DC going greener?
I've always considered DC a fairly green city. There are so many parks and it's very walkable.
In the three years that I lived there, I never felt the need to have a car -- the Metro goes almost everywhere, and the bus goes where the Metro doesn't. Everyone I knew who had a car complained bitterly about parking tickets, traffic circles, one-way streets and rush-hour bottlenecks.
But now DC Mayor Adrian Fenty wants to make the car-less life an official policy. So he's declaring Sept. 18 car free day. You can register on the web site and pledge that, for that one day, you won't drive. With about a third of the city's residents taking public transportation anyway, the impact isn't clear. But it will give those meter maids a little less to do.
Perhaps more significantly, Fenty is naming a Green-Collar Jobs Advisory Council. The group is charged with helping to enforce a new law that, by 2012, requires all buildings larger than 50,000 square feet to be built "green." And therein lie the jobs -- many people will be needed to build these structures.
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I report on the environment and Chesapeake Bay. A native of West Virginia, I have focused mainly on Maryland's environment since moving here in 1983. Along the way, I've crewed aboard a skipjack in the bay, canoed under city streets up the Jones Fall from the Inner Harbor, and gone deep underground in a western Maryland coal mine. Recently, I have been covering the growth and development transforming the landscape. I love seafood, rambles in the country and good stories. I hope to share some here.
