Catoctin Group
The Maryland Chapter's Catoctin Group encompasses Carroll, Frederick and Washington counties in Maryland. The geography of the region and the area these counties cover offers a plethora of opportunities to explore nature. But it presents a challenge to organizing our over 1,000 members, as it can take up to an hour to travel from Carroll and Washington counties to Frederick city, our historically central meeting place.
Carroll County
Carroll County lies in the Piedmont region of north-central Maryland between Baltimore and Frederick counties. Just under 456 square miles, it is about 27 miles in length and width at its greatest dimensions. Its elevations range from 300 feet above sea level in the southeast to 1,080 feet in the northeast. Home to forests, farms and wetlands, Carroll County sits in two major drainage basins: The Monocacy River to the west, which flows into the Potomac River, and the Patapsco or Gunpowder rivers to the east and south, all of which lead to the Cheasapeake Bay. Bear Branch and Piney Run nature centers and Morgan Run, a designated wild lands area, offer many recreational opportunities to the counties 168,541 of residents.
Frederick County
Bordered by the Potomac River and Pennsylvania, Frederick County is a transition county from the Piedmont in the east to the first ridges of the Appalachians and continuing west. Rolling hills of mostly farmland and small communities dominate the east. The county boasts a population of 220,000 residents. At the center is Frederick city, Maryland’s second largest city with about 59,000 inhabitants. To the west and north are the Catoctin Mountains, which are protected by Gambrill State Park, the Frederick Watershed, Cunningham Falls State Park and Catoctin Mountain National park. These parks offer numerous hiking trails, including the 28-mile Catoctin Trail, the longest in the region. Fifty-eight miles of the Monocacy River, nearly its entire length, is in Frederick County and is navigable when water levels are sufficient. The C&O Canal National Park parallels the Potomac River through the county, and the old C&O towpath has been preserved as a hiking and biking trail.
Washington County
The South Mountain ridgeline forms the border between Frederick and Washington counties. The Appalachian Trail winds its 40 miles through Maryland along this ridgeline.
Environmental Challenges
The greatest environmental challenges these counties face are population growth and suburban sprawl due to the spread east and north of the greater Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas. As predominately agricultural counties, none have been designed for commuting: there is very little mass transit and planning processes have lacked vision. While there are many excellent recreational walking and biking trails, none were designed to be practical alternatives to driving. The water supply is also strained, and in some areas polluted, and the air pollution across the counties has been getting worse.
Catoctin Group Action and Activity
The Catoctin Group has been very active in working with and supporting other grass roots groups to help address these issues in an intelligent and environmentally sound way.
We organize a variety of informational gatherings throughout the year and recently launched Cool Cities campaigns in Carroll and Frederick counties. We are currently working to do more programs in Washington County..
Turn your interest into action
Currently, we are a five-member executive committee (excom) elected to two-year terms. However, we have lots of room to grow and would welcome more help. If you live in Carroll, Frederick or Washington counties, please consider volunteering for a seat on the excom. We especially need people interested in chairing our conservation and political committees and putting out a newsletter. If this level of engagement is out of the question, but you’d like to get more involved, consider helping us organize a program, join the Cool Cities initiatives, lead a a hike or just join a hike or attend a film or social and get to know us.
For more information or to get involved, contact us!
We hope to hear from you soon.
Carroll County
Dan Andrews
Cool Cities Westminster
Energy issues/Chairman of Catoctin group
dooze@qis.net
410-857-4129
Gregor Becker
Assistant Conservation chair/Political chair
lorax4@carr.org
410-346-6336
Frederick County
Ken Eidel
Treasurer
Cool Cities Frederick
kceidel@verizon.net
301-696-5933
Lew Sherman--Conservation Chair
Matthew Lindberg-Work--Database Coordinator
matthew@solomonsgap.com
Washington County
Marcia Watters
Water monitoring
mdwatters@juno.com
301-790-3808
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Sierra Catoctin Group Calendar
MARYLAND SIERRA CLUB CATOCTIN CHAPTER EVENTS: Summer 2009 -
Be sure to mark the date!!! All are welcome to participate....
Future Executive Committee Meeting Dates:
What time?: Saturday, August 1st 2009
9:00 AM-12:00 PM
Where: The Common Market(Community Meeting Room)
LOCATION: Evergreen Square, Frederick, MD
5728 Buckeystown Pike Unit 1-B
Frederick, MD 21704
Please Click Here for Directions:
http://www.commonmarket.com/
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BE SURE TO MARK YOUR CALENDARS!
Please come to:
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Brunswick proposes plans to go green
Originally published January 13, 2009
By Karen Gardner |
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CURRENT INITIATIVES IN SUSTAINABLE BRUNSWICK
· Increased recycling
· Bike and footpaths
· Wind power text amendment
· Planning and Zoning landscaping
· Implementing energy audit
· Forest Resource Ordinance Funds
· Local stream identification
· Transit-oriented designs
· Staff education
· Staff energy reductions
· Electric use spreadsheet
Source: James Castle, Development Review Coordinator
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BRUNSWICK — Brunswick hopes to have more trees, more walkways and cleaner streams, even as a 1,500-home development is being built on the edge of the community.
Brunswick received an $8,050 grant from the Chesapeake Bay Trust to map out its tree cover and pinpoint areas where trees are needed.
The city's development review coordinator is also working on ways to make Brunswick a more "green" city, figuratively and literally. James Castle presented a Power Point presentation to the council last month called "Sustainable Brunswick."
Tonight, the council is expected to vote on the Sierra Club's Cool Cities Initiative, a plan that encourages conservation measures in urban areas. Brunswick's geographical location along the Potomac River and adjacent to the C&O Canal Towpath National Historical Park makes it a popular destination for outdoor enthusiasts.
From turning off lights and replacing light fixtures to a full-scale energy audit, city employees will be encouraged to conserve energy at every turn, Castle said.
Footpaths are planned for Brunswick Crossing, the 1,500-home development that is under construction, and will connect the development to the rest of Brunswick.
Brunswick Crossing will also have a bus to Brunswick's Maryland Area Rail Commuter parking lot. Frederick County's Transit bus system also increased its presence in Brunswick, Castle said.
Castle is working with Planning and Zoning Administrator Bruce Dell to implement the green measures. Dell is aiming to recapture Brunswick fees collected through Frederick County's Forest Resource Ordinance.
Brunswick's proximity to several streams that flow into the Potomac River are the focus of Castle's Stream Strategy. He is working with a local volunteer to monitor local streams for erosion and trash. They will check the water quality at various times throughout this year to measure the streams' health.
According to the ordinance, developers must pay a fee when developing land near a stream or creek, and Dell wants to bring those fees back to Brunswick to help pay for conservation measures.
"Because we are predominantly part of a watershed, we're hoping money collected from this watershed stays in this watershed," he said.
The city is also looking at using permeable asphalt for parking lots to reduce the amount of rainwater run off into local streams, Dell said. That rainwater often carries oil and chemicals, he added.
A tree canopy study will be completed in March, Castle said. The University of Vermont is conducting the study using satellite photos the Maryland Department of Natural Resources took in the summer of 2007, said Becky Wilson, urban and community forestry coordinator for the western region of the Maryland DNR Forest Service.
Any community in Maryland that wants a tree canopy study done can use the satellite imagery, she said. The City of Frederick and Frederick County Public Schools are the other jurisdictions in Frederick where the tree canopy study has been conducted. So far, more than 40 Maryland communities are participating, Wilson said.
Tree cover keeps buildings cooler in the summer, increases the amount of oxygen in streams and even extends the life of asphalt and paved areas, Wilson said. American Forests studied the loss of tree cover in the United States in the past 30 years. Development and the death of old trees has felled billions of trees in that time, and the goal is to plant billions of new trees, Wilson said.
Technology has made it much easier to plant trees in urban areas, Wilson said. "We've learned so much about urban forestry in the last 20 years," she said. "We expect this program to be even more sustainable down the road." |
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3642/
The Crying Indian
How an environmental icon helped sell cans -- and sell out environmentalism
Orion magazine
November/December 2008
BY GINGER STRAND
... Over two million Americans acted on that belief in 2006, volunteering for Keep America Beautiful activities: picking up litter, removing graffiti, painting buildings, and planting greenery. Many may not have realized they were handing their free time to a front group for the beer bottlers, can companies, and soda makers who crank out the containers that constitute half of America's litter. Or that this front group opposes the reuse and recycling legislation that might better address the problem. The information is not hard to find. Ted Williams wrote about it in 1990 for Audubon. Online, you can find many more narratives of KAB's real motives, including a summary by the Container Recycling Institute.
.... In 1953, Vermont's state legislature had a brain wave: beer companies start pollution, legislation can stop it. They passed a statute banning the sale of beer and ale in one-way bottles. It wasn't a deposit law—it declared that beer could only be sold in returnable, reusable bottles. Anchor-Hocking, a glass manufacturer, immediately filed suit, calling the law unconstitutional. The Vermont Supreme Court disagreed in May 1954, and the law took effect. That October, Keep America Beautiful was born, declaring its intention to "break Americans of the habit of tossing litter into streets and out of car windows." The New York Times noted that the group's leaders included "executives of concerns manufacturing beer, beer cans, bottles, soft drinks, chewing gum, candy, cigarettes and other products." These disciples of disposability, led by William C. Stolk, president of the American Can Company, set about changing the terms in the conversation about litter.
The packaging industry justifies disposables as a response to consumer demand: buyers wanted convenience; packagers simply provided it. But that's not exactly true. Consumers had to be trained to be wasteful. Part of this re-education involved forestalling any debate over the wisdom of creating disposables in the first place, replacing it with an emphasis on "proper" disposal. Keep America Beautiful led this refocusing on the symptoms rather than the system. The trouble was not their industry's promulgation of throwaway stuff; the trouble was those oafs who threw it away.
At the same time, the container industry lobbied hard behind the scenes. In 1957, with little fanfare, Vermont's senate caved to the pressure and declined to renew its reusable bottle law.
...In 1962, Michigan considered a ban on no-return bottles. Keep America Beautiful openly opposed it. Throughout the sixties, Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council battled a growing demand for legislation with an increasing vilification of the individual. They spawned the slogan "Every litter bit hurts" and popularized the term "litterbug." In 1967, meeting at the Yale Club, they decided to go negative. "There seemed to be mutual agreement," wrote campaign coordinator David Hart, "that our 'soft sell' used in previous years could now be replaced by a more emphatic approach to the problem by saying that those who litter are 'slobs.'" The next year, planners upped the ante, calling litterers "pigs." The South Texas Pork Producers Council wrote in to complain.
...It was an elegantly closed circle. The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it.
...Symbolic protest rarely is. In 1976, after KAB testified against a proposed California bottle deposit law, the EPA and seven environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, resigned from its advisory board. Activists declared KAB a "front group." But by then, being outed didn't matter. The group's work was largely done. In 1976, two-thirds of America's soft drinks and nearly four-fifths of its beer came in disposables. Today, every American throws away about three hundred pounds of solid waste a year, about one-third of it packaging. Sixty percent of that comes from food and beverages.
Eleven states have succeeded in passing bottle bills. Beverage container recycling rates in those states are roughly double rates in nondeposit states. But in shifting the debate to bottle deposit legislation—which it opposed—KAB still won, because it shut down debate over whether disposable beverage containers were a good idea in the first place. Vermont's original 1953 law would have required manufacturers to accept and refill their empties. No one's talking about that now.
.....In 1960, the year Keep America Beautiful and the Ad Council joined forces, containers and packaging composed just over 7 percent of the U.S. aluminum market. But Harper's gamble paid off. Within twenty years, aluminum containers would produce more revenue for Alcoa than its second-, third-, and fourth-largest markets combined. John D. Harper spent much of that time as a member of the Ad Council's Industry Advisory Committee.
...Ironically, perhaps unwittingly, the Ad Council and Keep America Beautiful got it right. The crying Indian hints at the root cause of the problem he mourns: it's not just roadside trash. It's the culture of consumption that created that trash—with government subsidized power—and sold it to the public as the American Dream, when in fact it was that very dream's death. Iron Eyes Cody may have wept on cue, but George Gillette wept for the land.
IS THE CRYING INDIAN the root of environmentalism, as Wikipedia would have it? Or is he its sole mourner, weeping its silent dirge? In the thirty years following his debut, Americans landfilled or incinerated more than a trillion aluminum cans—enough to encircle the Earth 3,048 times.
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SIERRA CLUB
EXPLORE, ENJOY AND PROTECT THE PLANET |
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Please read this article sent by Ken Eidel:
http://www.naturalpath.com/sustainability/eric-lombardis-zero-waste-park
Here is the link to the "Story of Stuff" http://www.storyofstuff.com/
Check it out!
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