Where on Long Island are you seeking to protect and restore? Which of the thousands of parks, recreational areas, and public spaces should we be focussing on? What is it in your community that needs your stewardship?
What vacant lot is overrun with invasive vines? Where must we return habitat?
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There are 13 towns on Long Island, between Nassau and Suffolk, and 89 villages. They are need our help. Adopt a park. Become its protector. Identify what invasive plants have come, and what is still native. Work with The Long Island Conservancy to develop a plan to restore precious native habitat on this very crowded island.
Long Island’s wildlife is vanishing due to wholesale habitat destruction. The island quadrupled in population since World War II. If Nassau and Suffolk were together its own country, it would be the 4th most densely populated in the world, with Bangladesh. Like Bangladesh, Long Island is threatened by flooding and sea level rise, and has very poor sewage infrastructure, with 560K septic tanks between the two counties, and with 71% of all Suffolk County on septics.
Much has been made of how this massive infusion of nitrogen into our surface water from septics has contributed to the fact that the New York State DEC has listed every body of water on Long Island as impaired, with a whole panoply of algal blooms decimating our marine and estuarine environments wholesale.
In the process, in our view, the contributions of landscaping and lawn care practices and street runoff has been sorely underplayed as we assess how we can possibly build a truly sustainable Long Island, with all the challenges that implies. We need to look at the degree to which habitat restoration and stormwater management can help to improve surface water quality even while we seek to grappled with the long term and expensive challenge of replacing 200,000 outmoded septic systems with what would denitrify the effluent to acceptable levels.
Every property that elects to “leave the leaves” and create habitat is part of the solution.
Everyone who starts the journey, learns what is native and what is not, is helping to build a sustainable future. We like PictureThis! Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be really good at plant identification.
Everyone that switches to electric mowers, blowers, trimmers, etc, is helping. A gas powered blower in an hour produces as much pollution as a pickup driven 3900 miles, and produces noise levels of up do 100 decibels. Why do that to your neighbors?
Everyone that goes manual — rakes, push mowers, shears — is really helping.