Jason Atkinson: Save the Great South Bay

Save The Great South Bay, a non-profit organization founded in August 2012, is a local grassroots organization dedicated to the revitalization of the bay.

We want future generations to fish, clam and swim in these waters as we had. We want to restore marine and shoreline habitats so that the South Shore and beach communities that ring the bay can become sustainable for this century.

At present, we are at a moment of crisis. The water quality on Long Island is such that due to septic tank seepage, pesticides, storm runoff, and lawn and agricultural fertilizer, we may not have water to drink, bathe in and cook with before long. As our polluted ground water seeps into our aquifer, it also seeps into our rivers, bays and ponds, and it is killing our bodies of water at an accelerating pace, and the costs of over-development and poor infrastructure mount.

Science has both the diagnosis here and the cure. Save the Great South Bay relies greatly on the collective expertise of researchers from a variety of institutions, many of them in The Long Island Clean Water Coalition, a group formed to address this urgent problem of ground water pollution before it is literally too late.