Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Tales...Story 1: The Chesapeake Bay:

Narration: At Greenbury Point, in Annapolis, Maryland, a group of midshipman, middle schoolers and cub scouts are volunteering their time and energy to clean up one of the nation’s largest waterways.

Boy: It’s the Chesapeake Bay.

Boy: It’s a great place to be and it’s a great place to live.

Katie: What about seafood?

Boy: Lobster and crabs are my favorite.

Narration: Crabs are just one of the species suffering though, thanks to the Chesapeake Bay’s high levels of pollution. And it’s the pollution that got the US Forest Service involved. Sally Claggett and Al Todd are program managers.

Al Todd: Certainly crabs and fish and most things living in the Bay suffer from the pollution of the waters the over enrichment with nutrients.

Sally Claggett: Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous and even sediment they occur naturally in the Bay but right now they are in amounts that are toxic to a diversity of life.

Al Todd: Parts of the ecosystem that provide habitat for fish and crabs, is one of the things that’s missing from the Bay and the reason for this is the nitrogen pollution and changes in water quality.

Narration: The health of the Bay has gotten so bad, that various laws have been put into place to cut down on the pollution in the Bay, from restrictions on development, to programs designed to control runoff from farms. The US Forest Service, and today’s volunteers, are focusing on helping the waters of the Bay by planting trees along a peninsula.

Boy: It’s surrounded by water, with the pollution in the Bay it’s an effort to create a buffer to keep less pollution and sediment from flowing into the Bay.

Narration: They’re planting what’s called a riparian buffer, a line of trees or vegetation beside a waterway.

Al Todd: Forests were the natural ecosystem that occurred along most of our shorelines in the Chesapeake Bay watershed historically. Riparian forests are like a last line of defense for a stream, they serve as a living filter, as pollutants are moving toward a stream, whether they are coming from runoff, or the air, or from ground water, riparian forests work as a filter to help remove them.

Narration: Over time, the natural forests disappeared to development. So the US Forest Service and the state of Maryland are now trying to replace those forests.

Boy: We’re planting that tree over there

Boy: It’s a tulip tree.

Boy: It’s going to look beautiful when it’s done.

Katie: What’s that?

Boy: An earth worm. Put it in here. It will help the soil.

Boy: It looks like an earth worm.

Narration: It’s hard to believe, standing here on Greenbury Point that within a mile is one of the biggest urban areas in the Midatlantic region. The sprawl extends from Delaware to Maryland, to Washington, DC, to Norfolk, Virginia. And it’s the effect of this sprawl that the US Forest Service is trying to address.

Al Todd: In an urban setting we really try to look hard at the entire tree canopy, it’s not just the buffer, but the whole tree canopy on the city, the green infrastructure, cities are composed of a lot of diff infrastructures, and the attention is on the gray infrastuctures, the streets and the sewers and the water supplies, but it’s really that green in an urban setting that mitigates the problems of the gray infrastructure.

Narration: So, in addition to planting riparian buffers, trees have now become part of urban and suburban development policy. For Soundprint, I’m Katie Gott.

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