Right now people are meeting and planning to launch a moratorium on the use of pesticides and non-organic lawn fertilizers in Sayville. The goal is this: If we could get just this one community to change its lawn care practices, would we see any measurable difference in local water quality, in water clarity, in the growth rates of the oysters?
If one went deep in one community, could that then become a model for other communities, not only on The South Shore, but all over Long Island?
What every Long Islander needs to understand is this: We live on top of our drinking water, an aquifer left by the glaciers. Some of what we put on our lawns eventually ends up there. We do not want pesticides or excess nitrogen from fertilizers to continue to contaminate that one source of drinking water we have. What we put on our lawns not only taints our drinking water, it also pollutes our creeks, ponds and bays. It is estimated that 15% of the nitrogen in The Great South Bay comes from lawn fertilizer. If the public, the local community, out of respect for our bayman heritage, and with the hope of bringing back the bay, voluntarily went organic for a year to ‘give the bay a break,’ would it increase our shellfish yields? Would the now annual brown tide bloom be less severe?
So it is with that hope that Blue Island Oyster in West Sayville, along with a number of other organizations — including Save The Great South Bay — and local concerned citizens, are reaching out to the Sayville community. Can one community work together to make a difference?
The Ninth Graders at Sayville High School, when they chose to build a Save The Great South Bay float for homecoming, and named us the Non-Profit they would support this year, would certainly want to know if that was possible. Now as spring heads towards summer, the bay is about to get the worst of it. Their voices, their energy matters. 260 Freshmen about to be Sophomores is a lot in a town of 16,600.
What we proposed doing at this first meeting at Big Island Oyster was to come up with an information display design that we would deploy first in a half dozen local Sayville venues — The library, the ferry marina, the movie house, etc.
Here is the display that Troop 217 put up in the Bayport / Blue Point library. Save The Great South Bay would like to create a standard display for the whole campaign, inspired by them.
A big thanks to Samuel Wathen, who with his $250 donation is financing the creation of the first two displays for Sayville. We are aiming at having a half dozen such displays deployed in Sayville by the week of the 10th. With that, we hope to bring people to the cause cleaning the bay by choosing a healthy, organic, pesticide free lawn.
Do you already have an organic lawn? And you live in Sayville, West Sayville or Oakdale? A Blue Earth sign on your lawn says this lawn is organic and that ‘We are all connected to the bay.’
Order yours now, then, and Blue Island will send you one!