Wednesday October 15th, Gunpowder RIVERKEEPER® Theaux Le Gardeur and staffers met with third year law students Lauren Wieder, Kathryn Hastings, Nicholas Wolf, and Zachary Shank, at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law Environmental Clinic Law, under the supervision of Professor Jon Mueller, to visit one of the many sites to be affected by the proposed Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project (MPRP) power lines. Rolling Hills Conservation, owned by Brandon and Marie Hill, is a 60 acre plot formerly farmed for corn that Hill has begun transforming into a foraging food forest and homestead. However, his blight resistant chestnut trees were barely in the ground when Hill heard news that the PSEG power lines were planned to cut another 150-foot swath through his fields and forest. Since then, Hill has been featured in major news coverage of the project by NBC, CBS, and others.
Hill’s property is already bisected by the existing power lines that the MPRP would be built alongside. Though the footprint of the towers makes up a small percentage of the total land, the entire corridor is still sometimes spayed with herbicide by the power company to protect the lines from the plants hundreds of feet below them. Marie pointed out the desiccated vegetation as we made our way down the steep driveway to investigate the affected areas. Since this spraying occurred adjacent to the edible food forest, it certainly gave us pause.
Our first stop along the right-of-way was a large stand of trees: Hill’s “old growth” forest and favorite mushroom hunting grounds. As it is within 150 feet of the existing lines, this area would be razed under the current plan. At the bottom of the hill, we came to a set of seep springs, headwaters to the creek that runs through Hill’s property and eventually joins up with Ebaughs Creek. Wetlands like this could provide habitat for some of the area’s most sensitive species of reptiles and amphibians.
At the top of the adjacent ridge, we stood once again under the power lines, hearing and feeling the crackle in the air as Hill pointed out one of the unseen affects of the electric transmission: his honeybees would not fly under the lines. Although research on this topic is limited it’s believed that the current passing through creates an electromagnetic field so intense it disrupts the bees’ attunement to the earth’s natural fields.
The last stop on the tour took us to the deeper pools of the stream, where trout waited patiently for their next meal. While the stream itself is outside of the right-of-way, it still sits in harms way. Gunpowder RIVERKEEPER® is concerned about landscape changes that could potentially convert forested lands and wetlands to turf. Any sediment loosed by runoff from the construction project could eventually blanket the stream and smother the life within it or be washed downstream into the Chesapeake Bay.
All along this walk and on the way out, Hill and his wife told stories, pointed out edible plants, and asked and answered questions of the students and their professor, a former lawyer for the Chesapeake Bay Trust. As they prepared to research the laws and precedents that would govern the implementation of this project, they’d be armed with firsthand experience of the ecosystems which could be lost as a cost of these power lines, and the people like Brandon and Marie who would lose them.
