RI E-IQ = Rhode Island Environmental Information Quotient
What do you know about Rhode Island's natural environment?
I've just spent a little time looking for locally produced lists of Rhode Island rivers and native mammals, and I am not satisfied with the results. I don't want to rely on Wikipedia for this information ~ some Rhode Island organizations probably have reliable, comprehensive resources that would interest both children and adults, with photos and details about habits, diet, etc., of native mammals. Surely the RI Natural History Survey has a good list of native mammals. I'm sure some of the many water-related groups have the list of rivers. This is standard almanac info, and of course it's in printed reference books. But web searches on >>"RHODE ISLAND" RIVERS<< and on >>"RHODE ISLAND" "NATIVE MAMMALS"<< do not produce nice, neat complete lists.
I'd like to be wrong about this! So if you can find comprehensive lists of RI rivers and native mammals online let me know!
It should be easy for anyone to find the answers to the following questions with a quick online search, don't you think? Online answers turn up quickly for the first two questions, but the last two questions, not so much.
What are the names of the islands in Narragansett Bay? A search on >>"NARRAGANSETT BAY" ISLANDS<< easily turns up a list on providenceri.com (City of Providence website) with historical information about the approximately 30+ islands in the bay. This was written by Stuart O. Hale in the 1980s or earlier. Very interesting and informative, only it lists 22 islands, not the 30+ mentioned at the top of the chapter. Maybe the rest are smaller than Whale Rock? .... How many bay islands can you name? What islands can you see from Colt State Park?
Where are the boundaries between watersheds in Rhode Island? A search on >>"RHODE ISLAND" WATERSHEDS<< turns up a lot of resources, but I almost drowned in the flood of information I found. Excellent maps are easily located, however: The RI Critical Resources Atlas has very informative maps of each watershed. I count 12 watersheds at this site.
What are the names of Rhode Island's rivers? Search on >>"RHODE ISLAND" "RIVER NAMES"<< and the top 10 results in Google turn up a lot of wikis plus Twin River Gambling Casino. I'll ask the river experts I know and compile this list soon...
What mammals are native to Rhode Island? A search on >>"RHODE ISLAND" "NATIVE MAMMALS"<< results in lots of detailed info and many references to a 1900 book available online, but no concise, illustrated list of animals. I have a resource we use in the Master Gardener Learning Landscape program that would be a good model for such a web page.
What else should we know about Rhode Island's natural world? Amazing quantities of data are available. Let's also make it easy to grasp the basic facts about our environment.
We set goals, and then things happen. It always seems to take longer to achieve success than we can ever imagine.
That's what struck me as I reviewed my notes from the 7th Annual Land & Water Summit held on March 27, 2010, at URI. Tom Horton, the keynote speaker, has made the Chesapeake Bay's restoration his life's work. He described how the goal date for cleaning up the Chesapeake has slipped from 2010 to 2028. Voluntary compliance doesn't work well, he noted. Legislation with teeth, plus the money and will to enforce the law, are required for success. Adequate legislation and enforcement, in turn, rest on long-term monitoring and research. So restoring a large watershed like the Chesapeake (and our Rhode Island watersheds around the Narragansett Bay) takes a lot of time, money, and willpower.
For Horton, Chesapeake Bay, like Narragansett Bay, is a magnificent ecosystem coping with pollution and the overharvesting of its fish and crustacean resources, yet still resilient despite increasing human activity in and around it. He quoted Aldo Leopold ~ that "the oldest task in human history [is] to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." He stressed that grow-or-die economic models are simply unsustainable. It's all well and good for each of us individually to reduce our carbon footprint. But if the population around the Chesapeake is growing at the rate of 2 million per decade, how can enough people offset their carbon footprints enough to offset this population growth? Think about that for a moment.
We need to convince people there are viable alternatives to the never-ending-growth model, that the options are multifaceted and not either/or ~ either overeat or starve to death. Our own Greg Gerritt, who writes extensively on this topic in Prosperity for Rhode Island, could be seen nodding his head in agreement every time Horton drove this point home.
As I continue to digest all the fascinating ideas from the Summit, I've found the link to the Chafee Memorial Lecture in Washington DC in January 2010 that Horton stressed repeatedly. This lecture, "A New American Environmentalism and the New Economy," was given by James Gustave Speth, dean emeritus, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The session was videotaped and posted on the web, so we can view it when we want. [FYI, It took a long time to download on my high-speed internet connection, and there's a bit of an introduction before he starts speaking, but hang in!] Horton urged the 325 Rhode Island conservationists present at the Summit to see environmental issues in a larger, systemic context, to ally with others working for political reform and for social justice projects,... and to CONTINUALLY QUESTION "GROW OR DIE" ASSUMPTIONS.
A quote of a quote from the Chafee lecture: "Anyone who thinks that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." ~ Kenneth Boulding
Here's a shorter interview with James Gustave Speth, The Environment and Economy in Conflict to whet your appetite for the Chafee lecture:
I began this post with a sigh, but I'll end with a story that illustrates our state's motto, Hope, which Horton describes as not being able "to see your way through the tall grass." He told of a short-legged dog that actually learned to jump up high enough to get his bearings when lost in the tall grass. Encountering Tom Horton's thought is to learn to leap up for a better view.
P.S.: In light of all this rain we've endured since the weekend, here's another idea from his talk we can implement: Let's pass impervious surface tax legislation in Rhode Island.
For other reports on the 2010 Land and Water Summit, see ecoRI and search for "Conservation Summit Focuses on Land
and Water Issues"
We Rhode Islanders are experiencing the worst flooding in memory this week, with record rainfalls of 8-9 inches in two days and many of our rivers not only at flood stage but at record levels that have broken records set barely two weeks ago. And we're painfully experiencing what "WATERSHED" can mean when too much water has to drain in too little time.
A watershed is essentially a natural, intricate system for draining water from the land. The EPA describes watersheds this way:
"John Wesley Powell, scientist
geographer, put it best when he said that a watershed is:
'that area of land, a bounded
hydrologic
system, within which all living things are inextricably linked
by their
common water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic
demanded
that they become part of a community.'"
The Providence Journal published a good description of How
a river floods: Rainfall just the beginning, (by C. Eugene Emery Jr.,
Journal Staff Writer on March 30, 2010. I think I'd reword the title, though, to be "How a river floods: An extraordinary rainfall can be the last straw." The article highlights that even though the rainfall has ended, the flooding will still increase for a while before subsiding. But how we work and plan together to manage our local watersheds BEFORE the rainy days can make things better or worse than they might have been.
This rainfall is so extraordinary that no matter how well we had prepared, Rhode Island would be in an emergency. Many Rhode Islanders work hard to manage our watersheds year in and year out, among them The Friends of the Pawtuxet. I'm sure that a lot of folks don't think the Pawtuxet is their friend today as the river's waters flood their homes and streets, destroying their belongings. But our rivers will continue to need all of us to be Friends, to speak up in public meetings and reasonably deal with the issues involved in development and water management.
The worst flooding is along the Pawtuxet River. Here is the Pawtuxet River Watershed Authority description of this watershed comprised of 64 ponds, 93 brooks, 7 tributary rivers, and 18 dams:
"The Pawtuxet River watershed, located in central-western Rhode Island, is the largest watershed in the state. The river flows generally from west to east. Its headwaters are in the hills of western Rhode Island. Its mouth is in historic Pawtuxet Village between the cities of Warwick and Cranston, the state's second and third largest cities. The watershed encompasses all or portions of the following communities: Coventry, Cranston, East Greenwich, Exeter, Foster, Glocester, Johnston, Providence, Scituate, Warwick, West Greenwich, and West Warwick. The Pawtuxet River watershed comprises the Scituate Reservoir and its tributaries, the North Branch of the Pawtuxet, the Pocasset River, the Big River and its tributaries, the Flat River Reservoir and its tributaries. the South Branch of the Pawtuxet, and the main stem of the Pawtuxet."
Gene Emery's article in the Projo points out some of the factors involved in the buildup of the rivers' waters. I've elaborated a little more on the March 29 PREFLOOD factors:
A complex river system with several large tributaries and ponds. The Pawtuxet takes the natural runoff from all the smaller streams and rivers listed above that drain into it.
Land use practices that prevent water from soaking into the ground.
Development that does not incorporate systems for preventing runoff from roofs and parking lots, such as green roofs, water barrels, rain gardens, catchment basins.
Urban sprawl that increases the paved surfaces on our land, and often along our rivers.
Pressure to develop wetlands that would absorb extreme amounts of water.
Impervious pavement (water can't go through it, so it runs off from paved surface to paved surface eventually going directly into the storm drains). Parking lots can be paved with materials that let the water through, and perhaps damaged pavements could be replaced with this kind of material.
Weak dams that we have not repaired, maintained well enough, or removed because of cost-cutting, pressures to fund other projects, the economy.... Ongoing proper management of the dams in Rhode Island is critically important on March 31, 2010, although most days it does not seem so. The care of dams requires ongoing voter support for enough DEM staff (which has been seriously cut in the last few years) and for funds for these projects, among other things.
Acquisition of development rights to land in flood zones to control flooding when it occurs. Rhode Islanders have been champion supporters of open space acquisition bonds. We must continue to support the funding of floodplain projects also.
Previously saturated ground from earlier rains. The ground was still coping with the record rains of two weeks ago when this latest storm came through March 29-30, 2010. We weren't sitting ducks, but rather we were floating ducks on March 29.
What can we do now? We just got the Perfect Storm. The rivers are doing what they do ~ drain the land ~ and they will subside eventually. But meanwhile....., and then in the coming months and years, what makes sense to do?
This video is from March 8 (!), WEEKS BEFORE BOTH record-breaking storms we've suffered since mid-March, about buying up development rights to land along the Pocasset and Pawtuxet Rivers to help control flooding.
This video was from March 15, so you can imagine how saturated the land is by March 29:
This video is also from March 15 on Perkins Ave in Cranston. An evacuated homeowner says in it,
"...we're going to lose everything again, it's the second time in five years. ... They should just condemn this street and let the river take it. Get rid of all the houses because everyone's in jeopardy."
This is truly an extraordinary situation. We can't do anything about how much rain falls in a day. There will always be flooding now and then. But there are some sensible long-term responses we can make. Anyone can explore YouTube for videos of the latest flood pictures, and local news programs such as the Rhode Show have collections of photos and videos that may raise other issues and give us ideas for future action.
Our watersheds bring Rhode Islanders into a community, and we need to help out our neighbors who have been flooded in the short term. In the long term, we can also learn more about a "watershed approach" and work together to minimize the effects of future floods.
Katherine Brown of Southside Community Land Trust sent the Providential Gardener the link to a September 22, 2007, article, "Let the East Bloom Again," which argues that the Eastern United States is much more suited to agriculture than the West because of the abundance of water here. An excerpt:
...Until the middle of the 1900s, much of our country’s food and fiber was
produced east of the Mississippi River. Maine led the nation in potato
production in 1940, and New York wasn’t far behind. The South,
including Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi, dominated cotton. Large
amounts of corn were grown in almost every state for consumption by the
local livestock and poultry. Regional vegetable markets, especially in
the mid-Atlantic states, served the population centers of the East.
...Through irrigation, Western farmers were spared the occasional droughts
that had plagued Eastern farmers, but the specialized Western system
came with a price. Water projects dried up the area’s rivers. Salmon
runs disappeared. Soils were poisoned from the salt in irrigated water
that is left behind after evaporation....
The key is to invest in irrigation systems that make the most of the East's winter rains that currently run into the sea. Having been in Colorado recently, I can tell you that water is in short supply there and it's a contentious issue. This is an interesting article that gives broad, national, and also historical perspective to our local farming initiatives ~ well worth serious consideration. If we don't deal intelligently with the West's limitations there are consequences:
...If the United States does not expand agriculture in the East, the
nation’s food production will move offshore, to developing countries
that may not manage herbicides, pesticides and health safety as well as
our country does.
Is this what we want?
The authors of the article are Richard T. McNider and John R. Christy, professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Here are some links to reports they have written:
The
Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) invites environmentalists, civic
activists, and residents of Northern Rhode Island to learn more about
how they can help identify pollution problems on the Blackstone River
and get them fixed. CLF will hold an advocacy training on Tuesday,
August 7, from 6:30-7:30PM at the Cumberland Public Library, 1464
Diamond Hill Rd., Cumberland, RI. Volunteers will learn how to locate
potential sites using Google Earth technology as well as how to
effectively report potential polluters to Rhode Island’s Department of
Environmental Management. Please come join us in the important work of
cleaning up the Blackstone and feel free to bring friends along. For
more information contact Mina Makarious, (mmakarious@clf.org or 401-351-1102).
More news from the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council:
Just received word that this meeting has been postponed to August 8, 6:30 pm.
Donigian Park Garden Club First Meeting:July 24th, 6:00pm, Donigian Park (Valley St. in Providence - next to Rising Sun Mills)
The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council is hosting the first
meeting of the Donigian Park Garden Club, which will be a group of
residents who help maintain the gardens and landscaping of this
important Olneyville neighborhood park. Donigian Park is one of the
few green spaces in Providence with public access to
the Woonasquatucket River. Join the Garden Club and help beautify this
green space for the community, whether you live in the neighborhood or
not! For more information, contact Lisa at lisa@woonasquatucket.org or
(401) 861-9046.
[N.B.: The Providential Gardener would like to publicize your garden/park/farm/watershed workday and/or event. Add The Providential Gardener to your distribution list via email.]
Some news from the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council:
Woonasquatucket River Rangers Need Volunteers! The
Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council is currently running its River
Rangers summer program, which employs a small team of Providence youth
to be stewards for the parks and public spaces along the
Woonasquatucket River. Volunteers are needed to do gardening,
landscaping, carpentry, painting, etc. Get involved in making your
community a better place by helping the Woonasquatucket River Rangers!
For more information, contact Lisa at lisa@woonasquatucket.org or (401) 861-9046.
You can find articles on the environment everywhere, including in most issues of the Providence Business Journal. Recently Robert W. Varney, regional administrator of EPA's New England office in Boston, wrote a guest column, "Honoring a legacy by protecting valuable wetlands." The legacy is Rachel Carson's ~ she would have been 100 in May ~ and the wetlands would be the "Borderlands....the largest ecologically intact forested system between Boston and Washington, D.C.," located on the Connecticut and Rhode Island border in South County.
The Borderlands project is described in a 2003 RI DEM report, "South County Greenspace Protection Strategy." It takes a while to open because it's 69 pages long. The Borderlands wetlands help ensure clean drinking water and reduce the impact of storm floods, and in particular, it protects the underlying aquifer which is an important source of drinking water.
"...wear closed-toed shoes and
clothes that can get dirty. Also, volunteers should bring sunscreen.
I will provide water and munchkins, but any other drinks or
refreshments they may want would also be helpful."
This cleanup is from 9 to 1. You can volunteer for other cleanups by signing up to be alerted about other Clean the Bay cleanups directly. See Or you can subscribe to The Providential Gardener and keep up with what's "Growing On" all over Rhode Island in one comprehensive site.
For email updates, type your email in the Feedblitz button. To subscribe in a reader, click the following link. If you don't know about Readers for streamlining weblog scanning, check this technology out and make it work for you! Click the "Subscribe in a reader" link and see what happens (it's only a good thing!) "Feed readers" monitor blogs, and if you subscribe, they alert you whenever material is added to those websites. Very handy. You don't have to go to the weblog ~ headlines with links to the blog come to you at your convenience.
Where are the boundaries between watersheds in Rhode Island? A search on >>"RHODE ISLAND" WATERSHEDS<< turns up a lot of resources, but I almost drowned in the flood of information I found. Excellent maps are easily located, however: The RI Critical Resources Atlas has very informative maps of each watershed. I count 12 watersheds at this site.
