FEW, IF ANY, development proposals in Maryland have generated so much opposition from environmentalists as the Annapolis-sized Chapman's Landing in Charles County. During
its nearly three-year review, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers received more comments showing why this project should not be approved than for any other permit in the history of the Baltimore District.
The Corps' environmental assessment of this project, released late last month, implies that the impact on the Chesapeake Bay and its freshwater tributaries can be controlled by good environmental engineering. When compared in detail, however, with the studies conducted by environmental groups, a more disturbing picture of the potential effects of this development on Maryland's natural resources emerges.
What are the discrepancies between the two groups?
Less polluted, not clean
For starters, the developer, Charles County and the Corps have not promised clean streams, but less polluted streams. Not the protection of this 2,250-acre forest's assortment of native plant and animals, but a quarter-mile no-build zone around a bald eagle nest and a ravine wetland filled with very rare ferns.
Not the preservation of a prehistoric landscape complete with 24 nationally significant Native American Indian sites and a 17th-century Potomac River estate with a magnificent view of the river and Virginia's Mason Neck Wildlife Refuge, but the preservation of an historic home and the excavation of a few artifacts. Not protection for the upland aquifers which nourish Mattawoman Creek and its tributaries, but a narrow, 222-acre stream valley wetland conservation easement.
The Corps and developer claim that no endangered state or federal species live in the forest that is part of the Mattawoman Creek watershed and that only two species inhabit the Potomac River shoreline site.
Local botanists, however, so far have found more than 30 locally rare, threatened and endangered native plants in the Chapman's Landing forest; at least a dozen of these species exist in the Mattawoman Creek drainage, on land which the Corps recently permitted for development. Several globally rare species, including a freshwater mussel, may also occur here. The Audubon Society has found that the Mattawoman's forests contain some of Southern Maryland's most important songbird nesting habitats. The Louisiana waterthrush, which prefers the oldest and richest deciduous woodlands, has been spotted in the stream valleys of Chapman's Landing.
