On Sustaining our Precious Water Resources in the Oswego River Basin and the Cayuga Lake Watershed

William E. Dugan III, Aurora, NY
Tied for 1st Place, Adult Category

For the past one hundred years in Cayuga County, as the economy rose and fell and rose and fell again, following outside world business patterns and affected by the various wars, little attention has been paid to our proximal asset, the clean fresh water in Cayuga Lake. Our population growth seems to have created a threshold in our attitudes toward environment, and particularly in regard to clean fresh water. Witness the size of the bottled water department in any decent supermarket.

Bill Dugan

However, our knowledge base of environmental impact on Cayuga Lake in particular, and the bigger World in general, is woefully small, when statistics and hard data are necessary for intelligent action. Therefore, the first step in our process is to become educated on our own backyard, because we will see no difference in a thousand other environments in the rest of planet Earth. The same natural forces that were here before us, and have made and balanced our environment, are still in play. We, as humans, are literally and figuratively, dumping where we eat, and upsetting the delicate balance of nature, in direct relationship to our increasing numbers.

The second step is to set up a system to control and shape environmental impacts Any system that is designed will eventually require enforcement through the legal system. And the current legal system surrounding controlled environment is created by and influenced by, politicians. The back end of any felony law is the punishment section, and currently environmental law is so weak that it is not considered as important as all other felony or misdemeanor crimes. So we have to be certain that the system set up is not subverted by political action committees, greedy politicians, or lenient judges. I believe it will take fallout from a major environmental disaster to achieve this goal.

The third step is to take the accumulated knowledge, and the new protection codes, and incorporate them into primary education curricula. There is room for adding more real world topics to primary and secondary education, as with today’s schooling, we seem to be teaching our children to operate in a world that no longer exists. And as part of those new curriculum vitae, teach the students to be activists.

As our internet information system expands geometrically, we need to create a centralized clearinghouse for environmental information, current world-wide and local events and issues, and a tightly controlled scientific kernel, which would present only the latest and most proven information on all facets of environmental interactions. Call it a modified environmental Wikipedia, carrying not only bad news, but also the good news of successful saves. Think of the personal impact on a concerned activist reading of effective actions in other problem areas.

And that brings on the topic of our personal behaviors. We are not too far removed from being hunter-gatherers. The comfortable surroundings of the hunting pack, the local church groups, and the ritual rich fraternal and service organizations do not attract or maintain young members, as the content meant more in ancient and older times. Witness the average or median age in any one of those institutions: access to massive information systems removes the need for ritual in our best young and brightest. Figure out where they are going and key into that flow to get our message across.

So attention to Cayuga Lake is selfish when we really need to understand the universal picture, and acknowledge that it affects the larger Oswego River Basin. Probably need to join with a similar group over there to do a really thorough job.

Conclusion: Pull out the existing Cayuga Lake Watershed study, and expand on it. Go for funding for comprehensive testing of inflowing rivers, streams, creeks and ditches. You cannot blame anybody for polluting unless you can prove it. In addition to the planetarium in Southern Cayuse Central School, put in lysimeters so the best and brightest have a chance to look downward for a challenge. Finally, find out politically how to shut down the landfill time bomb in Seneca County, just a short distance from the Cayuga Lake shore.