The start of a new year is a great time for self-reflection and an opportunity to work toward positive changes in ourselves and our communities. Join us in making a clean water resolution for 2015! Here are some ideas on how you can help make a difference for clean water:
Explore Baltimore’s Local Waterways
Spend time with family outside while getting to know your local parks and streams.
Anyone who has spent time around Baltimore’s waterways has seen the plastic bottles, bags, and litter along our stream banks. Keep disposables out of our waterways by incorporating reusable alternatives into your daily life.
Practice bringing reusable bags to the grocery store
Use a reusable water bottle and coffee mug
Replace lunchtime ziplocks with reusable snack bags
Reduce your Stormwater Footprint
In suburban and urban areas, paved surfaces, rooftops, and lawns create polluted stormwater runoff that empties into our rivers, streams and Baltimore Harbor. Reduce your stormwater footprint with daily activities like picking up after your pet or larger projects like conservation landscaping that reduce pollution and utilize rainwater.
Try Meatless Monday
No matter how you do it, reducing meat consumption has considerable environmental and public health benefits.
So what does meat have to do with clean water? Good question!
Agriculture is the single largest source of nutrient and sediment pollution in the Chesapeake Bay and food animal production is disproportionately responsible.
The animals we raise for food create a lot of waste (89,000lbs per second!) which directly and indirectly discharges into our waterways contributing to hypoxic dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay.
By shifting to a more plant-based diet, you are helping to protect regional water resources. Give it a try! It may be easier than you think.
Use your Civic Voice
Stand up for a cause that you believe in and make your voice heard by staying informed, contacting your local politicians, and reporting pollution. With the upcoming legislative session starting this month, keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to take action on water quality issues.
On Tuesday, December 13, Blue Water Baltimore showed Maryland’s Attorney General, Doug Gansler, around our Harbor! As part of his River Audit program, Gansler spent the day learning about the water quality issues facing Baltimore’s Harbor and about our plans to help the community address them. Gansler conducts four river audits each year. The audits…
Controlling stormwater pollution is a year-round concern, one that matters in winter just as much as spring and summer. When the temperature drops, vast amounts of deicing chemicals are dumped by the truckload across our roads, sidewalks, and driveways. With each thaw, all that salt washes directly into our waterways. Freezing temperatures also lead to broken pipes, which…
This post is a joint entry by Debra Lenik, Volunteer Coordinator, and David Flores, Program Manager for Water Quality and Pollution Monitoring. Debra: I may complain about long hours in the field during the spring and fall, but by the time January comes around, I’m definitely itching to be outside again. So when I received…
[NOTE: Debra Lenik is the staff Volunteer Coordinator at Blue Water Baltimore, and first joined us in 2010 as part of the AmeriCorps Volunteer Maryland program.] A colleague recently asked me where I saw myself in ten years. Holy mackerel, I thought. Ten years?! I’m 23 years old now and of course, that’s as far…
[Note: This post was written by Dana Puzey, program manager for the Water Audit program, and is the first of a two-part series on how you can reduce your ecological footprint as an individual.] When you are tuned into local environmental issues, you hear the rallying cries against water pollution all the time: Save the…
Last week, in the first part of this two part series on water pollution, I explored the connection between energy, water, and pollution. This week my focus is on the home: how water and pollution are connected to where we rest our heads. You’ve likely heard the terms stormwater and urban runoff (if you’d like…