Our Oc­to­ber 26 meet­ing: talk by en­vi­ron­men­tal at­tor­ney Stuart Lie­ber­man

A team ef­fort

Chil­dren and na­ture...and Gray­don

 

Our dy­nam­ic at­tor­ney speaks
Coali­tion sup­port­ers who at­tend­ed our Oc­to­ber 26 meet­ing were thrilled by an in­spir­ing talk from our at­tor­ney, Stuart Lie­ber­man. He dis­cussed flood­ing, his­toric preser­va­tion, health and fi­nan­cial is­sues, and other top­ics re­lat­ed to Gray­don, as­sur­ing us, “This does mat­ter” and “You can fight Ci­ty Hall.”

 

Read the full text of his re­marks and please for­ward the link to others. This tran­script is al­so avai­l­able from a link on our home page.

 

The meet­ing was cov­ered by Ridge­wood Patch and The Ridge­wood News (see clar­i­fi­ca­tions).

 

Stuart is al­so rep­re­sent­ing resi­dents of Penns Grove, NJ, in a class ac­tion suit against DuPont to clean up the lo­cal drink­ing wa­ter sup­p­ly (link to sto­ry).

 

A team ef­fort
Ev­ery­one pitched in: sett­ing up the room the pre­vi­ous even­ing, greet­ing peo­ple at the door, staff­ing the ta­bles for do­na­tions and pe­ti­tion sign­ing, dis­tribut­ing fact sheets and other in­for­ma­tion, and putt­ing ev­ery­thing back at the end. Sal­ly Bran­des or­ganized all this with aplomb. Great job!

 

At­ten­dees en­joyed read­ing let­ters to the ed­i­tor about pre­serv­ing Gray­don that were post­ed on a bul­letin board for the even­ing. Th­ese let­ters will be made avai­l­able on­line at our ear­li­est op­por­tu­ni­ty.

 

Thank you too to ev­ery­one who made a do­na­tion at the meet­ing, on­line, or by mail to­ward the Coali­tion’s needs. Le­gal fees be­ing a sig­ni­f­i­cant line in our bud­get, and with a po­ten­tial long haul ahead, we hope those who haven’t con­tribut­ed yet will con­sid­er do­nat­ing ei­ther by cred­it card (click but­ton be­low) or by send­ing a check to The Pre­serve Gray­don Coali­tion, Inc., P.O. Box 354, Ridge­wood, NJ 07451. Ev­ery do­na­tion is ap­pre­ci­at­ed and will be used to pre­serve Gray­don.

 

 

Our strug­gle to pre­serve Gray­don has in­spired a pa­per pre­sent­ed at a con­fer­ence and sum­marized on a Psy­chol­o­gy To­day blog by Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton psy­chol­o­gist Peter H. Kahn, Jr., PhD. His book The Hu­man Relation­ship with Na­ture ex­plores the deep sig­ni­f­i­cance of chil­dren’s in­ter­ac­tions with na­ture and the un­for­tu­nate long-term conse­quences for both them and the en­vi­ron­ment when th­ese are lost. Read his blog en­try here or from a link on our home page. Click on Read­er Com­ments (be­low the text of the blog en­try) to check out Mar­cia’s exchanges with Dr. Kahn and the coau­thor of his pa­per.

 

In the past few years an en­tire move­ment has grown around the pre­cepts of sim­i­lar­ly mind­ed ex­perts, such as Richard Louv, au­thor of Last Child in the Woods: Sav­ing Our Chil­dren from Na­ture-De­fic­it Di­s­or­der and six other books. Louv is chair­man of the Chil­dren & Na­ture Net­work. The im­por­tance to chil­dren’s de­vel­op­ment of na­ture and un­struc­tured play has been stressed by the Amer­i­can Acade­my of Pe­di­atrics, the Amer­i­can Public Health As­so­ci­a­tion, the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC), and many other or­gani­za­tions of high re­pute.

 

Louv writes in the book, for ex­am­ple: “A wi­den­ing cir­cle of re­search­ers be­lieves that the loss of na­t­u­ral habi­tat, or the dis­con­nec­tion from na­ture even when it is avai­l­able, has enor­mous im­pli­ca­tions for hu­man health and child de­vel­op­ment. They say the qual­i­ty of ex­po­sure to na­ture af­fects our health at an al­most cel­lu­lar lev­el.”

 

Among many fas­ci­nat­ing studies on the Net­work’s web­site is a sum­mary of a re­cent re­port from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois. The re­search­er cites doc­u­men­ta­tion, for ex­am­ple, that chil­dren with AD­HD have few­er symp­toms af­ter out­door ac­tiv­i­ties in na­ture-filled en­vi­ron­ments and that col­lege stu­dents achieve bet­ter re­sults on cog­ni­tive tests when their dor­mi­to­ry win­dows view na­t­u­ral set­tings. This is clear­ly an al­ready-rich area that is ripe for greater study.

 

Coali­tion sup­port­er Diane Pala­cios, who spott­ed a link to Kahn’s ar­ti­cle on the Ridge­wood Blog, in­s­tant­ly rec­og­nized its im­por­tance and de­liv­ered or sent copies to all mem­bers of the Vil­lage Coun­cil and its Gray­don Pool Com­mit­tee. Aware­ness, ini­tia­tive, com­mu­ni­ca­tion—a fine way to get the mes­sage out.

 

We’ll be back soon with more au­tumn pic­tures of Gray­don. If you’d like to share your best Gray­don pho­tos, tak­en in any sea­son, send them to us in dig­i­tal for­mat. The park is so pic­turesque that we’re con­sid­er­ing pro­duc­ing a 2011 Gray­don cal­en­dar. It’s love­ly through­out the year at the beach in our back yard.

 

Swimmingly,

Suzanne Kelly and Marcia Ringel, Co-Chairs

The Preserve Graydon Coalition, Inc., a nonprofit corporation

“It’s clear—we love Graydon!”

info@PreserveGraydon.org    www.PreserveGraydon.org

Clar­i­fi­ca­tions: Ridge­wood News ar­ti­cle about our meet­ing

• The “hand­ful of mem­bers” of the Coali­tion who have foot­ed le­gal bills to date an­ti­ci­pate at least par­tial re­im­burse­ment. Re­main­ing costs will have to be borne by the group at large (see bid for do­na­tions above!).
  
• The March 2008 let­ter from the state De­part­ment of En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion re­gard­ing in­ad­e­qu­ate wa­ter treat­ment at Gray­don in 2007 is three pages long, not eight. As the Ridge­wood News ar­ti­cle notes, a con­crete pool was men­tioned on­ly as a last re­sort if pool ma­n­age­ment was in­ca­pable of treat­ing the wa­ter prop­er­ly. In the two sum­mers fol­low­ing, wa­ter qual­i­ty has im­proved tre­men­dous­ly.