As this year’s Earth Day has come and gone, we pause to get some sense of how we’re doing — not globally or nationally, but here and in neighboring communities.

By Bill Lawyer

As this year’s Earth Day has come and gone, we pause to get some sense of how we’re doing — not globally or nationally, but here and in neighboring communities.

One of the things that has concerned me over the years is that we tend to go for the low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving our environment.  

While it’s great, for example, that we have passed laws regulating leaf blowers and vehicle idling, the real test is whether or not the laws are enforced.  From my experience, emission reduction is really a high-hanging fruit.  

The easiest way to check on how we’re doing is to use the 3 R’s standard of successful environment action: reduce, re-use, and recycle. And there’s a reason these actions are given in that order.  

The most significant improvement to the Earth’s (and Rye’s) environment will come from using less of our natural ecosystems. That means building smaller, more energy efficient homes, schools and other buildings. It means using less gas, diesel and electricity in operating cars, trucks and vehicles of public transportation. It’s called “smart growth”. How is the City of Rye doing?

When it comes to improving the environment, we need to focus on priorities — we only have limited time and resources to make changes, and we don’t want to end up “straightening out the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as the saying goes.  

But people seem to have a tendency to ignore that caveat.  

Now that gas prices have declined, for example, news services report that people are trading in their small cars for full-size SUV’s. Three-bedroom homes are being torn down to make way for five-bedroom ones.  

Not everyone is backsliding, but those who are still striving to reduce need to review their priorities.  

One example of straightening deck chairs, in this writer’s opinion, is the current focus on removing “invasive” plants in the tidal wetlands of Long Island Sound and the lower Hudson River.  

Over the past years many environmentalists have expressed concern about the spread of one wetland plant — phragmites (frequently referred to as “phrag”) at the expense of another — spartina. Both are native to North America.  

No one doubts that tidal wetlands are important to a healthy, safe environment. They provide breeding grounds for a wide diversity of plants and animals. They provide protection against storms. They even provide for sustainable commercial harvesting of several marsh grasses (including the salt marsh spartina).

Before the 19th century, tidal wetlands covered extensive areas along Long Island Sound and the Hudson River. But as time went by, most of the tidal wetlands were filled in for commercial, residential, and transportation developments.  

Here in Rye we’re lucky to still have extensive tidal marshland areas, even though one of the historically biggest ones was converted into the parking lot at Playland back in 1927-28.  

By the mid-20th century developers and environmentalists alike began to realize the danger of marshland destruction, and steps were taken to restore marshes and prevent the loss of additional ones.

So that’s where the trouble began. As attempts were made to restore wetlands, environmentalists focused their wrath on the abundant growth of frag. Frag was often moving in without any help from restoration groups.  

Now the concern was that spartina had traditionally thrived in the historic wetlands, but it was losing out because landfills had raised elevations so that the less salt tolerant frags were more “at home” than spartina.

“Spartinists” took the view that these plants were here first, and the pushy frags needed to be removed. Over in Piermont, on the right bank of the Hudson, the spartinists were calling for the use of herbicides, which led to angry public hearings.  

Well-known research ecologist Eric Kiviat of the Hudsonia Institute presented information that frags are actually quite important in promoting diversity. Things are now at a stalemate.  

Both sides claimed to be speaking on behalf of the environment. One way out of this dilemma is to find common ground — preserve more marshes, find ways to increase the resiliency of the existing marshes, and stop the most serious threats, non-point pollution and toxic oil spills and other disasters.

By working together to reduce the threats to marshes, we’ll all have more wildlife to enjoy right in our backyards.