Save the Bay, and stop Aerial Gunning

Hello and welcome back. My lack of updates can only mean one thing: I'm back on dialup! It is amazing how easy highspeed makes my research. Anyhow, I'll get to the point!
Petitions are flying far and fast this time of year for some reason. Two of note, one perhaps of more interest to my fellow Marylanders (though it should be important to you all!) being a petition from Environment Maryland urging Governor O'Malley to live up to his campaign promise to protect the world's largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay. The other is a petition from Defenders of Wildlife that may help put a halt to the brutal practice of aerial gunning all together! Both very important goals.
For the Bay, unfortunately, Environment Maryland doesn't seem to have an online petition to sign, and perhaps the due date has passed (I can't find a date anywhere on the letter or envelope!) but there are many other actions you can take from their website to help protect the Bay, our countryside, even the entire country and the entire world. I urge you to check them out!
While their letter cites mostly land development along the Bay as the major threat, my personal vendetta is against the poultry factories. The Eastern Shore of the Free State is checkered with chicken farms and processing plants, and much of the waste from these facilities gets dumped straight into the Bay. The immediate result is probably a feast for blue crabs, but the chicken waste brings with it bacteria, including those that can cause flesh-eating diseases in humans. 40 some percent of the Bay becomes a 'dead zone' every year due to heavy runoff of agricultural and developmental pollutants, and more and more development grows every year. We must tell our government that we "Treasure the Chesapeake" as the license plate says, and we need to protect it!
My second petition would close a loophole in a previous Aerial Hunting law and stop the Alaskan, Wyoming, and Idaho governments from using this cruel practice to decimate their Grey Wolf population. As I've reported before, aerial gunning is the inhumane practice of chasing the animal to exhaustion with airplanes and sometimes helicopters and then shooting them, or shooting indiscriminately from the air. Not very sportsmanlike conduct if you ask me, and people do consider hunting to be a sport! Visit the Defenders of Wildlife website and sign the petition today! The goal is 40 thousand signatures by Labor Day, and we're already a third of the way there!
If nothing pressing comes up in the next week, I plan to recap my Wild Horse article. We're into roundup season now, and it is important to keep on top of things!