I've received numerous emails and public support about a planting the seed for a strong focus on Long Beach's marine environment.
I appreciate those of you who engaged me with you alternative site ideas.
The best idea I heard was inviting Hofstra, or another higher education organization (New School, NYU, CUNY, SUNY, etc.) to develop a marine laboratory which interoperates with the Long Beach School District (internships),Town of Hempstead (authority over our waterways), and the city of Long Beach (who have boats (former marine police unit assets) which are not being used, and can be donated a Long Beach marine laboratory organization.
I'm most appreciative that those of you who are supportive of this vision, understand that the ethical thing to do is to start enriching our waterways with the same eco-systems that have been deteriorated by natural, and human impact for the last hundred years. ( Our waterways used to have five inlets, and when they filled the inlets to create Long Beach, our north bay became more stagnant, and our shellfish population is a solution for our environmental, and economic conundrum.
Since Sandy, the focus (as expected) has been on the relocation of sewage treatment outflow pipes, and from Bay Park, Laurence, Long Beach, Atlantic Beach, etc. . The focus however has completely lacked the data, let alone information on how the nitrogen source of nutrients that the outflow pipes have provided to support the shellfish populations in those areas will be replaced.
We need a concentrated effort to educate our community that once moving outflow pipes from our back bays and out to the ocean will have specific impacts on our environment. If you scaled the situation up to our own Post Sandy situation, A Family wouldn't invest to move back into Long Beach, if their children's schools were closed, if their job wasn't open to support them with a sustainable income, if there wasn't a hospital within 20 minutes, and if no infrastructure was repaired for them to ultimately survive.
Looking back on our waterway neighbor to the North, we have had massive sewage leaks within Reynold's Channel in the past, which have been documented by amateur videographers who are very concerned about our environment. Our waterways have not had detrimental algae blooms which are harmful to organisms in and around them. These algae blooms happen in neighboring waterways (for i.e. Shinnecock Bay, East Moriches Bay, Quantuck Bay, etc. ) We here in Long Beach, have the fortune of comfortably reading about these neighboring eco-systems turn un-swimmable every year and their choice to "Remove the outflow pipe without doing bio-ethical research first," is most likely the main factor in why their algae blooms persist without adequate filtration.
Yesterday a protest, outside of the T.O.H. Town Hall meeting, reactively demanding officials to divert the outflow pipes into the Ocean in order to "Clean the Bays" was held. Simultaneously there was no afternoon meeting at the Long Beach marine lab, by marine to collaborate data and information for preventing brown tides from happening when this sewage plant decision is inevitably made. There was also no symposium happening with members from local schools, or universities to direct concerted resources to Long Beach's impending "clean water conundrum."
There were no meetings because the City of Long Beach doesn't have a marine laboratory. Stony Brook focuses its resources on the Moriches, and Shinnecock Bay. Cornell focuses their resources on the Peconic Bay. The Town of Hempstead has a department, but it's stretched across all of its waterways, and they do not have a hatchery. That translates into having no resources for repopulating Reynold's Channel with pragmatically sustainable amounts of shellfish. The status quo has been untouched, but after the Devotion our neighbors are putting into the environment post Sandy, I feel that we're finally capable of righting this boat towards a progressive horizon.
