Welcome to our blog! Think of it as a place where you can take part in the conversation about protecting our home state of Connecticut and our extraordinary natural resource, Long Island Sound.
Water is one of the remarkable things about our region. There is the Sound, of course, but there are also 2,000 miles of rivers in Connecticut and many more miles in New York. I’d be willing to bet that there is a body of water less than a mile from your home. These bodies of water nourish our spirits and enrich our society.
However, our waterways are in trouble. About 80 miles of rivers in Connecticut receive overflows of raw sewage during storms, according to the Connecticut Council on Environmental Quality. There are unacceptable numbers of beach closings every year due to health concerns. The western end of the Sound becomes a “dead zone” each year in the late summer due to man-made pollution.
What a change from even a half century ago, when some of our rivers were thick with fish during spawning season. Go back to the eighteenth century, and you learn that New Yorkers ate more oyster than any other kind of meat. Daniel Webster once called the Sound the Mediterranean of the Western Hemisphere. Our waterways are capable of extraordinary bounty, and extraordinary beauty, and we are beginning to get that beauty and bounty back. A few decades of serious effort have already begun to show promise, as evidenced by the reappearance of porpoises in the Sound two summers in a row and some rivers that are coming back to life.
Really bringing back the Sound and our rivers, as well as protecting our land and cleaning our air, will take a lot of hard work and we will need your help. Extraordinary things happen when we work together. Visit our website often, and please help us protect our beautiful home state and Long Island Sound.
Posted by Don Strait, executive director of CFE/Save the Sound