Tag: water quality

18 results found

Suffolk County, Thwarted Once, Seeks to Raid $30 Million in Environmental Funding Again

Chalk one up for the environmentalists. EXCEPT now the County is looking to raid $30 million dollars in funds meant for land protection, which plays a crucial part in our efforts to protect our drinking water. As we live on top of our drinking water, with Long Island as a 'sole source aquifer,' we must preserve our open spaces, that is those few we have left.

Not surprisingly, Suffolk County and the Legislature did not give us much notice to act. They are after all looking to gut another environmental fund to pay for the fact that they couldn't gut the first. The budget votes are Tuesday, Oct 7th.

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Can Long Island Be Saved? Part VI – An Interview With Professor Christopher Gobler

Chris and his team helped link septic tank seepage to the nitrogen fueled algal blooms around Long Island. Today, we know that we need to deal with the 500,000 septic tanks on Long Island if we are to save our bays, rivers, ponds, and marshes, and preserve our drinking water. Today, as various scientific experts and public officials grapple, along with our environmental non profits and the public with the question of how we address our water quality issues, Gobler's work is essential in charting the right path.

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Can Long Island Be Saved, Part V: Cuomo’s Initiative to Improve Water Quality and Coastal Resilience

he die offs of vegetation (marshes, eel grass, sea grass) and wildlife (fish, shellfish, birds, insects, amphibians and reptiles) have been stunning. Whole habitats are vanishing before our eyes. At the same time, that nitrogen is seeping ever more deeply into our drinking water into the aquifer that sits below us, with water deposited there by glacier melt eons ago.

Not only are nitrogen rates rising, but the rate of the rise is too, as the plume of nitrogen created by the explosive population growth on Post War Long Island, much unsewered, has generated a plume of nitrogen that is now making its way downward into our drinking water.

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Can Long Island Be Saved, Part III — An Interview With Carl LoBue of The Nature Conservancy

We knew that if The Great South Bay was to be saved, it was going to have to be through bringing science to the problem. The people of The South Shore of Long Island needed to understand what the issues with the bay were, what was causing them, and what solutions were possible.

A couple of calls pointed me in Carl's direction, and soon he was sharing his knowledge and passion with the group, and helping us to understand what it would take to achieve our mission - to bring back the shellfish, the fish, the eelgrass, the marshes, the habitats that decades of neglect and decay had all but removed.

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