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Long Island Water Education Program Expands to More Local Schools
The North Shore Land Alliance Long Island Water Education Program Expands to More Local Schools – Great Neck and Valley Stream School Districts Education is a core part of the Land Alliance’s mission. It is integral to helping community members understand the benefits associated with the preservation of Long Island’s land and waters and the important role land conservation plays in ensuring a healthy quality of life. With nearly 3 million residents in Nassau and Suffolk Counties completely dependent on groundwater for all their fresh water needs, water is one of our community’s most precious and most vulnerable resources. Many Long Islanders are unaware that the source of their drinking water is the aquifer under their feet or that nitrogen is the number one contaminant of our aquifer, harbors, bays, streams and rivers, the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean. The Long Island Water Education Program teaches students about Long Island’s water: from the sole source aquifer that provides our drinking water, to the streams, wetlands, bays and Sound that constitute our watershed and make Long Island such a desirable place to live. In the classroom and on our nature preserves, the program uses hands-on interactive lessons to demonstrate the connection between protecting land and water, and engages students in their stewardship. Initiated in 2014 through a generous grant from the Bruderman Family, the Long Island Water Education Program has reached more than 1,000 students in 2015 from four school districts across the North and South Shores. The program – designed by Land Alliance Educator, Karen Mossey, in conjunction with two highly experienced retired teachers, Anne Codey and Eileen Rossi – is a three-lesson series for fourth, fifth and sixth graders that addresses a sampling of Common Core/NYS Education Department standards. Each lesson can be carried out individually and the program can be adapted for use with other grades or with after-school students. The Long Island Water Education Program has consistently received very favorable feedback from teachers. It is a model for other water education programs on Long Island. As the demand for the program has grown, additional sources of funding are needed to ensure that the growing number of schools who request access to the program can be accommodated. Thanks to a generous $40,000 grant received from the New York State Conservation Partnership program, our Water Education Program will continue for two additional years. This fall, we expanded to include Great Neck and Valley Stream School Districts in addition to the five with which we launched the program during the 2014/15 school year. We plan to add additional school districts next spring. The fall 2015 field trips have shown off Shore Road Sanctuary in full seasonal glory, as the photo above demonstrates, and engaged students in beach exploration, permeability testing and grassland investigation and stewardship activities. Karen Mossey has been assisted at these events by a crew of talented and dedicated volunteers: Anne Codey, Amanda Furcall, Kathy Hannigan, Harmoni Kelley and Eileen Rossi. If your school would like to participate in the Long Island Water Education Program and provide students with engaging, hands-on environmental learning experiences, please contact us at liwep@northshorelandalliance.org.
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The Great Healthy Yard Project: Our Yards, Our Children, Our Responsibility!
The Great Healthy Yard Project: Our Yards, Our Children, Our Responsibility featuring Diane Lewis Dr. Diane Lewis is a nephrologist and a mother, a community leader and a conservation activist. When she became a mother, she thought feeding her children natural food and spending time with them in nature was enough. She quickly learned that broken bones and hurt feelings could be fixed but their exposure to environmental toxins cannot. As a nephrologist she has a better than usual grasp on the importance of clean water and the impact chemicals that are now found in our drinking water at alarming levels have on the body. Scientific studies from top tier journals show that even small amounts of these chemicals cause increases in diabetes, cancer and abnormal development of the brain and nervous system by disrupting hormonal systems. Many of us do not connect our yards with our drinking water supply, but the chemicals we use on our lawns and gardens wash with rain and storm water into our streams, ponds, reservoirs and deep groundwater wells in measurable amounts. Together these water sources comprise our drinking water – and as a result, chemicals flow into our homes and bodies. In fact, 95% of the contiguous United States is directly impacted by how we care for our yards. While 41% of the land is devoted to agriculture, 54 percent is comprised of cities and suburbs. This means homeowners are caring for most of the land in the US. And, every year, Americans use a staggering 80 million pounds of pesticide on 30 million acres of lawn – ten times more chemicals per acre than farmers use. Many of the yard chemicals that enter the water cycle do not degrade: instead they accumulate in the environment. This not only puts our families at risk but also the generations that follow. Dr. Lewis has put her medical practice aside and is devoting her time to doing something about this problem. She has authored a book, The Great Healthy Yard Project, and begun an initiative that educates the public about the risks to our drinking water. She helps people understand what they can do to have beautiful yards and gardens without chemicals and offers up a challenge to homeowners to join her in her quest to protect our drinking water and in turn our community at large. Here are some additional facts and sources if you would like to learn more: • The USGS has found at least one pesticide in most streams and lakes nationwide, and half of groundwater wells. • The EPA has found enough fertilizers in 70 percent of the streams in the northeast that they are considered of poor quality to support life. • Fertilizers lead to blue green algae blooms, seen in over 50 lakes in New York State and also in salt water bodies. • Water is a shared resource. The Magothy aquifer supplies all of Nassau and half of Suffolk County’s drinking water. 17 Conservation News – Fall/Winter 2015 • We get fish and shellfish from Long Island Sound and swim in it. • Synthetic pesticides and herbicides are endocrine disrupting chemicals and the Endocrine Society position papers directly link them with an increased incidence of diseases caused by disruption of hormones including breast and prostate cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, abnormal neurologic development and diabetes. • Glyphosate, the most commonly used herbicide, was recently labeled a probable carcinogen by the World Health Organization.
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