This summer, President Obama is calling upon all Americans to participate in our countries recovery through the United We Serve initiative. The President has said that the challenges America faces are unprecedented, and that we need to build a new foundation for economic growth in America.

We here in New Jersey Community Water Watch are working hard this summer to do just that.

All around New Jersey, our chapters are working to get the community involved and educated about our state’s poor water quality issues. We have been busy planning and recruiting volunteers to help us teach, monitor streams and clean up our water ways. We have also been teaming up with a few other community groups around the Middletown area to combine our efforts and resources into doing as much as possible together to benefit the environment in our communities.

A few times over the summer, the most recent being last week, we here at Water Watch have met with the team from Brookdale Community College’s College Action Team for Sustainability to discuss ways to get the college and the community more involved in “going green.” We have also been attending the Middletown Environmental Commission meetings to get the latest environmental happenings around the area and to see what we can do to help out. We have come up with a few ideas and locations for clean ups and talks of a kayak launch are in the making, which will be further chronicled in later blogs.

Our idea for Riverpalooza came about in early June and the all the bits and pieces of ideas are beginning to come together to form the big picture for the statewide cleanup that is without a doubt going to be a great day.

This month, after weeks of planning lessons and gathering materials, we began our Environmental Education circuit in Monmouth County. Because environmental education should not just stop at with the youth, we extended our services throughout more of the community. In addition to teaching at Atlantic Highlands and Highlands Recreation summer camps, we will also be involved in educating the Middletown and Holmdel Girl Scouts and we are doing weekly lessons with senior citizens at We Care Adult Care in Middletown.

The first lesson we did on Friday July 10^th for 35 people at We Care Adult Care was to illustrate the geologic formation of an aquifer, how pollution can get into ground water, and how this pollution can end up in drinking water wells. We built an edible aquifer with chocolate chips, vanilla ice cream, ginger ale, sprinkles, food coloring and a straw to serve as the gravel aquifer, confining later, water, soil, pollution and a water pump, respectively.  With a few red food coloring drops in the Edible Aquifers, it was possible to show the students how easy it is when doing everyday activities, such as washing the car or watering the lawn, for contaminants to leak into our groundwater and ultimately on or in our bodies. We ended the afternoon with a fun game of Groundwater Jeopardy which tested everyone’s knowledge of what we had learned throughout the day.

Hopefully together with the help of our community and volunteers we can reach our goals and help you reach your own goals for helping out in the fight for clean water.