Dock of the Bay: November 1-7, 2018
Anne Arundel Conservationist of 2018
En-Tice-Ment’s Deana Tice earns that honor
Community involvement, environmental preservation and family: These are the qualities that make a conservationist.
En-Tice-Ment’s Deana Tice earns recognition as the 2018 Conservationist of the Year, chosen by the Anne Arundel Soil Conservation District because of her commitment to community growth.
“We look at all the candidates and the conservation practices they’ve installed,” said John Czajkowski, Soil Conservation District manager. “We want to know their status in the community. It’s not just about farming, it’s about the conservation practices they install and keep.”
Both of Tice’s farms, En-Tice-Ment Stables and Obligation Farm, feature nutrient management programs. Nutrient management reduces contamination — mainly nitrogen and phosphorus — to our waterways. Without good nutrient management, well and drinking water can be contaminated and life in our waterways become unbalanced.
Tice’s involvement at her farms is “impressive,” Czajkowski said, but her activity in the county sets her apart. The Tice family uses many best management practices, including roof runoff, rotational grazing, automatic waterers for horses and manure storage structures.
A fourth-generation farmer, Tice has a degree in agriculture and farming resources from the University of Maryland.
“Preserving the land and using it so that it’s there for future generations to come. Protecting our Bay and all of our natural resources in the area.” That, Tice says, is why conservation is so important to her.
The Soil Conservation District award dates back to 1956.
BIG Is Back
Books for International Goodwill reopens
Chesapeake Country readers again have a convenient spot to donate gently used books. Books for International Goodwill — BIG — reopened on October 16, 18 months after Parole Rotary’s signature project closed its doors and looked for a new home.
Run almost entirely by volunteers, the project supplies underserved communities both at home and abroad with used books. Among 30 populations around the world, Afghanistanis and Africans, Native Americans on reservations and service men and women overseas have shared more than 8.5 million BIG books over 20 years.
Finding the new location was “much slower than we thought,” said Buzz Stillinger, director of marketing for BIG. After learning in 2016 that BIG’s lease on the old Capital Gazette building in Annapolis would end, volunteers asked “everbody we knew” for a space.
The new site on Defense Highway in Annapolis is, Stillinger says, “the best warehouse we have ever been in.” The new lease is for five years.
BIG’s warehouse stock runs between 60,000 and 80,000 books. The usual flow of donations, about 1,000 books a day, fills a 40-foot shipping trailer each week. Volunteers keep order, sorting the books for shipment and sale.
Now you can help fill up the new warehouse, where book donations are accepted 24/7.
“Textbooks, children’s books and nonfiction are what the underserved communities are looking for,” Stillinger says.
Public book sales every six weeks — with books going for $10 a bag — help fund shipping.
Mark your calendars for the grand opening November 10 and the first book sale in the new warehouse on December 8 (8am-2pm).
Books for International Goodwill, 451 Defense Highway, Annapolis: www.Big-Books.org.
Young Writers Wanted
To break barriers, build communities
To build stronger, more compassionate communities, we need to start young.
Seven or eight isn’t too young, and 17 or 18 is not too old. Thus the nine-year-old World Artists Experience Writing Project sets its challenge for third- through 12th-graders.
The challenge: Write a poem or first-person narrative on how you’ve crossed cultural differences to find similarities.
Here’s how the kids answered last year’s challenge:
The poem, A Delicate Thread, is a composite of lines from many of the 2018 winners.
This year’s topic is Breaking Barriers, Building Communities: Connecting, Cooperating, Caring.
Students may enter this project through their schools or on their own. All writing is reviewed and winners are selected by a distinguished group of poets and teachers based on the writings’ diversity of experiences, points of view, voices, grade levels and quality of writing.
Students selected for publication, as well as those awarded honorable mention, are invited with their parents, teachers and principals to a publication celebration, usually at an Embassy in Washington, D.C., or some other exciting venue.
The ceremony not only recognizes the students; it also introduces them to art and artists from other cultures.
World Artist Experience, based in Arnold, is a non-profit promoting increased understanding and respect between all peoples of the world.
“The writing project seeks to help all of us better understand the consequences of our choices and actions as well as the power of stepping out of our comfort zones to connect with those whose experiences, beliefs and backgrounds are different from ours,” says Rachel Smith, project co-director.
Enter by November 16: www.tinyurl.com/world-artists-writing.
Way Downstream …
Another wonky journal dug deep to produce findings on creatures popular in Chesapeake Country, Labrador retrievers.
A study published last week in Canine Genetics and Epidemiology found that for reasons that aren’t entirely understood, chocolate Labs have shorter lives and more health problems than Labs with black or yellow coats.
Researchers in England and Australia studied health records of 33,000 Labs and determined that the median longevity for chocolates was 10.7 years, compared to 12 years for others of the breed.
Labs with the brown coats suffer ear and skin diseases more frequently. These problems, like longevity, appear to have something to do with breeding. Things get dense here, but health issues and the shorter lifespan may be related to a narrowed gene pool that results when breeders seek the chocolate color, a recessive trait expressed only when both parents have the gene that yields the rich brown color.