Long Island is about to replace its cesspools and septic tanks. Nassau County has 140,000, Suffolk 360,000. Suffolk intends to launch a pilot program that will deploy 400 units over the next two years. Albany is chipping in with $2 billion to address the issue at scale. Yet more will be needed, but everyone, seeing the problem, is stepping up. At the same time that we do this, we need to stop polluting our waters with lawn fertilizer and pesticides.
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!
Curt Johnson, Executive Director of Save The Sound, issues an Eco Reportcard on the water quality of Long Island Sound, and discusses what remains to be done, especially on Long Island
What happens when one community decides to adopt organic lawn care practices? How does it change the health of the local waters and of the marine creatures in them? That is the question Sayville is about to try and answer.
Girl Scout Troop #217 (Bayport - Blue Point) is challenging their community to go green, to move away from pesticides and high nitrogen fertilizers, and make The Organic Lawn Pledge
We absolutely need to start managing our drinking water on Long Island, or we will not have any drinking water in due time. Salt water intrusion has already begun to taint the aquifers because we pump far too much water out, half for our lawns. We've chosen our lawns over our children, above the needs of future generations! Toxic plumes of VOCs (Volatile Organic Chemicals) large and small, seep ever further and wider into the groundwater, imperiling the one source of water we have.
Each year, each grade at Sayville High School chooses a cause or a non-profit to support. This year, the Freshmen of Sayville High School chose "Save The Great South Bay" as their non-profit. It was Doug Shaw, who teaches English at The High School and was born and raised in Sayville, who reached out to me via our Facebook Group to relay the good news. He told me "the kids were looking to do something really local."
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.
What makes Georgica Pond so interesting is the possibility that motivated residents, top scientists and attentive local officials could be at the forefront of reversing the symptoms of the nutrient pollution that has become an island-wide, and arguably a world-wide, problem.
