I work for an international utility. While it is focusing on global programs to reduce its expenses, its revenue stream is from numerous innocuous, local systems. We just ‘do it’ and make those local sources work. Wetland restoration is no different. In assembling the big, global picture, recall from your Computer 101 class that, there are several thousand pixels comprising that screen.

The big picture may be daunting, but we learned in Project Management 101 how to cope. Find a little piece and chip away. NY-CWRP is doing just that. But a few years old, and with a few members, we have at least five projects underway. We will do much more, Partner!

For instance, our Partnership has an undeveloped educational component in its mission. Working with youth groups for decades, I have witnessed our culture developing chronic “biophobia”. Society needs to assimilate – rather than divorce itself – from the outdoor ethic. Isn’t there a parable about good, mature conservationists first have to have dirt flowing through their fingers, regularly, at an early age?

So how do we get the video gaming industry to encode “Warcraft” that engages not a virtual gunfight, but rather a strategy to entice young players to accumulate an arsenal of ‘fixes’ to our global – or their local – environmental issues? Learn to think young, to develop participatory projects ‘in their back yards’. Do you have an idea?

Can you think of a program that entices preteens and teenagers to tear themselves away from the video screens? To actually look, smell, feel, taste, and hear the wetland environment? To learn to identify swamp trees and to understand why and what it takes for those species to grow to maturity, and to observe what the understory is and how it changes as the canopy climaxes? And how it all changes again when the trees come down – naturally, or for the mall that houses the next audiovisual outlet. Is there no ecological “SIM City” that can be as competitive and fixating as “Doom”?

Inland waters flow to the oceans. The biosphere tells us its limits, yet the economy dictates how we live - and where. Daniel Suzuki opines that by 2014 ocean fisheries will no longer be economically viable. Such global thinking is overwhelming and depressing. But it is not doom and gloom; the productive attitude is not “we’re screwed, so why bother?” Think local, act local.

I’ll bet that most of you reading this are suburbanites. You left the city. For various reasons, but many of you left to have your own ‘space’ in green surroundings. You, as do I, contribute to urban sprawl, to the development of relatively short-lived strip malls. Lots of these developments we cherish damaged freshwater and coastal wetland systems. As horizontal malls move back to vertical, can you think of innovations to recreate aquatic systems?

Think local, act local. We need passionate people to work with municipal officials. They – nay YOU, can help to identify floodway encroachment, to propose projects that foster recovery of green spaces/corridors along drainage ‘ditches’, and make an asset for the community. You can influence better planning by bringing your employer into the CWRP fold. Your company can pledge in-kind goods, cash, or volunteer service teams to help orchestrate a wetland restoration project, or a cleanup day of “that dirty eyesore of an old ditch/waterfront”. Community values, like that of your house, can have more “curb appeal”. United, in NY-CWRP, the effort becomes easier, because we each share a piece of that bigger picture.

Think local, act local. Our Partnership wants to see scores of little estuarine, wetland and riparian enhancements and restoration efforts in each community. In the backyards, publicized in the local paper, and highlighted at the county fairs by consortiums of garden clubs, scout troops, college professors and high school environmental clubs – aided by the NY Corporate Wetlands Restoration Partnership – with your company as a member. My company supports this mission. Will you? I invite you to contact me or any of our Partners if you are inclined to help us ‘turn some dirt’!

Thank you,

Scott Shupe
Chairman, NY-CWRP