dhirschman – Page 7 – Hirschman Water & Environment, LLC

An Environmental Restoration Workforce for the Future

An Environmental Restoration Workforce for the Future

I lead an organization called Howard EcoWorks (EcoWorks) in Howard County, MD. We empower communities and diverse workforces to respect and restore our natural systems for future generations. For the first several years, we focused on one thing – building rain gardens. As our relationship with the County, our primary funder, grew, we started performing maintenance on the County’s stormwater and stream restoration practices. Our organization and its programs have been growing quickly and succeeding in many ways. However, I have also witnessed our County seat, Ellicott City, devastated by a series of freak, high intensity storm events. With each successive storm, my professional assumptions about how to restore a watershed, and my organization’s role in that, have changed.

Canal Boats, Locomotives, Interstate Highways. . .A River Runs Along It

12Februarydhirschman

Canal Boats, Locomotives, Interstate Highways. . .A River Runs Along It

Last fall, I rode my bike along the C&O towpath and the Great Alleghany Passage, following rivers for most of the journey. The C&O traces the banks of the Potomac River from Georgetown in Washington D.C. to Cumberland, MD. Travelling at the “speed of bike” is suitably slow to allow one to ponder the landscape, how it got to be the way it is today, and how transportation infrastructure has intersected with the river corridor over the years.

Ode to Acer rubrum

23Januarydhirschman2 Comments

To the One in My Yard

I don’t mean to be crass
But I raked near a ton of your biomass (off of my grass)
At that yellow scarlet time of year

Little River Time Machine

17Decemberdhirschman

I learned to love rivers and appreciate stormwater while living in a wikiup. A wickiup you say? A hut made of brushwood or covered with mats. . .any rude hut. That’s the internet definition. I built my wickiup along the banks of the Little River on land that my cousin owned in northern Durham County, NC. It consisted of a circle of saplings dug into the ground and bent to the middle to form a dome. The whole thing was covered with tarps, and I had a door and a window to look out on the river. My wickiup residency lasted a year and spanned all four seasons. This was 35 years ago, before that part of the County became more crowded with subdivisions as the Durham area expanded.

Way Down Yonder in a Very Large Pawpaw Patch

28Octoberdhirschman

Pickin’ up paw-paws, puttin’ ‘em in her pockets,
Pickin’ up paw-paws, puttin’ ‘em in her pockets,
Pickin’ up paw-paws, puttin’ ‘em in her pockets,
Way down yonder in the paw-paw patch.

In this traditional folk song, the pawpaw patch was “way down yonder.” It seems the patch is expanding, becoming the dominant shrub along floodplains of major river systems.