Sustainable Tarpon Springs - Weekly Digest

Every week I can find some progress to be grateful for in the local world of sustainability.  There’s also a long list of serious environmental issues to be exposed and tackled, both locally and globally, but I know the more any of us brings awareness to how our choices impact our planet, the more hope we have for our future.  Our consciousness itself can shift our reality!

I am grateful for a gathering of dedicated ‘community garden supporters’ last week at the Cops ‘n Kids Youth Center.  We brainstormed a tangible ‘action plan’ for a blank slate of ground where some garden successes had formerly happened.  The idea to create a beautiful space of both edible plants and flowers offers education and inspiration for all of the families whose kids are served at Cops ‘n Kids.  

I hope this is just the beginning of what can occur on various school grounds and other parcels of city owned property designated for community gardens.  There is nothing more stimulating and hopeful than learning about gardening by transforming a piece of empty property into a place of beauty and food production!  The opportunities for this kind of education, plus the benefit of the veggies for all the stakeholders, offers hope for the future of everyone involved.

Another ‘sustainability-success’ in our area was this past weekend of celebration in New Port Richey known as Pasco EcoFest.  Jimmy and I attended this event for the second year, and it has developed and grown much more than it was last year.  I regret I didn’t blog about this event prior to it happening because there was space for much more participation at Sims Park and J. P. Starkey Wilderness Park where the activities took place.  

There were excellent workshops, including ones on making soil blocks, how to attract garden butterflies, building planters out of free pallets, and setting up solar home energy systems (to name a few).  There were local musicians and dancers providing entertainment on the park stage all weekend, and events for children.  Vendors sold sustainable products like local honey, seed starts, and Suncoast Co-op Growers brought products from cottage industries and urban farmers. 

On the downside of this week’s sustainability digest would be the situation for our state’s manatees whose mortality numbers have already broken the dismal record of 766 from 2010.  Many deaths were stillborn, newborn, or young calves - a significant part of this year’s contribution to future generations of manatees.  Ten months into 2013, 769 manatees had died at a rate so fast, scientists have not been able to perform autopsies to get a complete picture of the causes.

In the past, unexpected cold snaps have caused manatee mortality, but this was an especially bad year for habitat to be overwhelmed by red tides.  Of course, the type of microscopic marine algae, karena brevis, natural occurs in low concentrations in nature all the time.  And when conditions are right, can grow to deadly levels - so we do not want to contribute the nutrient loading that causes this algae to surround and smother runoff areas in coastal tributaries.

We may not have control over naturally occurring red tides, but humans could do much more to reduce our contribution of nitrogen fertilizers to the water, and this includes all the golf courses in Florida.  Business or not, we all have an obligation as stewards to protect the the ecosystems of this area.  Loss of any species can cause a dramatic ripple effect we could not anticipate, not to mention the heartbreak.

It ‘takes a village’ to embrace and value sustainability!  I would hope whatever our walks of life, we could each look at the opportunities within our ‘circles of influence’ and make a commitment to be sustainable.  For this week, it may just mean a commitment to give up our plastic water bottle habit in favor of a stainless steel reusable bottle and telling your friends about it.

Here’s to our children and our children’s children!