

(Posted by Tom Horton.)

In recent weeks there’s been a two-pronged push by agricultural interests to credit farmers with already doing most of what’s needed to reduce pollution; also to discredit federal computer modeling that says farmers need to do a lot more to meet the Chesapeake Bay restoration goals.

The extra credit comes courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service; the challenge to EPA’s modeling effort comes in a lawsuit filed by the American Farm Bureau.

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Is Immigration Killing the Chesapeake Bay?

By Tom Horton | February 3, 2011 |

Posted by Tom Horton.

Stand back so you don’t get splattered. I’m going to talk about immigration, and I’m going to get right down in the sewer.

Are immigrants really responsible for degrading the Chesapeake Bay? It’s easier and safer, by far, of course, to say it is too much nitrogen, too much phosphorus, too much sediment, too much clearing and paving and filling—all the usual suspects.

All this, of course, is caused by people, and during the last decade, most of those people were immigrants, both legal and illegal, and their children.

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