Stop Killing Striped Bass with Excessive Lawn Fertilizer
Green lawns can coexist with healthy fish and you can save money while cleaning our shores of rotting algae.
On a hot July day, sixteen striped bass, a horseshoe crab, and an unidentified crab were found dead on the shore of Little Pond, a salt pond in Falmouth. Fish swam into a harmful algal bloom and died quickly from the lack of oxygen. The town responded swiftly with a bylaw to reduce lawn fertilizing by 80 percent, from five pounds to one pound nitrogen per 1,000 square feet of healthy lawn. The fertilizer industry went to the state. Falmouth people were mandated by the state to apply five pounds of fertilizer if they wanted their lawns to stay green.
Fortunately for the marine life of Falmouth, the local state senator was at the time President of the Senate. She amended a budget bill to exempt Falmouth from the state rule, restoring the town's right to home rule when it came to lawn care.
Act with the Ocean River Institute for responsible lawn stewardship without the toxic runoff into our waterways. We ask for your voice; we ask for your stories and we ask for your support.
Tell Beacon Hill the 350 other municipalities in Massachusetts, "the Bay State," also have rights to clean water, healthy fish, rivers not clogged by green slime, and algae-free summer beaches. They also would not mind saving time, effort and money on unneeded lawn fertilizer that pollutes.
"An Algal Bloom of Epic Proportions" headlines the Santa Cruz Waves (June 29, 2015). Gary Griggs writes: "The entire west coast is experiencing a harmful algal bloom of unprecedented size that extends from Central California to Washington State ... Massive blooms of phytoplankton, or microscopic floating algae such as diatoms, are common along the central coast of California in the late spring and summer. Just like the weeds emerging in your garden in the spring, when the weather warms and nutrients are provided ... the plants in the coastal ocean bloom like a huge garden."
Tune in to Rob's podcast with K. C. Armstrong on Women's Radio Network on striped bass and dogfish. Rob talks about his work with the Massachusetts Striped Bass Association (recreational) and Massachusetts Commercial Striped Bass Association to successfully sue the U.S. Government for not taking an ecosystem-based management approach to management of herring, the primary forage fish of striped bass. Rob also talks with K.C. about dogfish and how one can save both fish and local fishing communities by eating more dogfish, a fish that can be mistaken for cod and haddock when deep-fried.
Black Sea Bass and Green crabs moving north are the topics of the program with K.C. Armstrong that preceded the striped bass episode. As cod and lobster are moving north to cooler waters, the black sea bass has been expanding its range and preying on green crab, also an invasive species from warmer climates. Rob then comments on the article published by Rebecca Kessler about how fish and marine animals are responding to environmental changes in the supposedly warming Gulf of Maine, and explains the "barn door open" "barn door closed" phenomenon. Rob closes with an explanation and history about estimating fish populations and how eating seafood and eating local can help us reduce our carbon footprint.
Patagonia Store Boston Staff hosted
Plight of the Torpedo People at an event with photographer/filmmaker Chris Burkard to benefit the Ocean River Institute.
Talkin' Striped Bass, Stoppin' Algal Blooms at Patagonia Boston
Saturday, August 8th, Harper and Michela will be tabling at the Patagonia Boston store at 346 Newbury Street. Come by and talk with us about protecting striped bass and cleaning our beaches by changing our lawn care practices. One can have a green lawn and healthy waters while saving money.
We spent Saturday at Patagonia two weeks ago and had a great time talking with people. We thank Patagonia for hosting us, and thanks to everyone that stopped by.
Come on by Saturday Aug 8. Let's talk about what's in your ocean. Tell us your fish tales. Together, we're growing a vocal coalition for clean beaches and healthy fish in Massachusetts.
Hey, Beacon Hill, can you hear us now? Where'd you get that rain jacket with good quality zipper, seams sealed inside and pit zips?
We want clean beaches and clear water with plenty of healthy marine life. If you want this too, please make a donation today. Your financial participation will help us achieve needed resources to stop nitrogen pollution off of lawns that feeds toxic algal blooms. Together with other donors, we are gaining every town the freedom enjoyed by Falmouth to save money by fertilizing only when the lawn is in need of nitrogen and not whenever the industry is in need of a sale.
Opinions 4 Good (Op4G) is an online market research company that provides funding for nonprofits. Since partnering with Op4G, ORI has received a total of $1,177 in donated survey incentives from our panel members. For each new member that joins this month, Op4G will donate $2 to Ocean River Institute. Long-term participation will provide additional donations throughout the year, with the average survey paying $3.50 for about 10 minutes of your time.
Click here to sign up. Every $2 helps us get more people involved in saving fish, sharks, and our oceans. After you sign up, please share this opportunity with friends on facebook or twitter.
Once again Macy's is saving oceans and rivers by partnering with the Ocean River Institute. Donate $5 to ORI and we'll mail you a card for 25% off your total purchase at Macy's Stores. Simply write "Shop for a Cause" in the Additional Comments field at the bottom of the online donation form and ORI will send you the card. Click for more info.
Amid accusations of “capitulation” and “left extremism,” panelists at the Democracy Rising conference heatedly debated what it would mean for Greece to stay in—or leave—the eurozone.
Speaking into a camera broadcasting live from a Washington, D.C., house party Wednesday night, Sen. Bernie Sanders renewed his presidential campaign plea for a "political revolution." Income inequality, the corrosive effects of money in politics and, memories of his Netroots Nations meltdown in mind, the death of Sandra Bland featured prominently in the address, which the campaign said reached "100,000 supporters" attending "more than 3,500 organizing meetings in all 50 states across the country."
The Vermont independent's energetic upstart bid has enjoyed a steady climb in the polls and the spectacle of thousands of supporters packing convention halls and hotel ballrooms from New Hampshire to Texas to see the candidate deliver his stem-winding stump speech.
In New York City, about 300 devotees gathered at a bar called The Royal near Union Square to chat, cheer and share their personal information with volunteers dispatched to collect names and email addresses for the campaign. Three supporters lined up outside with a long banner emblazoned with the familiar call to arms: #FeelTheBern.
Despite its impressive $15 million second-quarter fundraising haul, Sanders remains deeply reliant on the creativity and guile of seasoned outside organizers. "People for Bernie," the group in charge of organizing Wednesday night's gathering in New York, occasionally coordinates with the candidate's team but operates on its own, as its founders insist, to advance and empower its own members.
The Wednesday night meet-up enjoyed a lively opening act, with an emcee cajoling attendees to take the stage and make the case for "Bernie." When no one took the opportunity, she asked for them to bark out their prized issues. All but "repeal the Second Amendment" were met with rowdy cheers (Sanders has a mixed record on gun control issues). READ MORE
In addition to filling potholes, Bernie Sanders focused on the Soviet Union, Cuba and the Sandinistas.
Bernie Sanders is pictured six months after winning the mayoral election in Burlington, Vt. | AP Photo
In June 1986, the House of Representatives voted to send $100 million in U.S. military aid to Nicaragua’s contra rebels. It was a major victory for Ronald Reagan’s hardline anti-communist foreign policy.
In Burlington, Vermont, Mayor Bernie Sanders sprang into action. Sanders quickly called an emergency board of aldermen meeting to discuss how the lakeside college town should respond.
This was not a surprising or unprecedented move for the young socialist mayor, who considered it his small city’s responsibility to craft a foreign policy in opposition to the Reagan administration’s. The previous summer, for instance, Sanders had presided over a local meeting to protest Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.
But even in lefty Vermont, his foreign policy activism provoked eye rolling. The Grenada episode led the Burlington Free Press to complain that the city’s leaders were debating foreign issues “while legitimate city business was ignored.” Seven of the city’s 13 aldermen skipped the Nicaragua meeting, with many complaining that Sanders was, once again, wasting time on a far-flung cause.
“People tried to portray him as neglecting his mayoral responsibilities as he was doing these other international things,” acknowledged Terry Bouricius, a longtime Sanders confidante, and an alderman at the time, who dismissed the criticism.
Sanders was undeterred. To the young socialist mayor, all politics was global. “[H]ow many cities of 40,000 have a foreign policy? Well we did,” he wrote in his 1997 memoir, Outsider in the House. “I saw no magic line separating local, state, national and international issues.”
The alderman’s meeting produced a vague plan for a donation to the Nicaraguan people, compensation for what Sanders called their suffering at the hands of the U.S.-backed contra rebels. (The tale is described in W.J. Conroy’s Challenging the Boundaries of Reform: Socialism in Burlington.) The result was, Sanders later conceded, “more symbolic than anything.”
It often was. But that never stopped him.
As he takes on Hillary Clinton, Sanders, now a Vermont senator, is drawing huge crowds with a potent message about income inequality and corporate greed in America. But in Burlington, Sanders was as passionate about global politics as he was about local ones. His city hall office on Burlington’s Church Street became an unlikely pocket of resistance to Reagan’s anti-communist policies. His annual budgets prominently featured updates on “world peace.” (Burlington’s incineration in a nuclear war, he insisted, would be a very local issue indeed.) He acted as a self-styled peace envoy, paying visits to Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. He even honeymooned in the USSR, an experience he has called “very strange.”
Through it all, Sanders directly linked his city’s mundane struggles with issues like housing and infrastructure to the grandest geopolitical themes. “Not only was the war against Nicaragua illegal and immoral, it was an outrageous waste of taxpayer money. As a mayor, I wanted more federal funds for affordable housing and economic development,” Sanders wrote in his memoir.
There’s little evidence that Sanders managed to influence the American ship of state during his tenure as Burlington mayor from 1981 to 1989. A collection of Sanders’s mayoral papers at the University of Vermont includes numerous messages to Congress and the White House relaying Burlington’s opinions on various policies. (One December 1986 letter from Sanders to Reagan notified him of a 7,001 to 5,914 city referendum condemning the House’s aid to the contras). The records show fewer replies, although Republican Rep. Trent Lott of Mississippi, or someone writing on his behalf, did politely acknowledge a notice of the city’s support for a nuclear freeze. “Burlington’s foreign policy had no discernable impact on the anti-Marxist proclivity of the Reagan and Bush administrations,” Conroy concluded in his book.
Approached in a Senate building, Sanders promised a later interview but was unavailable before POLITICO’s deadline.
It’s impossible to understand the rise of Bernie Sanders without understanding the way America’s role in the world captivated him.
Substantively, Sanders wasn’t hugely out of step with liberal Democrats who loathed Reagan’s foreign policy — and who lived in visceral fear of nuclear war. But he stood out for the emphasis and effort he devoted to those subjects, and the controversy they produced even in one of America’s most liberal cities.
“World peace is, in my mind, a very local issue,” Sanders declared on the first page of his 1987 city budget message, one of many archived official documents examined by POLITICO for this story. “If a nuclear war takes place, the citizens of our city will perish with the rest of the nation. That’s a local issue.”
Sanders’s foreign travel demonstrated that he was no armchair activist. In the summer of 1985 he traveled to Managua on the invitation of the socialist revolutionary government of Daniel Ortega, whom Reagan had targeted for overthrow but whose cause Sanders called “heroic.” (Sanders had drawn the Sandanistas’ attention thanks to his pursuit of a sister-city relationship between Burlington and the Nicaraguan town of Puerto Cabezas, which endures to this day.)
Sanders brought a local reporter with him for the weeklong trip, which featured a meeting with Ortega himself. Sanders said he was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the country — “I was treated in a special way,” he later said — and hoped to dispel what he called false U.S. media reports about the Sandinistas. (Ortega, who serves as president today, did not respond to an interview request via Nicaragua’s embassy in Washington.)
Burlington was divided on the wisdom of Sanders’s trip, according to Conroy’s account. The Free Press snarked that “the mayor fancies himself a budding diplomat capable of making intelligent decisions about the merits of a government on a long-distance basis. It is the classic mistake made by amateurs.” One Republican alderman warned that the trip revealed where Sanders’s “real interests lie,” and charged that “Burlington is nothing but a stepping stone in his long-range ambitions and plans.”
Alvaro Huerta: By viciously attacking Latino immigrants, Trump makes it crystal clear to one of the nation’s fastest growing demographic and key voting groups that they are not wanted in the GOP.
Ellen Brown: In the modern global banking system, all banks need a credit line with the central bank in order to be part of the payments system. Choking off that credit line was a form of blackmail the Greek government couldn’t refuse.
David Swanson: Don't listen to the pro-war propaganda even when it's parroted by the pro-peace advocates. It doesn't improve your thinking, your understanding, or the prospects in the long run of avoiding war.
Elephants could be gone from the wild in the next few decades if something is not done right now. The U.S. is the second largest retail market for ivory (after China), and we must adopt rules here at home to close the loopholes that allow the illegal trade to flourish.
Thankfully, while President Obama was in Kenya, he announced a new measure that will significantly curtail the ivory trade in the United States. Tragically, just two days later, poachers killed five elephants in Tsavo West National Park in Kenya. The carcasses of an adult female and her four offspring were found lying in the park with their tusks hacked off. Elephant poaching has reached crisis levels and the issue needs to be addressed quickly. Now, we need to urge the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to quickly finalize this rule.
SEE BELOW FOR THE 1001STTIME THE REITERATION OF DEMAND PAYMENT OF RETIREMENT PAY WHICH SHELL REFUSED TO HONOR IN THE PRESENCE AND DEEMED APPROVAL OF THE HONORABLE MAGISTRATES OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE PHILIPPINES
