The latest report card on the health of the Chesapeake Bay shows mixed results, including good news for oysters, and bad news for blue crabs.

Photo by jim_darling We can’t trip over a Facebook status message without being reminded that today is Earth Day. Local food blogs The Arugula Files and FoodieTots are using the occasion to promote Blog for the Bay day, an effort to get local bloggers to link to a Chesapeake Bay Foundation petition urging the EPA to take action to meet a goal of cleaning up the bay by 2010. They also suggest posting a…

The Anacostia River is known as the capital’s forgotten river. To many residents, they may have never seen it as it is way over younder in Southeast. But it is there, people live and work on its banks and the city, with its full attention on transforming the Anacostia waterfront, must deal with one sobering fact: the Anacostia is really, really polluted. WTOP reminds us how dirty, toxic and nasty the river is. That runoff…

WTOP reports that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has awarded $200,000 in grants to three local development corporations for the construction of environmentally sensitive landscaped roofs (“green roofs”) on office buildings to reduce runoff into the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, and ultimately into the Chesapeake Bay. Among the projects on tap is a 68,000-square-foot vegetated roof for the new headquarters of the U.S. Department of Transportation (shown here in a rendering from the building’s developer, the…

Good morning, Washington. As you can see from this photo of the National Cathedral from the Newark Street gardens taken this morning, it should be a nice day, though according to Capital Weather, rain may be moving in this evening and into the overnight hours. A New Reason for Cracked Red Line Rails?: WMATA thinks that one reason why rails are cracking on the Red Line is because of increased frequency of service along…

D.C. Council Rejects Hazmat Shipment Measure: After there was a lot of support for legislation that would bar hazardous shipments from being transported through the District via rail, the D.C. Council rejected the emergency measure. The Post reports that the mayor’s office believed that because of the way the legislation was written, it wouldn’t have been able to survive a court challenge. The bill’s opponents note that the most hazardous materials already bypass the city…