Tag: TaeHo Lee

LRWP’s Most popular posts of 2019

Many thanks to all our blog contributors in 2019!

We learned so much from authors like Joe Mish and Joe Sapia who share observations of the natural world in our on-going “Voices of the Watershed” series. We are grateful for regular information-sharing from Streamkeepers and civic science volunteers, including writers Margo Persin and Howard Swerdloff. Folks like Rutgers doctoral candidate Kate Douthat teach us about plants and hydrology and stormwater flows through focused blog series. And student interns TaeHo Lee and April Callahan did a great job developing interviews with LRWP Board Members and others active in the watershed.

The following are the most read / viewed web pages on the LRWP website in 2019:

#5 The water world around us we do not see, by Kate Douthat

#4 Elmwood Cemetery BioBlitz, by Howard Swerdloff

#3 LRWP’s Top 10 Environmental Issues, 2019 Edition, by Heather Fenyk

#2 South River’s “Brick Beach”, by Heather Fenyk

#1 Mile Run Clean-up, the Video, by Jessica Dotson

Watershed Sculpture Project @ the Mercado!

Article and interview by TaeHo Lee, Rutgers Raritan Scholar

Starting Saturday April 14 and running through October, the LRWP will join Mercado Esperanza in Joyce Kilmer Park (143 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, New Brunswick) for a community market celebrating the food, arts and culture of New Brunswick and its diverse Latino community. Learn more about the Mercado in TaeHo Lee’s interview (below) with Mercado Coordinator Carolina Moratti. In the interview Carolina gives a preview of a new program for 2019 called Mercado Esperanza Kids. As part of Mercado Kids, the LRWP and our coLAB Arts partners invite you and your favorite young person to make “watershed sculptures” for inclusion in our 2019 Sculpture Project gallery installation. The Mercado runs once monthly from 11-4 PM, and will be held on April 14, May 26, June 30, July 28, August 25, September 29, October 27.

Participants at Mercado 2018 learn about watershed health while participating in sculpture-making. Photo: coLAB Arts

Carolina Moratti and her son Abraham met me at a Café on George Street during Rutgers spring break to talk about the monthly Mercado Esperanza on Joyce Kilmer Avenue in New Brunswick. Carolina has worked with the Mercado since it started in 2016, and now serves as Coordinator. Carolina is a Peruvian born American. She moved to the US in 2005, and five years later became a citizen. She was a former student and an instructor of Elijah’s Promise. She currently works as a phlebotomist, partaking in community outreach with women and kids as a hobby. She describes herself as a hard working single mom. Abraham is Carolina’s 12-year old son and a 6th grade student of Von E. Mauger Middle School in Middlesex. Though he was born in the States, he identifies himself as a Peruvian, Central and South American.

T: Tell me about New Brunswick’s Mercado. What is your role at these monthly events?

C:  I started by helping community women, entrepreneurs, and cooks who wanted to build a business. I would coordinate their involvement at the Mercado, helping them sell prepared foods. Later on I started to work managing the Mercado as a whole. I also created the Mercado Esperanza Kids, in which I work with young volunteers to do activities for kids. We have young kids doing temporary tattoos and face painting, and also environmental education. My current priority is emceeing the Mercado, taking care of Mercado Esperanza Kids, and doing social media and public relations.

T: Does the term Mercado mean market?

C: Yes! And Esperanza means hope. Mercados are everywhere in Latin America. Some places are called Marketa but we call ours Mercado Esperanza/Hope. We’re giving hope to people because sometimes they are in a difficult situation. They are homeless, they don’t believe in themselves, they are having a hard time making money, succeeding, and having their voice heard. So we gave them some representation, something that they can be proud of. It is really life-changing.

T: I think it is also very important that this Mercado also allows people to celebrate their culture.

C: People can feel secluded as immigrants in America when nobody sees them. But we give them some representation and help them to be seen. What I love about Mercado is that we keep in traditions. And we’re showing our kids how wonderful it is to go to a local Mercado and experience how we are trying to bring the culture of Mexico here. We’re bringing culture, we’re bringing memories, we’re bringing flavors, we’re bringing music, and all that vibe that we have when we go to another Mercado in any part of South America or Central America or Mexico. We have so many vendors with their kids selling and playing at the Mercado. It’s very good to see that the kids are also getting involved.

T: As part of Mercado Esperanza Kids you are working with the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership and coLAB Arts to offer a “Watershed Sculpture Project” activity. Why is it important to you to see environmental outreach included as part of Mercado offerings?

C:  The more things we include at Mercado the better. If you go there for food but we are teaching you about how to keep the water clean, how to produce less garbage, how to reuse, how to recycle. If we can give you that information we are making a change because we don’t have that in our culture. A lot of countries in Central or South America don’t do that. People are very excited to see environmental education. It’s a lot of information that is not easy to get to. So if we provide that with Mercado it’s amazing.  Because I know it’s going to make a change.

T: Last summer you participated in a weeklong “Watershed Institute” with coLAB and the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership. What were some of the things you learned that week?

Abraham: I learned about water quality monitoring, and how it’s important to protect the environment. And I learned that we can protect the environment by making sure we recycle things. We can also clean up after ourselves and after others who have forgotten to do so. We could maybe even make a fundraiser for an environmental cause.

Abraham Moratti conducts visual habitat assessments as part of Summer Institute 2018 “Art and Action in the Watershed.”

T: Do you have anything to say to adults who mainly created the environmental issues that you and I have to inherit for our lifetime and for the following generations?

A: They should have been more careful. They should have been more thoughtful. They should have cleaned up their mess after themselves. They should have been more aware of what they were doing.

Meet LRWP Board Member Amy Braunstein

Interview by TaeHo Lee, LRWP Fall 2018 Raritan Scholar

On the coldest, windiest day of October 2018, Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership Board Member Amy Braunstein and I met at Hidden Grounds on Easton Ave, a hidden café seven steps below street level, to talk about the LRWP’s new Streamkeeper Program. Amy is the Founder of Friends of Mile Run Brook, and is the LRWP’s first “Streamkeeper” – someone who has committed to stewardship of a local waterway in the Lower Raritan Watershed. Amy has served as Streamkeeper of New Brunswick’s Mile Run Brook for almost a year. Amy has a varied background. She did her undergrad at Rutgers, graduating in 2008 and she recently passed the bar after completing a law degree. She is now practicing law in Newark. While a student, she was an organizer involved in various political campaigns on campus including Tent State and Democrats for Change. She also worked with Food and Water Watch in New Brunswick. She has been an environmentalist since she was a Girl Scout when she had the chance to participate in community clean-ups, but Food and Water Watch reawakened her environmentalism as an adult.

TaeHo: Where are you from in Lower Raritan Watershed, and how did you get involved as Streamkeeper for Mile Run Brook?

Amy Braunstein, cleaning up Mile Run Brook (photo: John Keller)

Amy: During my senior year of college, I came upon Mile Run Brook while exploring with friends, and fell in love with the stream. I live right next to it now, on Woodbridge Street. We are right on the municipal border between New Brunswick and Franklin, but also the county line between Middlesex and Somerset. Mile Run and the Raritan are natural boundaries.

Living next to Mile Run, I got a pretty good view of a lot of the garbage that was either being dumped in there or washing in there. So I started reaching out among friends and online, just trying to organize some small cleanups on my own. After doing enough cleanups, I wanted to learn more about the actual water quality. And through that I met Heather Fenyk who was active on the New Jersey’s Waters and Save the Raritan River facebook group pages. I asked if anybody had water quality testing kits, and Heather found my Friends of Mile Run Brook facebook page and reached out to me and was like “would you want to help out on these [water quality monitoring] projects?” and then she asked me to help out with formation of the Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership. It’s fine to do things on my own, but working with the Partnership brings so many more resources to the stream, and opportunities to learn more and get more involved in larger watershed issues.

T: Could you tell me what a Streamkeeper is?

A: A Streamkeeper is somebody that has committed to monitoring the vitals of a particular stream, and to providing stewardship for the ongoing health of that stream. This includes the water quality monitoring that we do, things like measuring temperature, speed, depth, and turbidity, and taking a more holistic approach to the activities going on nearby that might impact the stream and possible areas of improvement. It also includes organizing clean-ups and helping people who want to get involved. That is finding folks that would want to help with this effort. A Streamkeeper takes a stewardship role, above and beyond taking data by looking at who is using the stream in terms of not only human recreation but also fish and wildlife and figuring out things that need improvement.

T: Tell me about Mile Run Brook.

A: There is a fascinating history with the stream. Have you seen the documents about the old mine?

T: No!

A: There was an old copper mine that started near where my house is. Somewhere in those backyards was an access tunnel. And it went all the way down past where the new Hillel building is on the Rutgers College Ave campus. The tunnel ran underground. This was back in the Colonial Era. I think it closed up maybe by the end of the 1700s, definitely by the mid-1800s. But that mine shaft is still there. Workers still find it every now and again during construction projects. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie, the Goonies, but it’s an ongoing joke that they found a treasure map and a series of mine shafts and tunnels under this suburban town. And it’s a fantastical adventure with pirate ships and such. We joke about the copper mine in New Brunswick and say “Oh! We got a Goonies’ situation down there!”

Copy of the map that depicts the copper mine and its mine shaft in New Brunswick

T: (laughter) So, the mine is all filled up now? Or…

A: No, it’s abandoned. Although when they were constructing the Hillel building on College Ave, they found old pickaxes and parts of the dissolved mine. Unfortunately, the reason why this mine opens up over by Mile Run Brook is that, before modern science and human understanding of our effects of pollution on the water systems, people thought water will flush out any garbage left behind and make the area clean, just all of the mine waste and stuff. At one clean up, we found, we’re pretty sure, it was a piece of old coal slab run off from the mine, from the smelting process. And the whole area behind my house is actually a landfill that was capped in the 1930s, I think. And on the Woodbridge St., all of the houses along it were built in the 1950s. Folks would use the stream as a garbage dump. There are pits down there where they found old glass, where they just had been throwing old bottles. Some of these bottles are, in fact, very old. As old as New Brunswick, even. Some of these are hand blown glass. Also – have you seen the name Paulus around? It’s a dairy company in the 1800s in central New Jersey. We found milk bottles from the dairy. This was back when a fleet of milkmen was delivering milk to people.

T: And you found it during a cleanup?

A: We found it one day when I was just kind of walking around with my boyfriend. Sometimes we walk down there to explore. We’d seen some local folks who would walk down with a bucket and then come back out with a bucket full of old looking bottles. And we’re like, “what’s going on down there?” It’s a fascinating history. You know, there’s been people in and around the stream for a long time.

Old hand-blown glass milk bottle from Paulus Dairy that Amy found from the stream.

T: What are current challenges of your Streamkeeper work?

A: The constant challenge is the garbage that is washed in with the stormwater from residential areas. Storm drains lead to our local waterways and a lot of refuse that gets into our streams that way. Also, unfortunately, there is a lot of dumping. I think that doing anti-littering and anti-dumping outreach in a way that is effective and that actually gets people thinking about the effects of their actions is a challenge.

Another challenge more specific to my spot, my geographic proximity along Mile Run Brook, are homeless folks who live there from time to time. Doing outreach with them has been difficult, because there is a lot of fear. When I approach them, they will hear me coming and leave. There’s fear of authorities. There’s fear of having all their stuff stolen. The LRWP has done some great outreach work to these communities in advance of clean-ups. For example, we let them know what’s going on, invite them to join us, and treat them like human beings. The LRWP worked with a social worker to develop outreach material to give them that talks about shelter and food and employment and other social service resources. But, working with those communities, it’s going to be a challenge.

We do want to make that bridge, because they can also be great allies, and there are folks that live near the stream, and it shelters them, and they can be another set of eyes. There’s a lot that we share in common. And I think sometimes people just call the police on them and they get pushed out of the spot and it’s unfortunately a long-term problem in our society that needs to deal with. It’s like the lack of housing and shelter for everybody that needs it. These are kind of like big society problems, but also they relate back to the work with Mile Run Brook. Because the way the things are now… a lot of the homeless people don’t want to be seen and so they will just hide all the evidence of them being there like garbage and food wrappers and all that stuff. And the way they hide them is to just throw it down the ravine.

T: What are some responsibilities that property owners who live adjacent to streams have to maintain the adjacent water bodies?

A: There are two levels: there is legally what is required of them; and then I would say there is kind of like morally and ethically what it is required.

Legally, people cannot discharge any fluids or liquids into the streams. Sometimes folks will be doing home model repair and will not take the proper precautions when emptying radiators or changing the oil. And that stuff can get straight into the stream and have an impact. Also, we have a responsibility to not put any other materials into our local streams. One common mistake that property owners make is just pushing all the leaves, branches, sticks, and debris off of their property and down the ravine into the stream. I mean I think that their thinking is that It’s all natural, it’s not going to make an impact. But this is illegal. And the cumulative impact of everybody pushing all that debris down in there, which would otherwise be scattered evenly on the ground ultimately becoming fertilizers in the waterway, would clog the streams and create stagnant pools.

Another issue confronting New Brunswick residents and homeowners is there is a lot of garbage just in general, and sometimes… you live in New Brunswick, right? So you see that garbage gets blown by the wind. So you can clean up your yard but then stuff can blow in and, I mean, really, it’s on each of us to go through and pull that garbage out of our yard. It is not fair. I didn’t throw it there. It blew in. But that stuff ultimately does make its way into either the trees getting caught or into the streams. So homeowners have responsibilities to remove the garbage or litter, before it is blown into these areas.

Morally and ethically, there is only so much that the law can require people without being coercive or going too far and saying how you live your life. But, I feel like people should look at the impact that their actions make such as how they mow their lawn or what kind of plants they choose to grow. So, where I am at the ravine is very, very steep, and there is an erosion issue. And there is natural plantings and natural ways to just getting those root systems in place to hold the bank in. Or also leaving old or fallen trees undisturbed, they really serve their purpose in streambank reinforcement. Thinking about the impact of each of our actions when it comes to aesthetic improvements to houses, sometimes we will take them in and there will be a bunch of trees and they’ll want a yard. We don’t get those trees back, not in our lifetime. Maybe in our kids’ lifetime if we’re lucky. So, taking positive actions to improve the areas is something that I think falls more into the area of morals and ethics.

One thing the LRWP advocates for that is amazing are pollinator gardens. These are projects the LRWP does in partnership with the New Brunswick Environmental Commission. They will plant milkweed and things that we know that these species are being impacted need in order to survive. Homeowners can easily plant pollinator gardens or native plant species, and they can make choices to not use fertilizers and pesticides. I think doing those kinds of things is really a moral responsibility at this point… Unless each of us tries to make an effort, there is coming a time where there is not going to be enough space for all the creatures of Earth’s biodiversity.

T: What would you like to accomplish in the next five years as a Streamkeeper?

A: let’s see… in 5 years as a stream keeper of Mile Run specifically, I would love for Mile Run to be a stream where people can wade in and fish in and play in as a recreational opportunity. Right now there are issues with stormwater runoff. There used to be a lot of industries along Mile Run – there was a perfume factory and other industrial dischargers dumping directly into the stream. Now the issue is stormwater runoff bringing in trash and other wastes through the stormwater system. Identifying what and where these pollutants are going in and stopping them at the source is goal #1. Maybe we can get Mile Run to be a place where people can really play. I would like to see frogs and lizards and other indicator species return to Mile Run. I would love to see a pathway along the Mile Run so that the members of the public can have a green space to go and recreate in. The more people use it or know it’s there the more they appreciate it. But if it’s just a hidden spot, it’s easier to get trashed and it doesn’t have value. So I would love to see some recreation spaces opened up over there.

T: As a Streamkeeper, do you have any messages to others who may be interested in becoming Streamkeepers?

A: Just explore your streams! Take a look around. All the work I have done to clean-up the stream has benefited me tenfold in terms of my enjoyment of a beautified space. And there is still a lot of hidden beauty in our streams; animals you wouldn’t expect to see. Honestly getting outside and being in nature it’s like… your kids are gonna love it. With a little bit of elbow grease, if we all do a little bit, it’s amazing how beautiful it can be. So, my message would be “go out there, take a look, and get to know the place!”

Following the interview, Amy took me to Mile Run Brook and gave me a brief tour of a section of the stream, from which her house overlooks. We had to be careful around what looked like a homeless spot and spotted a white-tailed deer darting away.

View of Mile Run Brook from Amy’s backyard. On the right of the bank is a homeless community.

Segment of an old tunnel that Mile Run runs through.

Even after many clean-ups, trash gets blown in, washed in, and dumped into Mile Run Brook