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.