Working Vacations

      When the U.S. Congress goes on summer vacation, senators and representatives head home. With Congress in long summer recess — all of August and the first week of September — our two senators are visiting communities in Maryland from the ocean to the mountains.

     On a steamy late August Tuesday, both Sen. Ben Cardin and Sen. Chris Van Hollen were out and about in Chesapeake Country. Cardin’s three stops in Charles and Calvert counties included Mallows Bay, the newest national marine sanctuary and home of a ghost fleet of decaying vessels, many from World War I.

     Van Hollen spent his day in Southern Anne Arundel County. At Camp Letts in Edgewater, he congratulated a graduating Chesapeake Conservation Corps class and welcomed a new class. At Herrington Harbour North Marina, he got an upclose look at a thriving center of Maryland’s tourism and boating industries. At Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, he got on-site lessons in how the leading environmental research institute of the world’s largest museum complex is studying the forces of climate change. 

     These were not classroom lessons. Anson ‘Tuck’ Hines, the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s director, toured Maryland’s junior senator through long-term experiments in forest, field and wetland. One of those experiments, BiodiversiTree, is a 100-year study on effects of tree-species diversity on forest ecosystems.

     “We’re studying how to mitigate and respond to climate change in three climate zones,” Hines told Van Hollen. Mangroves in Florida, forests in the Chesapeake, and salt marshes in the Chesapeake, plus all three globally are the center’s laboratories.

     Here in Chesapeake Country, environmental engineer Gary Peresta watches over the salt marsh experiment, underway since 1990 to study how effectively native grasses and invasive phragmites sequester nitrogen and carbon and hold the land against the ravages of climate.

      Phragmites do the job well, Anson said. “You’d be glad to have them between you and Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans. But in the bigger dynamic, they’re destroying native plants.” 

      What will Van Hollen do with these lessons he learned?

     “There’s a debate going on in Congress on climate change and preventing greater tolls,” he said. “These experiments are critical to the science and what pieces are being added.”

    He also promised to protect Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s funding so the good work can be kept up.