What a fantastic day. There were 450 visitors to the Point Whitehorn park and Beach Watchers were busy talking to people the whole time. Visitors were interested and engaged in what we wanted to share. Hats off to Sue Brown, Wendy Harris, and Dawn LaTurco for pulling this off! Special thanks to Heather Mackay for pulling great activities and ideas together and providing such incredible information to our team.
Beach Watcher Teams are Pulling Together
Our Beach Monitoring team is off and running. This group has great support this year and I’m very pleased! They have already monitored the site on Point Roberts and have the whole summer planned out. If you would like to get involved, however, it’s never too late. Just let me know and I’ll put you in touch with the group.
Other project teams are coming together now a well after a brief pause. We are simultaneously working on some internal assessments at WSU Extension and that had me sidetracked for a bit. So my apologies go to our new Beach Watchers.
The Youth Education Team, Chuckanut Bay Education, and Rain Gardens Teams will be coming together very soon. I expect we’ll pull our Festivals and Events team and our Continuing Education Teams together just a little later in the summer.
If you would like to know more about the projects these teams are working on and/or get involved in the planning stages just let me know and I’ll get you plugged in.
Stormwater Bar
Thank you Dennis Jones for bringing this gem to our attention!
Watershed-Friendly Gardening Video
The City's BTV channel (cable channel 10) will be airing the watershed-friendly gardening video again through June 15. Here is the schedule:
Fri at 8 a.m.
Wed and Thu at 11 a.m.
Sun at noon
Sat at 2 p.m.
Mon and Sat at 11 p.m.
Garden-to-Garden
Speaking of gardening, have you ever wondered how “greener” gardening pencils out compared to traditional landscaping? Below is a link to a neat project in Santa Monica California that set out to measure the installation costs, and ongoing maintenance of a native garden compared to a traditional garden. The installation cost for the native garden was higher but the garden used only 1/5 the water, generated only 1/3 the green waste, and required just 1/4 of the labor of the traditional garden. Neat!
http://www.sustainablesites.org/cases/show.php?id=1
Another small step towards sustainability – reusable snack bags
Thanks Jennifer, for sending this link to me.
http://snacktaxi.com/
What do You Get When You Save Water? Energy!
“Beginning in the early 1990s, the Santa Clara Valley Water District got serious about water conservation. . . .The results have been impressive: a savings of 370,000 acre-feet of water in 13 years. (A typical household uses one acre-foot of water per year).
But perhaps even more significant have been the energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: 1.42 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 335 million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equal to taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year.”
Read more about it here:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/04/04/saving-energy-water-santa-clara/
And What Could we Get if we Saved Enough Energy? A Healthy Ocean Ecosystem.
Here’s a nice simple explanations of ocean acidification:
http://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/video/flash/acidification-1.html
And Here’s More on our Impacts on the Ocean
“Climate change, fishing and commercial shipping top the list of threats to the ocean off the West Coast of the United States.”
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=114704&org=OLPA&from=news
I was thinking that a display showing how sea shells dissolve in an acidic environment would be powerful. Would anyone be interested in pulling that together?
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