Thanks to Mountain Creek Church of Christ and all of the volunteers, we have a bioswale!

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Saturday, November 16 dawned beautifully and promised to be warm and sunny.  On Friday, Brooke and Lillian drove to Vonore to the amazing Overhill Nursery to pick up a big, big load of NATIVE trees, shrubs, and perennials to plant in the bioswale at Mountain Creek Church of Christ.  They brought a FULL truck to the Church!  Not only did our delightful friend and landscape architect Miko from LandStream Designs arrive to give us direction, Dan from Botanica was also on hand to help with placing plants in the right locations and teaching the volunteers.   Best of all, however, were the 45 or so volunteers that arrived to help dig, plant, spread mulch and otherwise make this all possible.  Wow!!  Even with all that help, we didn’t quite finish, so the landscapers from the church came back to finish getting the rest of the plants in the ground.  This church took a huge step toward protecting their creek from stormwater runoff by installing this bioswale! We are so proud of them!!  As Kyle, the youth minister from the church so appropriately stated, “Now I really can’t wait until Spring to see how it all looks then!” 

World Water Day salute!

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Water.  We all require it for life.  We all need CLEAN water and LOTS of it!  Caribbean SEA and TenneSEA work at the grassroots level to empower kids and their communities to get clean water.  The Flint, Michigan water disaster was a wake up call for many to realize that you cannot take your water for granted.  The changing precipitation patterns throughout the Caribbean have led to water scarcity or tremendous flooding events.  Atlanta, Georgia faces water shortages not just because of increases in water use, but also because of changing precipitation patterns.  We CANNOT take our water for granted.

Today, we salute three water champions : Valerie Constantin-Regis, Naomi Abraham Moon, and Randal Hale. Read more

Sapelo Island Teacher’s Workshop has been funded by VW!

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Thanks to VW Chattanooga, the Sapelo Island Teacher’s Workshop run by our wonderful Jim Watson is happening once again! Dates this year are June 8-12 and applications will be available soon. You must attend a meeting with Jim to be eligible to apply. We will let you know when the application meetings are as soon as we set them up! Read more

Protect Mountain Creek Urban Wildlife Sanctuary and Outdoor Education Hot Spot

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Giving Tuesday is coming!

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Good for business, good for the environment!

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I challenge every business owner to really consider the benefits of stormwater green infrastructure.  You can be like those who argue that they could never afford to implement the new stormwater regulations and that it will be bad for business, or you could really learn about green infrastructure and find out how GREAT it can be for business!

Bill Raines is gaining lots of kudos for being the first to embrace retrofitting his site to incorporate green infrastructure for stormwater treatment.  Although he embraces it fully at this point, it took many years of conversations, calculations, and investigations.  Many times over the past five years, Mr Raines has thrown up his hands and said it just wasn’t going to work.  Most of the engineers we worked with said the same thing.  It took Josh Rogers and Adam Reynolds from the City and County water quality departments to really bring things around to feasible.  His tax reductions have been great motivators for implementing this wetland.  He had extra incentives, including creating a learning lab for students at Skyuka Hall, which is located at his Four Squares site. If SEA hadn’t been there the entire time, bringing new ideas, explaining how things worked, helping with the calculations….it wouldn’t have ever happened.  We were there thanks to the 319 grant funded through the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.  Our idea in 2009, when the uproar over huge increases in stormwater fees was at its peak, has resulted in lots of education not just for the kids, but for  Mr Raines and me, many engineers, and many developers.  Everyone should now realize that it IS not just possible to install green infrastructure, but it is economically beneficial as well.

Watch the story produced by WRCB TV:
WRCBtv.com | Chattanooga News, Weather