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Why the Chesapeake Bay’s beloved blue crabs are at an all-time low

Photography by Kristen Zeis | Reported by Aman Azhar/Inside Climate News

MATHEWS, VA—For a third straight year, the number of crabs in the Chesapeake Bay has dropped, this time to an all-time low. And even the scientists who worked on the most recent winter dredge survey, which measures the population, grow wistful when they consider the colorful crustacean so central to Baltimore and Maryland culture.

“It’s something you do in summer. You pick crabs and spend an extended meal with wooden mallets and cold beer and tell jokes and reminisce,” said Thomas Miller, professor of fisheries science at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, who has been part of the survey team since its inception 33 years ago. “All of the things that we appreciate with family and friends, it happens around a crab feast.”

Court Decision in Martis Valley West Case

Photography by Zac Visco | Reported by Claire Carlson

MARTIS VALLEY, CALIF—A long-awaited victory for conservation groups came in mid-February when California’s 3rd District Court of Appeals found that the 2016 approval of development in Martis Valley overlooked the project’s impact on Lake Tahoe. Conservationists are hopeful that this decision sets a new precedent for development projects in the Tahoe region.

“We want to create legal precedent that you can’t have these outside basin projects create all of their impacts on the Lake Tahoe Basin and do nothing to mitigate it,” said Alexis Ollar, executive director of Mountain Area Preservation, one of three groups involved in the litigation process.

Who came before? The impact of humans on East Texas ecology

Deep Indigo Collective provided The Tyler Loop with photo research and coaching, and editing support | Reported by David Harrison

EAST TEXAS—East Texas is a land of immense diversity. Much of the area is dominated by what is simply known as the Piney Woods ecoregion, a 54,000 square mile area shared with Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

In addition to pine forests is a menagerie of wetlands, oak savannas, bottomland hardwood forests and vestigial prairies.

But like ecosystems across the southeastern United States, The Piney Woods are critically endangered through a combination of fire suppression, industrial practices and development.

How can East Texans live in a healthy relationship with their natural environment, and what’s at stake when we don’t?

Restoring the flow: East Texans ‘spring’ into action

Photography by Ben Torres | Reported by Govinda Dass

TYLER, TEXAS—When it comes to the health of our watersheds, state, local and federal officials on both sides of the aisle agree: Habitat restoration and water preservation are integral parts of protecting our water supply.

Where are East Texas’ water sources? The creek beds you might see around the countryside or near your property are remnants of the much larger flood plains and tributaries of East Texas. Most of our cities are located near these water sources, such as Saline Creek near Noonday, where recent rains set record water levels.

Alluvium plains shaped by our waterways collect surface water and are often dammed to form bodies of water, such as Lake Palestine.

How will Tyler solve its water woes?

Photography and reporting by Sarah A. Miller

TYLER, TEXAS—As temperatures plummeted far below freezing in parts of Texas during February’s Winter Storm Uri, thousands of East Texans experienced a loss of access to their tap water due to broken or frozen water pipes in their homes, broken city water mains or because of boil water advisories.

But Winter Storm Uri was far from the beginning of Tyler water woes, straining an aging water infrastructure. LouAnn Campbell, City of Tyler Public Works and Utilities Public Information Officer, said Tyler Water Utilities go back over 100 years. The oldest areas of the city have the oldest water lines.

Low-income Texans already face frigid temperatures at home. Then the winter storm hit.

Photography by Andy Jacobsohn | Reported by Amal Ahmed/Texas Observer

DALLAS—When the temperature dropped into the single digits last Monday night, Edilisa wrapped herself and her 9-month-old baby in blankets and huddled in the closet of her studio apartment in Austin. It was the only way she could think to separate the two of them from the large windows that usually bring in lots of natural light — but with an arctic cold front sweeping over Texas, leaked a steady stream of frigid air.

“I’ve never experienced this before,” said Edilisa, a 28-year-old single mother, who asked to use her first name only due to immigration concerns. With her power shut off intermittently from early Monday to Wednesday, “It felt like it was 20 degrees inside.” But as much as she wanted the heat to turn back on, there was another worry looming over her: With the extreme cold temperatures, her heater was running in overdrive before the outages started.

Marsha Jackson is trying to move shingle mountain

Photography by Andy Jacobsohn | Reported by Amal Ahmed

DALLAS—On hot, humid days, when the wind blows over Shingle Mountain, Marsha Jackson can’t breathe. For three years, a company called Blue Star Recycling dumped hundreds of tons of roof shingles in the lot next to her home and ground them up into dust. Eventually, the company created a pile so large it resembled a mountain shooting up out of the flat expanse of southern Dallas. Blue Star claimed it was saving the material from heading to a nearby landfill, but in truth, the company created a new, illegal dump, 50 feet away from Jackson’s bedroom window.

For the entirety of its three-year existence, the 100-foot-tall pile of ground-up shingles, which is now so much a part of the landscape that it’s been named, has sat uncovered. Shingle Mountain’s dust, which contains carcinogens like asphalt fumes, swirls into the air, settling on top of the homes on Jackson’s street, and into the lungs of the people who live there.