Berkley Crain and Danielle Lukens and their classmates at Lancaster Country Day School are creating micro forests that will help cleanse the waters of the Chesapeake Bay.
Lancaster Country Day students Berkley Crain, left, and
Danielle Lukens take notes on the trees they
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That's a good news story for Earth Day number 38, Tuesday, April 22.
The sobering sidebar: It's going to take the streamside buffers planted by the students a long time to make much of an impact.
The bay is still starved for dissolved oxygen, choked with algae and clogged brown with mud, chemicals and nutrients from the 100,000 streams that vein its rapidly developing, 64,000-square-mile watershed.
Conservationists say government is far behind on its schedule to release millions of dollars and turn the problems around by the target date of 2010.
Jumping into the breach are citizen environmental groups like the Little Conestoga Watershed Alliance, for which Lukens and Crain volunteer.
Todd Trout, the girls' chemistry teacher at Country Day, helps direct the nonprofit alliance.
Trout joined the group shortly after it started up in 2000, and ever since has enlisted students to help plant riparian buffers. Now, he said, kids provide much of the motive power.
Their time-proven modus operandi: educating other students and the public, stabilizing stream banks and putting in greenery that blots up pollution before it ever reaches the water.
According to Trout, they've planted thousands of trees and shrubs.
They collaborate frequently with students from other schools, the Lancaster County Conservation District and the county Water Quality Volunteer Coalition, which is conducting a long-term water quality testing program.
They've partnered with Lancaster General Hospital, the Lancaster County Conservancy, Rettew Associates and Exelon Corp., among other supporters and sponsors.
They learn as they go.
Crain, of Lititz, and Lukens, of Berks County, are monitoring the mortality rate of the young trees they helped plant at Jacob's Creek Park, off Sylvan Road in Manheim Township.
The 17-year-old senior girls say they might return one day to stroll through a mature grove bisected by pristine waters.
It might take a generation or two to realize that image.
"This is a way for students to see science outside the classroom," Trout said.
It won't immediately heal the bay's "massive problem," he added. "But if you try to take care of your own backyard ..."
Call to arms
The bay drains parts of six states, including Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland and New York.
In Lancaster County, according to conservation district watershed specialist Matt Kofroth, 12 to 15 citizen groups are tackling the cleanup one stream at a time.
Most of them are working with a school district in some way. "From Manheim Central to Warwick to Solanco," he said, "everybody seems to be getting involved. ... It's great."
Trout's group has zeroed in on the Little Conestoga and its tributaries.
And it kicked off the 2008 season with an Earth Day tree planting Saturday along Bachman Run, near Fruitville Pike and Koser Road in Manheim Township.
Launched with the help of an $11,000 Growing Greener grant, the alliance installed its first buffer zone in March 2001, near the Maple Grove Community Center in Lancaster Township.
The group has since completed streamside improvement projects along Swarr Run and Stauffer Run, among others.
A year ago, about 50 people — half of them students — put in 400 silky dogwoods, river birch and other plants at the Jacob's Creek site.
Scores of volunteers went back last September to purge the ground of purple loosestrife and other invasive plant species.
On a recent visit to the subdivision-ringed park, cattails waggled in the wind. The clear waters of the tributary gurgled toward their junction with the Little Conestoga, bound ultimately for the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake.
Lukens and Crain jotted notes on their clipboards as they walked through the forest of plastic tubes that protects the young trees from deer and mowing machines.
The girls, who intend to pursue environmental studies in college, will graduate this spring. But Lukens said they'll pass along the plant mortality data they collect to the students who come after.
As student liaisons to the alliance, the pair has toiled alongside everyone from middle school kids to senior citizens and recruited countless peers to help plant and maintain trees.
They say their classmates have gladly signed up to muscle shovels into the earth and lug a small ocean of tree irrigation water.
According to their teacher, a mindset is blooming, along with the system of buffers.
"I think the culture of our school buys into this," Trout said. "In the sense that there's a call to arms we get a great response."
Jon Rutter is a staff writer for the Sunday News. His e-mail address is jrutter@lnpnews.com.
