Articles by Sandra Olivetti Martin

Lightening the Load

The lifting’s easier when we love it

TDML is a leaden initialism, as the experts opined at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s confab last week on how we can help restore the Bay by reducing our Total Daily Maximum Load. The job is heavy lifting, too, as we’ve written in these pages more times than once, most recently in the September 29 story Sharing the Load (bayweekly.com/ articles/environment/article/sharing-load). Yet I’m uplifted day by day in the many ways I...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/20/11

Greening the U.S. Boat Shows

From 800 pounds of trash rise the prospect of ‘an entirely green event’

Beneath the marketplace of dreams that is the U.S. Boat Shows runs a stream of waste. That’s the conclusion of the first ever audit of the waste produced by one of the shows, this year’s Sail Boat Show. While you were slipping off your shoes, stepping aboard sleek sailboats and sipping Pusser’s Painkillers, a pair of sustainability managers from the environmental strategies firm WasteStrategies were sorting through 800...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/20/11

This Week’s Creature Feature ... A Happy Cow Is a...

Maryland Grazers hope to clean up the Bay getting cattle farmers to switch feed from corn to grass

Cows in the Bay watershed will live happier lives grazing at their whim in green pastures rather than confined in cells and fed a diet of corn. Their comfort is so good for the Bay and for farmers that it has earned the Chesapeake Bay Foundation a $200,000 grant to extend its three-year-old Maryland Grazers Network to more farmers in more places. The Grazers Network is one of 55 bright ideas on reducing pollution to local waterways and the Chesapeake Bay...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/20/11

Macintosh Made

Thanks to Steve Jobs, a big part of newspapering is easy

Steve Jobs was Bay Weekly’s silent partner. His Macintosh computers are the machines on which every one of our 933 issues have been made. Since 1993, when we went to work on Mac Classics, General Manager J. Alex Knoll has been thinking ahead to our next bite of the Apple. But death stops the clock. When the future ends, the past steps to the fore. Since Jobs’ death on October 5, I...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/13/11

Working with a View

Tim O’Neill talks with Bay Weekly about the restoration of Annapolis’ Capitol dome

Tim O’Neill of Severna Park is project manager for Power Component Systems out of Hanover. One of several subcontractors restoring the dome of Maryland’s State House — built between 1784 and 1787 as the second dome to top the 1772 Capitol — Power Component Systems has the job of stripping the top layers of paint from the Capitol’s dome. Bay Weekly What’s it like up there? Tim O’Neill I’ve been above the acorn...

Article - Bay Weekly Interviews; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/13/11

The U.S. Boat Shows Are in Town

And are we in trouble ...

Avoid the occasion of sin. That precept of my Catholic education should, over the years, have kept me away from the U.S. Boat Shows, which occupy Annapolis October 6 though 16. First the Sailboat Show, returning for its 42nd year, validates the city’s title as Sailing Capital of America. Yes, it’s a self-conferred title. But through October 10, it’s as hard to contest as Napoleon’s self-coronation as emperor of the French. As I write, hundreds of...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/6/11

This Week’s Creature Feature … Aquatic Invaders Alert

You can run, but you can’t hide

Invading aquatic species will have to speed up their evolutionary development of evasive strategies to outsmart the newest addition to the University of Maryland Environmental Science research fleet. The 155-foot barge, known as the Mobile Test Platform, has the job of testing the array of new ballast-water treatment technologies developed in hopes of keeping invaders out of Chesapeake Bay. “This new testing platform will serve to evaluate emerging treatment...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/6/11

Sharing the Load

We’ll all have to do our part in managing our Total Maximum Daily Load if we’re going to piece together a healthier Bay

It won’t happen without you. The actions of federal, state and local governments are just the beginning of revitalizing the Bay. We are also counting on the partnership of millions of people who live in this region to join in protecting the waters that support their health, their environment and their economy. So said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this summer, speaking in her new role as this year’s president of the Chesapeake Bay Executive...

Article - Green Living; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/29/11

Writing a Story Is Like Remodeling a Kitchen

They don’t call it craft because it’s fast

Astronomy tells us summer left us only last Friday, September 23. But the seasonal gears of creatures change sooner, following the light. Like farmers making hay under September’s Harvest Moon, we humans feel this is the month to get something done. So every September brings me a new crop of writers. Enthusiasm whisks them in, for you have to be under the power of some heavy confidence to call or write an editor. I love their bright ideas and...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/29/11

The Geography of Community

Farewell to one neighbor; bon voyage to another

For most of my earlier years, the neighborhoods where I lived were grids, and connections followed straight lines, side to side and front to back. Sometimes I was lucky and the next- or nearly next-door neighbors were people of shared interests beyond the chance of proximity. That’s how husband Bill and I developed dear friendships with the Kirkpatricks, next door but one, and the Ladleys, next door but two, in Holland Point, where we spent our first years in Chesapeake Country. ...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 9/22/11