Chesapeake Bay

 
I love this cartoon by cartoonist extraordinaire Tom Chalkley, courtesy of a neat new web site, marylandcommons.com.  Doesn't this perfectly capture how everyone thinks the Bay's pollution is someone else's fault?  What is it going to take to change this?
 
 
 

Every summer, our crabs, fish and oysters face a terrible menace to their survival – as much as 40+ percent of the Chesapeake Bay becomes a dead zone with insufficient oxygen for them to breathe. Not surprisingly, the Bay’s marine life is dying off. In the last seventeen years, the population of blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has plummeted 67%. Oysters, which used to be the Bay’s most profitable commercial fishery, have declined to 1% of the levels seen in the 1950s and 1960s. Fish kills of 100,000 or more fish at a time regularly occur each summer.

Governor O’Malley just announced a new program called Marylanders Plant Trees. As part of the state’s goal of planting 1 million new trees by 2011, the government will give you a coupon worth $25 off each purchase of a native tree costing $50 or more. Print out the coupon at Marylanders Plant Trees website, where you are also asked to register the trees you plant. What could be cooler?