Only in Anne Arundel, where thick residential development exists side by side with a devout love for the Chesapeake Bay, could Keith Underwood become a folk hero.
His name is spoken reverently on the Severn River, where a line of marsh grass now guards the shoreline of the Epping Forest neighborhood. They love his work in Shipley's Choice, where runoff from an elementary school parking lot is filtered through a series of cascading pools.
Keith Underwood demonstrates the health of the bog he recreated at Howard's Branch by pointing out new, wild growth. "That's the primeval bog right there," he said as he surveyed.
(Photos Rafael Crisostomo For The Washington Post)
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Underwood designs wetlands, re-creating natural systems in place of pipes and culverts. He is returning tiny, swampy pieces of the county back to the way they were before development.
He is "the Bog Man."
"He has the mind of an engineer, the eye of an artist and the heart of an environmentalist," said Stephen Barry, coordinator of outdoor education for the Anne Arundel public schools.
Underwood, 49, was born in Georgia but has lived in Anne Arundel most of his life. He started out working as a landscaper when he was 18.
More than a decade ago, Underwood says, he became interested in the plants of a disappearing ecosystem, the mid-Atlantic bog. These bogs are differentiated from marshes, swamps and other wetlands by their sandy soil and an array of unusual flora such as the Atlantic white cedar tree, the American cranberry and the carnivorous pitcher plant.
Underwood began to realize that every presentation he watched about bogs finished on the same depressing note.
"Every slide show ended up with, 'The site has been destroyed,' " he recalled.
So he started his own campaign to convince Anne Arundel authorities that the bogs could be brought back.
Fortunately for Underwood, at the same time, local and state governments were also looking at the numerous developments along the water and seeing a problem.
For them, the problem was rainwater. Before the homes and streets were built, the county's forests had absorbed the water and allowed it to filter through soil and plant roots.
But after development, the water blasted off roofs and through streets and storm drains. It carried large amounts of dirt, which clouded the waters of the rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. The unfiltered storm water also carried nitrogen and phosphorus, pollutants that are blamed for large algae blooms and oxygen-poor "bad water" in the bay.
Underwood began to make the case that bogs could filter the water better. At first, officials were not inclined to listen.
