Return of the Rhino
Efforts to restore critically endangered black rhinos are protecting a piece of Kenya’s natural heritage.
Family Time Taysha Barnes (center) goes fishing with her mother, Robin Lomax (right), and grandfather Robert Lomax Sr., in Turner Station, Maryland. Because of local water pollution, the family does not keep what they catch. © Jared Soares
On a muggy morning in June, Edythe “Edie” Brooks, 76, leans over to pick up an old chip bag teetering close to the water at Turner Station Park, a Chesapeake Bay access point about 20 minutes outside downtown Baltimore, Maryland. She crushes the litter in her hand. “I like things to be clean and green,” she says. “I can’t help myself.” It’s a Saturday, but the retired nurse has already been up for hours, clearing brush, weeding and picking up trash throughout the community.
Brooks, a lifelong resident of this historically Black community, sits in the shade for a few moments and looks out at a huge grassy hill on the far side of the water. The hill
is more than 100 feet tall, but it’s not a natural part of the landscape. “That’s a landfill,” she says with a sigh. She and other residents worry about the potential for leaks.
Looming in the distance, the landfill, stocked with asbestos, solid waste and industrial pollutants, is a decades-old reminder of the toxic legacy of steelmaking in the area. Turner Station grew in the shadow of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, a major U.S. manufacturer that provided material for the nearby Baltimore shipyards. In the mid-20th century the neighborhood was a bustling community, home to many of the mill’s workers.
Today, years after the closure of the steel mill, Turner Station—like so many postindustrial communities in America—is faced not only with the remnants of industrial waste but also with growing climate-related hazards. “They suffer from almost every environmental stressor you can imagine,” says Isaac Hametz, Baltimore program director at The Nature Conservancy.
Located along the Patapsco River near the Chesapeake Bay, Turner Station has challenges, including continual flooding exacerbated by climate change and air-quality
concerns related to the nearby Baltimore port. Its waterways are polluted: Maryland authorities have placed Fish Consumption Advisories for crab and multiple fish species around the area’s waters due to industrial pollutants, but people continue to fish there and consume what they catch.
Shoreline
The community of Turner Station sits near sea level between the Patapsco River and Bear Creek.
© Jared Soares
Toxic Legacy
Turner Station, like so many postindustrial communities, sits alongside the industry that once made it a boomtown. Across a narrow creek, Sparrows Point—once home to a major steel factory—is always in sight.
© Jared Soares
Shoreline
The community of Turner Station sits near sea level between the Patapsco River and Bear Creek.
© Jared Soares
Toxic Legacy
Turner Station, like so many postindustrial communities, sits alongside the industry that once made it a boomtown. Across a narrow creek, Sparrows Point—once home to a major steel factory—is always in sight.
© Jared Soares
In 2024 the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the river collapsed after a cargo ship collided with it, thrusting the community into the national news. Six people died, and the collapse created further economic and environmental concerns as it cut off a major artery into Turner Station.
Turner Station is the largest historic Black community in Baltimore County, and its climate-change-related threats mirror those that are increasingly—and disproportionately—facing communities of color around the country.
Beginning to address such challenges in communities like Turner Station is a formidable task—but something Brooks and other residents are tackling, one battle at a time.
Nearly 25 years ago, members of the community formed an environmental and community improvement group called Turner Station Conservation Teams. They’ve become a small community-revitalization nonprofit made up mostly of retirees, including Brooks, who is a board member. They fight to celebrate the area’s history, ensure safeguards against legacy toxic sites like that landfill, and secure government funding to support community projects. But they need help.
In the past few years, the group has worked with nonprofits, including The Nature Conservancy and NeighborSpace of Baltimore County, and agencies like the U.S. EPA, as well as local and state governments. The Conservancy has worked to connect them to other groups and to potential grants. Together they’re beginning to envision a cleaner, safer future for Turner Station. It’s the kind of envisioning that many communities are beginning to consider as they face a hard truth: that climate is changing the world around them, sometimes in ways that make staying in their neighborhoods challenging.
Before the Key Bridge collapsed in April 2024, Turner Station was perhaps best known for being the home of Henrietta Lacks, a Black cancer patient whose biopsied cancer cells—without her permission or knowledge—became essential for medical research. Her home, now a rental property, still stands on New Pittsburgh Avenue. Many Turner Station residents say that although an increasing number of area properties are now rentals, generations of their families—and of their friends’ families—live here or in the surrounding areas, reinforcing their ties to the area and their desire to stay.
Nearby on a Saturday, locals peruse the bookshelves inside the small library at the Sollers Point Multi-Purpose Center—the site of many local events and athletic activities, and also where Turner Station Conservation Teams hosts its monthly meetings. Ongoing flooding from both rainfall and extreme tides is a continual topic of discussion at these gatherings, but so, too, are their plans for upcoming community events, including their regular neighborhood cleanups and cookouts for some of the area’s roughly 2,150 residents. Their overarching hope, Brooks says, is to build a brighter future for generations ahead while honoring their community’s past.
“When this community was founded, there was a lot of hope here because there were jobs for people who came from poor areas where there was no work,” Brooks says.
“My family came here because of jobs,” she says. Her father was a ship fitter for Bethlehem Steel, and her mother worked at the local hospital. “This was a place of hope for many people—many African American people. It was a segregated community, but it was a wonderful family neighborhood. Church, faith, family, education—that’s what it was all about,” she says.
The steel mill first opened here in 1891. It closed in 2012, but it was already in decline decades earlier as steel production needs changed and some work shifted overseas. In its heyday, steelmaking took place on a roughly 3,000-acre peninsula called Sparrows Point that sits across a narrow waterway from Turner Station. Today the old mill site has become a new type of industrial space, home to distribution, storage and fulfillment centers. Amazon, for example, is one of the companies with facilities there.
But the legacy of the steel mill is still present. Of particular concern to Brooks and members of the Conservation Teams are the land and waters surrounding Bear Creek, a body of water adjacent to Sparrows Point. In 2022 the EPA added Bear Creek to its Superfund National Priorities list, after identifying pollutants including PCBs and metals in the sediment. In 2024 the agency announced that it will begin designing a plan for removing the most polluted sediment, a process that the agency estimates will take about five years to complete. It plans to dredge approximately 27 acres of Bear Creek, removing the pollutants for disposal elsewhere, and eventually “cap” a larger area—about 62 acres—of contaminated soil with a cover designed to trap contaminants in place.
The planned removal and remediation process itself worries some members of Turner Station Conservation Teams. Dredging could disturb some of the polluted soil, and residents worry that those toxins could seep into some of the same water that frequently floods parks and homes. In September 2024, in response to such concerns, the EPA agreed to do additional investigations before any dredging occurs and to create a working group dedicated to community outreach and project coordination.
It’s a big step. Gloria Nelson, the 74-year-old president of Turner Station Conservation Teams and a retired human resources employee for the state of Maryland, first became involved in this work about 20 years ago in part because a planned development at Sollers Point hadn’t involved the community. Residents fought against the development and asked to be included in decisions.
The group has continued to try to strengthen its community and keep a seat at the table for those looking to address area hazards, but sometimes, Nelson says, the challenges they face can feel overwhelming.
Turner Station is far from alone in its struggles to reinvent itself following an industrial past and build resiliency against climate change and other hazards. In neighborhoods in Houston, New Orleans and elsewhere, climate change has exacerbated already-existing issues like toxic waste sites. A 2020 investigation into Superfund sites by NBC News, Inside Climate News and The Texas Observer found that 74 U.S. Superfund sites threatened by climate change contain toxic wastes damaging to human health. The prior year, the U.S. Government Accountability Office concluded that seven Maryland Superfund sites were at risk from climate change, including Sauer Dump in Dundalk, located just a few miles from Bear Creek.
In fact, flood inundation is increasing more rapidly in Maryland than in most other U.S. coastal areas because of a combination of sinking land and rising sea levels. A 2016 EPA bulletin noted that if warming continues, sea levels along the state’s coastline could rise 16 inches to 4 feet in the next century.
Turner Station is particularly vulnerable. It sits barely above sea level, contends with tidal river flows and suffers from inadequate stormwater drainage infrastructure—some pipes are full even on sunny days, limiting their capabilities during storm events. Turner Station has perpetually struggled with flooding, but in recent years, residents say, the problem has grown worse.
There’s no formal tracking of flooding events for Turner Station, but federal data on historical flooding in nearby Baltimore underscores the change: In 2024 Baltimore recorded 18 flood days, the highest figure since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began tracking in the 1980s; by comparison, in all of 2014 there were only four.
Residents have lost furniture, prized photos, family heirlooms and even pricey appliances like air-conditioning units in Turner Station’s floods. Most people in flood-heavy areas now just make sure their water heaters or HVAC units are elevated on platforms above the ground, Nelson says.
Margaret Risher, 94, used to run outside to move her car to a higher elevation every time there were heavy rains, but one night before the pandemic there was a downpour while she was sleeping. Her car became waterlogged and died, she says. She never replaced it. She uses rugs instead of carpet on her home’s first floor because of frequent floods, and as a precaution she keeps photos of her children and grandchildren on high shelves to protect them.
Though Risher no longer drives, she regularly attends the monthly Conservation Teams meetings, where she says she’s learned a lot about the environmental risks the community faces. “I think climate change has a whole lot to do with this weather down here and the water and the flooding,” she says on a May afternoon as she watches the rainwater collecting outside.
Tree Planting
At a tree-planting ceremony in November 2024, a variety of trees wait to be planted.
© Jared Soares
Tree Planting
The trees and their layout were chosen as part of a community design workshop.
© Jared Soares
The group, alongside Baltimore County, pushed for the Army Corps of Engineers to publish an official flood risk study in Turner Station, which was completed in 2022. Areas at most risk, the Army Corps wrote, could have storm-related flooding that reaches up to 2.6 feet in a 24-hour period. Solutions could include installing a pump station to move water out of low-lying areas and adding more stormwater lines to divert water, the report said. Finding funding for such fixes, however, was outside its scope.
Such proposed solutions, says Phyllis Joris, executive director of the nonprofit NeighborSpace of Baltimore County, were simply “not feasible or affordable.” Baltimore County drew the same conclusion.
Instead, the county joined with partners including The Nature Conservancy and NeighborSpace to come up with a new stormwater master plan with affordable fixes. “This new plan will identify actionable—and financially viable—stormwater and flood mitigation solutions relying primarily on watershed storage,” says Erica Palmisano, a Baltimore County spokesperson. In other words, this approach will hinge largely on more affordable nature-based fixes to help soak up water.
NeighborSpace and the Conservation Teams were charged with community engagement and outreach to understand the flood risk for individual homes. In 2024 they, with support from TNC, went door to door asking people to fill out detailed forms, and in roughly five months they gathered responses from around 140 households. The county will use that information to build a detailed model of how flooding affects the area in 2025—materials local groups and the county may use to apply for funding to begin addressing the issue. In the meantime, Joris says, they are trying to connect residents with available resources—including grant money—that may help more immediately.
Community
In November 2024, Turner Station residents and friends joined together to celebrate the planting of the new trees at Henrietta Lacks Village at Lyon Homes. The local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts helped dig holes for two of the trees.
Design: Local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts helped plan for the community’s new trees in an artistic map. © Jared Soares
Celebration: Community members celebrated the tree planting in November 2024. © Jared Soares
Putting on Gloves: Five-year-old Jace Fowlkes joined his grandfather at the tree-planting event. © Jared Soares
Art: Sculptures of native insects (like this cicada) decorate the area. © Jared Soares
There is other environmental work brewing in Turner Station, too. The EPA funded an air-monitoring program in the region and invested more than $537 million in water infrastructure across Baltimore County. The University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University are conducting air and environmental health studies in Turner Station as well. So far, exact plans for what to do with all these health surveys remain uncertain. Conservation Teams says that currently the data is being collected simply to get a better handle on understanding potential unseen dangers.
Meanwhile, each month, as many as 50 people show up to the group’s meetings to discuss flooding, the economy and more, Nelson says. A few years ago, the group connected with The Nature Conservancy.
The Conservancy, says Hametz, has helped with writing grant applications for the group—sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. Conservation Teams recently lost out on a NOAA grant they’d hoped would fund three staff positions in the nonprofit. Nelson, Brooks and others are all volunteers, and Nelson worries about the future of the group.
Bringing in young members would help, she says. Six of their 10 board members are in their 70s, one is in her 80s, and three are in their 50s and 60s. It’s time to “pass the baton,” she says.
In 2024, Turner Station Conservation Teams and TNC deepened their efforts to do just that. Together they engaged community members to plant 140 native trees in
the neighborhood—their “Witness Trees.” The name is a nod to how they will grow alongside the community, bearing witness to its changes, says Andrea van Wyk, TNC’s Baltimore community projects manager. The trees will contribute to better air quality, she says.
In 2024 the groups, working with members of the local Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in a community design workshop, added 45 more trees. As part of the process, the Scouts also designed insect sculptures and fairy houses to hide in several new stone walls that provide seating at the site.
At an event in November, the Scouts gathered with Nelson, Brooks and other members of the community group at an affordable housing development in the neighborhood called Henrietta Lacks Village at Lyon Homes. The Scouts helped dig holes for two trees.
The trees will provide shade in an area where there previously was none. They will help clean the air since they are placed by homes close to the highway, van Wyk says.
Looking at the trees, Nelson says she feels optimistic about the years ahead. The project, supported by the Chesapeake Bay Trust and Tradepoint Atlantic, showcases an example of older members of Conservation Teams and younger community members coming together with other partners to make something beautiful that will last.
“When people see historic Black communities ... they think that they are so vulnerable and not going to fight back,” says Nelson. “But we stand strong. … We want to keep our community, build our community back up, preserve the history and make it even better than it was.”
About the Creators
Dina Fine Maron is a journalist based in Washington, D.C. Previously she was an investigative reporter covering wildlife crime and policy for National Geographic.
Jared Soares is a photographer whose portraiture, sports coverage and other work have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, Outside and other publications.
