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Way Downstream

In Eastport, Jeff Lape, the new director of the government’s Chesapeake Bay Program, will commute from Chevy Chase and most recently has worked in the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center in the EPA’s lawyer shop. Doesn’t sound like he knows a blue crab from a dungeoness. But Lape, who has years of the Bay Program’s halting progress to overcome, reminds skeptics that he grew up around water (on a lake in the Adirondack Mountains). “I can’t wait to get started,” he said. Given the arguments over Bay restoration, maybe that conflict resolution background will prove valuable …

In Annapolis, new data show that Marylanders want to eat local. A survey by the University of Baltimore Schaefer Center for Public Policy distributed by the state Agriculture Department found that 76 percent are more likely to buy produce identified as having been grown in Maryland, up from 57 percent in 2006. Nearly half said they would pay extra to support Maryland growers…

Also in Annapolis, engineers from the Army Corps, Coast Guardsmen and Maryland public works planners are putting their heads together to keep boaters off the rocks and shoals of the new and longer twin jetties protecting Rockhold Creek, Anne Arundel County’s most densely boated waterway. The plan is to seek funding — about $18,000 — from the Coast Guard for three new lighted aids to navigation, plus a few hundred thousand dollars from Congress for dredging out silt left behind by Hurricane Isabel and by jetty construction…

On the Eastern Shore, locals know it simply as Chestertown. But to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it’s “an 18th century, drop-dead gorgeous Chesapeake jewel of a town.” Considering that description, it’s no wonder that the Trust put Chestertown — noted for “Cornish rock houses, Craftsman bungalows, simple log cabins and neoclassical confections” — on its 2007 Dozen Distinctive Destinations, along with the likes of Charlottesville, Va.; Durango, Colo.; and Mineral Point, Wis. …

In Washington, D.C., Sen. Barbara Mikulski describes herself as anti-war, but that isn’t mollifying the demonstrators who continue to sit in outside her offices to protest her support of appropriations legislation to fund the war in Iraq. Mikulski has found herself in the same bind as many Democrats who want the troops out but refuse to cut off money to support them. Four protesters were arrested when occupying Mikulski’s D.C. office on Feb. 27. Now new teams are staging peaceful, short-term sit-ins …

Our Creature Feature comes from the Arctic, where everybody knows that polar bears could be threatened to extinction in the wild because of global warming. But scientists are saying that another creature may offer clear evidence of what lies ahead: Spiders.

Yes, arachnids live in the Arctic, among them big wolf spiders, hiding under the snow in the cold of winter. Researchers say they will be watching to see if warming temperatures permit spiders to grow more quickly and how soon southern varieties migrate to the Arctic.

“The effects of changes are more obvious in the bigger animals,” scientist Michael Nickel told Reuters. But global warming “affects the whole environment.”