Category: Featured

“Drink The Bay Clean” Launches At The Blue Point Brewery — Doing Good By Drinking Well

Blue Point Brewery has done a remarkable thing:   They created a beer to help Save The Great South Bay in its mission.   With “Drink The Bay Clean,” they and the bars, restaurants and retail stores that will carry this India Pale Lager have created a beer that helps fund The Creek Defender Program, which focuses on local stewardship of the 42 creeks that flow into The Great South Bay, the I Love Long Island Campaign, which promotes eco-friendly, bay friendly lawn care that doesn’t involve pesticides and chemical lawn fertilizers and teaches native plantings, as well as the organization’s commitment to revitalizing the bay as a major shellfish producer, and its advocating for 21st Century waste water infrastructure for The South Shore and Long Island, and for a sustainable Long Island.

In sum, The Blue Point Brewing Company, together with hops distributor Hopsteiner, Carleton Clothing, a creator of iconic Long Island apparel, Clare Rose (may a fair settlement in their current labor dispute be arrived at soon), the region’s largest beer distributor, and DWS Printing, who did such a marvelous job on the labels for the cans have made a beer for a cause — To save The Great South Bay.

Dozens of Long Island and New York City bars, restaurants and retail establishments have already signed up to carry the beer, which was created by Mark Burford, Brewmaster Emeritus and Founder of The Blue Point Brewing Company.    He made this with all the passion of having grown up on The South Shore, on the bay.   He graduated Sayville, Class of ’80.   I graduated ’77.   We remember — and we want it back.

If there’s a place you think would want to carry the beer, please Contact Us with the name of the place and who the brewery should speak to.

The Launch Party, which coincided with World Environment Day, was a 12-8 marathon that over the course of the day brought in about 1000 people:

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Citizen’s Campaign For The Environment was there.     Operation Blue Earth, which is driving a Sayville / West Sayville campaign to get people away from lawn fertilizers and pesticides, was there.     You have probably seen their lawn signs in the area:

Now, you can see the Operation Blue Earth Van as well!

Save The Great South Bay, as a founding member represented The I Love Long Island Campaign, which calls for a island wide campaign against pesticides and chemical lawn fertilizers, and which promotes native plantings.  Operation Blue Earth is one of 30 organizations already supporting the cause:

Pledge to go without pesticides and high nitrogen fertilizers and have an eco-friendly, bay friendly lawn, order your yard sign (click on sign):

and be entered in a raffle to win $1000 worth of eco -friendly, bay friendly plantings for your yard, courtesy of beer revenues from Drink The Bay Clean.   Just Contact Us to let us know you entered.

Together, we can through organizations like The Perfect Earth Project and Grassroots Environmental Education reinvent the Long Island lawn and protect all our bays, rivers and ponds.   Right now, the bay is being ravaged by brown tide, pulses of nitrogen rich runoff pouring into the bay.   Its fertilizer season!   By what logic are we putting additional nitrogen on our lawns when we are about to spend billions to get it out of our water?  Especially when a good mulching mower can feed your lawn better than fertilizer and you get that for free?

Blue Point Brewery, which draws its water from the glacial aquifer that lies below Long Island, wants that aquifer protected.   The oyster farmers who fight to grow their harvests each year, like Blue Island Oysters and Great Atlantic Shellfish Farms, want bay friendly yards.   We on The South Shore need to help them, and in the process revitalize the bay and the local economy.

This World Environment Day celebration also featured CRESLI — The Coastal Research and Education Society of Long Island, which concerns itself with whales, seals, dolphin, sea turtles and sea birds.   I’m a proud board member!

Here is Artie Kopelman, President, with Asia Lee, Long Island nature photographer extraordinaire, at the CRESLI booth.

Book your summer whale watches now at CRESLI!

The Moriches Bay Project was also in attendance at World Environment Day.   They are seeking to restore the bay through the introduction of oysters.  All in all, it was the first of what Blue Point Brewing and Save The Great South Bay expect will be a an annual celebration for our environment.

4-8 was the actual beer launch, with Non-Stop to Cairo

and The Brother Pluckers.

With that, “Drink The Bay Clean” was all sold out and all the kegs were kicked by 5 PM.  An auspicious start!    It was all people were ordering.

All the adult sized “Great White” shirts also sold out.   You can order online, though by clicking on the photo.   $20 plus shipping.    High quality U.S. cotton, eco-friendly inks, printed right here on Long Island in Port Washington by Spectrum Designs, a non-profit that employs autistic adults to print their apparel.   Have your organization consider having its apparel printed with them.

All in all, a great launch, and more “Drink The Bay Clean” events to come as together with Blue Point Brewing, we seek to save a bay that right now is very much under siege.  The day actually started with a 10-12pm beach clean up, organized by the brewery and the Town of Patchogue.  Great job!    But even as we celebrated the beer launch and gathered together a number of environmental groups, the bay looked worse than ever.   We’ve our work cut out for us.

If you are interested in volunteering or interning, we have a big job to do, and can’t do it without you.

Contact Us and tell us where you are from, how you might help, whether as a local Creek Defender volunteer, a store that wants to carry our I Love Long Island campaign signs, or our Save The Great South Bay apparel.  Right now, South Shore Paddle Boards in Babylon has both our apparel and the signs.

They rock!

Also, let us know where we should have our next Drink The Bay Clean event.   It will be a busy summer!

 

Be In Babylon For Earth Day April 22nd, and Help Make History — The Creek Defender Program Launches

ATTENTION ALL BABYLONIANS!

Save The Great South Bay’s Creek Defender Program launches on Earth Day April 22nd along The Carll’s River!

Save The Great South Bay, in conjunction with local citizens, schools, civic groups, businesses, and with other local environmental groups, will be launching its Creek Defender Program.   Save The Great South Bay believes that in order to heal the bay, we need to heal the creeks first.   There are 31 of them that flow into The Great South Bay.   The launch of The Creek Defender Program in Babylon is meant as a model for all the communities on The South Shore:   Here is how you can be effective local stewards of your bays, ponds, streams and creeks.

The first creek we will address is Carll’s River, which begins well north of The Sunrise Highway.  We’ve mapped it online like all the other 30 creeks.     Clicking on the image will take you to a live map.

 

Babylon High School, The Elementary School, The PTA, The Village of Babylon, The Town of Babylon, Seatuck,The I Love Long Island Campaign, South Shore Paddle Boards, and a number of local civic groups and businesses will gather to help clean The Carll’s River.   We must defend our creeks.  We must stop polluting them with runoff, pesticides, and lawn fertilizers, and illegal dumping.   In order to heal The Great South Bay, we need to heal the 31 creeks that flow from The South Shore into The Great South Bay.

We propose to accomplish this by organizing ten person teams of volunteers to go door to door in Babylon Village and along Carll’s River with information on The Creek Defender Program, on ecosafe lawn care and using native plantings, to proper stewardship of this river.   Babylon’s efforts on Earth Day will become a model for how we address our other South Shore creeks.

9:00 -12:00 South Shore Paddle Boards will lead a clean up of the Sumpawams, starting at their store at 258 East Main Street.

12:00-1:00 Registration, Staging (DJ), Babylon Elementary School:

1:00 – 4:00 Creek Clean Up. Door-to-Door Campaign promoting , which

4:00-8:00 After Party at The Babylon Gazebo. Kick Off by Todd Shaw, Babylon’s Creek Defender (Carlls, Sumpawams, Fosters)

Beer provided by Blue Point Brewery, Brewers of a soon-to-be released beer “Drink The Bay Clean,” with proceeds going to support The Creek Defender Program and other initiatives for the bay.

Live Music

Restaurants

Local Environmental Groups

Kudos to Babylon for showing The South Shore the way, and for creating the model through which, creek by creek, we can bequeath a healthier bay to future generations!

If you’d like to participate, drop us a line!

Save The Great South Bay Tours Bellport Inlet (The Breach) with The New York Times — The Overwhelming Consensus: Leave It Alone

The breach, now known as Bellport Inlet, is now broadly accepted as being a boon to The Great South Bay. No longer are there calls for its closure. It has revitalized Bellport Bay, and showed us what we lost and could yet get back

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“Once More Unto The Breach, My Friends, Once More” — Please Submit Your Public Comments By Oct 8th!

The Great South Bay may getting worse in general, year by year, but not around the breach due south of Bellport. There, you will see clean water, fish, birds, seal, fish, mussel beds -- nature resurgent. The National Parks Service is obliged to offer this period of public comment as it prepares its management plan and environmental impact statement for "The Breach." So let's tell them where we stand!

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A Pledge To Help Build A Sustainable Long Island Taken at The Aspen Action Forum

The video here is from last year's Action Forum, where I offer an update from 2013. Membership in the Save The Great South Bay Facebook Group had tripled to over 1700. A consortium called The Long Island Clean Water Partnership had formed, comprised of over 100 organizations. Somehow, people on the local, state and federal level got on the same page, prodded by the science. Similarly, local reporting on Long Island's environmental issues, especially around water quality, really came around. Increasingly, Long Islanders are becoming aware of the challenges our waters face.

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Can Long Island Be Saved? — Part XII: 2014 — A Watershed Year?

This December finds Long Island's environmentalists, those in The Nature Conservancy, The Citizen's Campaign for the Environment, The Group For the East End, The Pine Barrens Society, and the 100+ local organizations in The Long Island Clean Water Partnership in a state of wonder and exhaustion: Wonder because politicians and policy makers at all levels of government and across the political spectrum are standing together. They are all in agreement with the science that shows that Long Island is in a water quality / water pollution crisis and that something must be done immediately and on a large scale to address it.

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Can Long Island Be Saved? Part IX — The Following Beaches Will Be Closed This Weekend…

This what happens on Long Island in the warm months every time it rains. And it gets worse by the year. Before 1984, we did not have algal blooms around Long Island. Headlong development has caught up with us. What led us to think that we could put 500,000 septic tanks / cesspools in the low lying sand of Long Island and not suffer some consequences? That said, we had no definitive scientific link between nitrogen from our septic tanks and the explosion of algal blooms now threatening almost all our waters until 2005.

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