While this year”™s Academy Awards may have focused on “The Shape of Water,” at Sarah Lawrence College”™s Center for Urban River at Beczak (CURB) they were focusing on the shape our water is in. One hundred and twenty environmental leaders gathered at a regional conference to discuss water quality monitoring efforts in the lower Hudson.
Watershed activists, government officials, and scientists attended the Sarah Lawrence conference that was held on the campus of Pace University in Pleasantville.
The event featured presentations from groups, including Riverkeeper, the New York state DEC Hudson River Estuary Program, and others as well as panel discussions and breakout sessions on the latest water quality initiatives. Also attending was Peter McCartt who has been appointed to the newly created position of sustainability coordinator for Westchester County.
“One goal of ours was to demonstrate what we as non-profits and academia can bring to the table to help solve our local water issues,” said Ryan Palmer of CURB.
Tracy Brown from Save the Sound described the combination of bottom-up monitoring and green infrastructure projects with large-scale, agency-driven research and planning as the “secret sauce” for advancing watershed-friendly development.
CURB began in 2013 when Sarah Lawrence College entered an alliance with the Hudson River Valley Environmental Education Institute, which had operated the Beczak Environmental Education Center on Hudson River waterfront in Yonkers.
