Cayuga Lake and its creeks are at the heart and center of our lives, and need our celebration and protection. The Cayuga Lake Watershed Network urges people to embrace Cayuga Lake with creek and lakefront cleanups. Beginning in mid-April 2010, community groups “Embraced the Lake” with numerous creek and waterfront cleanups. View the slide show below and go to www.cayugalake.org for more information.
Mid-April: Cayuga Lake waterfront in Aurora – Peachtown Elementary School students and teachers picked up lakefront trash from the Wells College Boat House to Payne’s Creek. Barb Post reports: “I had fun hoisting the largest carp skull I’ve seen on a stick for the little boys who were working! I also found some beautiful goose wing bones.”
Mid-April: Mill Creek and other King Ferry-area creeks draining to the lake – the Direct Streams water monitoring group and neighbors, a Girl Scout troop, and Poplar Ridge Friends worked over several weeks to collect trash from these steep, beautiful creeks. Ronda Fessenden helped with trash disposal.
April 16-18: Fall Creek in Dryden – Members of the Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition (DRAC) cleaned up trash at several creekside Dryden nature preserves – the Genung, Etna, and Campbell preserves – and at the parking area next to Fall Creek below the Route 13 bridge.
May 1: Cascadilla Creek tributary in Ellis Hollow – Girl Scout Troop 1107 trekked down the creek bed to gather trash and a wild assortment of mystery items, and made a pile of recyclable metals, including car body parts and bedsprings.
May 8: Fall Creek below Ithaca Falls – Trout Unlimited reeled in a strange assortment of banged-up items, and caught a bunch more down at the Cayuga Street bridge.
May 8: Wells Campus creeks that run to the lake, Aurora – The Campus Greens report: “We collected over 10 bags of trash and recyclables as well as 4 tires, what we suspect to be some sort of muffler, some scrap metal, shoes, and other strange stuff. We faced the storm, cleaned up the creeks on and surrounding campus, and everyone received prizes.”
Coming this fall: Seneca-Cayuga Canal in downtown Seneca Falls – The Mynderse Academy (Seneca Falls high school)’s Envirothon Team will do a fall cleanup as the tourism season winds down.
Thank You to:
Ray Benjamin, Ithaca Streets and Facilities; and Jack Bush, Dryden Highway Department, for picking up the trash!
Ludgate Farms Gourmet Country Market for providing snacks to the Fall Creek and Cascadilla cleanups!
Embrace the Lake: Is your group interested in doing a creek cleanup on one of the 34 major creeks that drain to Cayuga Lake, a lakeshore cleanup, or along one of the many hundreds of smaller creeklets and streams that give their waters to Cayuga Lake? The Network supplies “Embrace the Lake” posters and flyers, gloves, trash bags from American Rivers, and snacks. We help with publicity, and make the contact for trash pick-up afterwards.
Spring and mid-late fall are best, when creekside vegetation is not too high. Plan ahead for fall 2010 or spring 2011! Contact Hilary Lambert at steward@cayugalake.org
Cayuga Lake and its creeks are at the heart and center of our lives, and we need to celebrate and protect them.
What: We are embracing and encircling Cayuga Lake with creek and lakefront cleanups, starting this spring and into early summer. Thirty-four major creeks drain to the lake, along with hundreds of small straight streams. In cooperation with the Floating Classroom and the Center for Environmental Sustainability, the Cayuga Lake Watershed Network is organizing a rolling schedule of weekend creek and waterfront cleanups around the lake. We invite individuals, families, schools, churches, businesses, Scouts and community groups to take part.
When: We’ll have a celebration and kickoff cleanup during the weekend of April 16-18, the Global Days of Service prior to the 40th anniversary of Earth Day the following weekend. A rolling schedule will keep these cleanups going until the plants grow too high for effective cleanups (hard to imagine right now!).
Where: Anywhere in the Cayuga Lake Watershed, where waters are flowing in the direction of Cayuga Lake. Do you have a favorite neighborhood creek or wetland, where trash has built up? Here is your chance to get that mess cleaned up. Was your picnic spot or shoreline area along the lake marred by garbage, last fall? Let’s get that stuff out of there! A couple of communities are already organizing for a creek cleanup, but not many yet. Help celebrate and protect our creeks and lake.
Who: Individuals, families, schools, churches, Scouts, community groups. You!
As a group organizes for a cleanup, we’ll help pick a good spot along the chosen creek or waterfront area that is safe for all ages and approved by landowners, and get the word out via email, a press release to local newspapers, radio, etc. We are asking for a couple of hours of volunteer time to pick up trash and clean up around a carefully-selected area.
To help you organize a cleanup, we need the following information:
Do you want to have your own cleanup, or be a participant?
If you are doing your own cleanup, we need the coordinator for your group – name, contact information (preferably both phone and email). You might want to come up with a fun name for your group and cleanup!
Name of the creek or lake waterfront area you will be tackling.
A cleanup location – safe, with nearby parking, and landowner permission.
Provide clear directions to provide to volunteers who want to show up on the date. Tackle a do-able section with trash appropriate to your group.
A date and time period for the cleanup (two to four hours at most) and weather (rain, snow) date.
We’ll help with these tasks:
Publicity – a short news release for local newspapers, radio stations, and other places you suggest (we’ll help write and send it out).
Garbage bags to fill, a place to put the full bags, and someone to collect and dispose of them properly afterwards (we’ll help organize the pickup, and will help provide garbage bags, and gloves to wear).
A sign-in sheet for all participants (we will provide this).
Signed safety waivers for all participants (we will provide waivers).
You will need to inform participants/keep track of the following:
Adult supervision and permissions are needed for all youngsters – no unaccompanied youngsters allowed.
Appropriate clothing, hats and footwear, with possible change of clothing nearby, sunblock if it is a sunny day.
A first aid kit and access to emergency help via cell phone, etc (plan ahead!)
Refreshments (snacks, and water to drink if it is a hot day).
Someone to take photos and keep notes of what you collect.
Business Sponsorships: We are seeking donations from area businesses to help support this project. Please contact steward@ycaugalake.org for more information.
Afterwards, we’ll want to know:
How many bags of garbage did you collect?
What was the grossest thing you found?
What was the largest thing you found?
What was the weirdest thing you found?
How would you improve this event for next year?
Awards will be presented for Best, Most, Grossest,
Largest, Weirdest, etc!
How to Get Involved: Contact the Network at the following email addresses and let us know you want to get involved: amunoz@wells.edu, mbirklin@wells.edu. You can also leave us a message at 315 364-2992. Watch for information on our Web site, www.cayugalake.org . By mid-April, we’ll list groups with contact information.
I have signed on as a guinea pig for the Marcellus Challenge, by entering 2008 and 2009 NYSEG-based electric and gas use, in kWh and therms, for my 2200 square feet, single-story, 1949 house into the Green Energy Compass's online calculator created by Performance Systems Development. I then clicked on the 'Energy Use Report' and 'Peer Group Report' calculators to learn the sad news.
In comparison to the admittedly-small group of six local Ithaca area users in my peer group, I am on the bottom. Even when compared to the larger national group, I am only average. And that's bad news, because I have made the easy fixes -- switching to compact fluorescent bulbs, using power strips, keeping the wintertime house temperature at 62F in the day at 58F at night. My house has no airconditioning, no dishwasher, and up to date appliances, with new windows and doors for one end of the house, and a new roof in 2009.
However, if I am going to walk the talk of protecting water and air quality and community life from hydrofracking, I must reduce my natural gas use. We don't need no stinking hydrofracking here -- or anywhere. (Not to mention the fact that I can save thousands of dollars per year if I put some money into greater energy efficiency!)
So, I'll start making the necessary changes during 2010 at my house, and I invite you to do the same. Make your pledge to accept the Marcellus Challenge at http://www.sustainabletompkins.org/programs/marcellus-challenge/ . For your next step, join me and many others at the Marcellus Challenge Pledge-In on March 3 from 6:30-9:00 pm, Womens Community Building, 100 West Seneca Street, Ithaca NY.
Please see related article by Sue Heavenrich, "Proposed Well Draws Concern," in the 1/11/10 issue of Tompkins Weekly, also posted to Wishing Well Magazine.
Since 1986, Joe and Sarah Osmeloski have owned a 6-acre horse farm on Dryden Road/Route 13, just east of Willow Glen Cemetery and south of the intersection with Irish Settlement Road. Their property and that of the house next door are bracketed by two waterways that cascade down from the steep wooded slopes of Yellow Barn State Forest on the south side of Dryden Road.
On the west side of the Osmeloskis’ land, a small tributary of Willow Glen Creek feeds their front-yard well. Running downslope along the property line, this year-round stream provides necessary clean water for their seven horses. Further downhill this stream joins Willow Glen Creek, which parallels it a few hundred feet to the east. Willow Glen soon joins Virgil Creek, then Fall Creek, and thus to Cayuga Lake.
Until recently the Osmeloskis lived a quiet life focused on horses, chickens and dogs. Responsible landowners, they worked with NYSDEC (New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation) to obey the clean water regulations and laws required of farmers, to keep their stream and Willow Glen Creek clean for those who live downstream.
Imagine their shock when they found out in December 2009 that they were living directly downstream of a proposed natural gas well that is apparently exempt from the regulations and laws that they themselves must obey! On the open farmland slopes uphill between the Osmeloskis and Yellow Barn Forest -- bracketed by the same two waterways -- preliminary work is underway to prepare for the proposed Cook Well, which would, if approved, drill down through the Marcellus Shale to the Trenton-Black River limestone to extract natural gas at that depth.
According to information provided by DEC to the Osmeloskis, the drilling will extend downward at an angle for over 9000 feet to reach the gas at around 7500 feet below the surface. Supposedly, hydrofracking methods and chemicals are not used in Trenton-Black River gas extraction, but neither Dryden officials or the Osmeloskis yet know if this is true, or if an integration order will require surrounding neighbors to cooperate so that this well can be drilled.
Joe and Sarah are worried that their well and their stream are in danger of contamination from drilling operations in the field above, with Willow Glen Creek on the east side and their stream on the west side of the proposed drilling area. Joe says, "Why do I have to cooperate with DEC to protect water quality, and these guys do not? How crazy it that?" Sarah said she is especially concerned if both the well and the stream, "Pack it in at the same time. We have horses, dogs, a garden, chickens, and our house. How will I get clean water to all of them, if our water is contaminated?" Almost a quarter century ago, the couple purchased this land because of its plentiful clean water. They wonder if that era will come to an end soon, for reasons beyond their control.
In the face of these concerns, the Osmeloskis and members of DRAC (Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition) held a New Year Celebration of Clean Water late in the afternoon of December 31, 2009. DRAC members Hilary Lambert, Judith Pierpont and Margaret McCasland were introduced to the seven standardbred horses, the couple's three Tibetan-breed dogs, and got a glimpse of the chickens. The group walked down to the snowy horse pasture, where their stream spills out of a culvert across the ground as a refreshing year-round water supply for the horses, continuing downslope into the woods for its rendezvous with Willow Glen Creek.
After Sarah had hung a set of Tibetan prayer flags above the culvert opening that carries the stream's water into the pasture, Hilary read a Robert Frost poem, "A Brook in the City." This simple poem from the 1920s warns that when a brook is destroyed, the soul of a community is also harmed (poem provided below).
Judith Pierpont sang a song by Appalachian singer and activist Jean Ritchie, "Cool of the Day," about the beauty and value of clean land and water and the necessity of caring for them (words provided below).
Margaret McCasland called for us all to embrace renewable energy resources based on the sun by lighting a beeswax candle, and read the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force's "Statement on Hydraulic-Fracturing" written in March of 2009 (text provided below), before closing with Jake Swamp's "Giving Thanks: A Native American Good Morning Message" (published in 1995 by Lee & Lowe).
Strengthened and reassured, the small group walked back across the darkening pasture, past horses, dogs and chickens to Dryden Road where they embraced and parted, to prepare for whatever 2010 may bring.
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A Brook In The City
(c) Robert Frost
The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run --
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under,
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep.
===
Cool of the Day
(c) Jean Ritchie
Now is the cool of the day
Now is the cool of the day
This earth is a garden, the garden of my Lord
And he walks in his garden
In the cool of the day
My Lord, he said unto me
Do you like my garden so fair
You may live in this garden if you'll keep the grasses green
And I'll return in the cool of the day
Then my Lord, he said unto me
Do you like my garden so pure?
You may live in this garden if you'll keep the waters clean
And I'll return in the cool of the day
Then my Lord, he said unto me
Do you like my pastures so green
You may live in this garden if you will feed all of my sheep
And I'll return in the cool of the day
Then my Lord, he said unto me
Do you like my garden so free
You may live in this garden if you'll keep the people free
And I'll return in the cool of the day
===
Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force Statement on Hydraulic-Fracturing
The Haudenosaunee consist of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. The Haudenosaunee Nations and its people have a unique spiritual, cultural, and historic relationship with the land, which is embodied in Gayananshogowa, the Great Law of Peace. This relationship goes far beyond federal and state legal concepts of ownership, possession, or other legal rights. The Haudenosaunee people are one with the land and all that depends on the land, and consider themselves apart of it. It is the duty of the Nations’ leaders to work for a healing of the land, to protect it, and to pass it on to future generations.
The Haudenosaunee know that every part of the natural world is important and interrelated; when humans tinker more and more with the natural balance, we do so at the peril of our grandchildren. The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force engages in extensive environmental work on behalf of its people and all people, in the hope that it may hasten the process of reconciliation and bring lasting justice, peace and respect among all living beings – animal, bird, fish, plant and people – who live on Turtle Island.
Clean and abundant water is now the highest priority for human survival. The natural world is the distributor of water, according to the great systems that control our earth and its climate. It belongs to no one person, corporation, or nation. Privatization and pollution of water are fundamental violations of our human rights, and the rights of the natural world. The balance of life is predicated on sharing the Earth’s natural resources.
Our ability to live in unity and in balance with the Earth depends on each and every person at every level, from governmental departments, to property owners, to children volunteering to help plant urban trees. To be a human being carries with it a responsibility to understand our impact on the world around us and the future generations, and to act in ways to make the world better, not worse. Finding solutions that work with nature, instead of against her, is the only rational course of action to meet the challenges of our time.
The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force believes that the process of hydraulic-fracturing will devastate the natural environment over a large area and for many generations into the future. We also understand that even though the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is able to justify moving forward with this process based on a presumption of the soundness of its written policy, by requiring permits for certain activities and providing regulatory disincentives for violations to its permitting requirements, there will be unintended consequences that DEC cannot prevent.
We need only look so far as the Tully Valley, south of the Onondaga Nation Territory, and we see the unintended consequences of 100 years of solution salt mining on that valley. We look near Parachute, Colorado where a mine sprang a leak, allowing some 1.6 million gallons of fluid to soak into the arid earth. According to state records, the spill migrated underground until it seeped from a cliff side and froze into a gray pillar of ice more than 200 feet tall. When it melted, the fluids dripped into the torrid currents of Parachute Creek and finally dumped into the Colorado River. Colorado state records show that of some 1,500 spills in drilling areas since 2003, more than 300 have seeped into water. In one case, a truck carrying drilling fluids crashed into the Colorado River, where it remained partially submerged for more than three weeks.
In neighboring Wyoming, the Bureau of Land Management found a 28-mile-long plume of benzene contamination in an aquifer beneath a gigantic gas field, caused by hydraulic-fracturing. The aquifer is near a tributary to the Green River, which in turn flows into the Colorado River. More than 1,000 other cases of contamination due to hydraulic-fracturing have been documented by courts and state and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
The Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force has not been able to create a scenario by which the economic and energy benefits of hydraulic-fracturing will outweigh its known dangers and risks. DEC is one entity delegated the authority to protect our Earth and waters against contamination caused by hydraulic-fracturing by refusing to allow our Earth and its waters to be exploited in this way. We ask that the DEC partner with us to find other energy sources that do not destroy our grandchildren’s ability to live long and healthy lives.
