Upcoming Events

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Closure of the White Oak Library canceled our April, May, and June meetings.  Closure of library public rooms will continue through the end of the year because they are needed for storage as libraries rearrange themselves to keep users properly distant from each other.  We are considering Zoom meetings, having now participated in two of them hosted by Friends of Sligo Creek.   If you missed the 6/23 program on vegetation management and the Weed Warrior Program, you are in luck! You can still see the slides used.  Scroll down below under Recent Event.

For the latest from Montgomery Park on what's opening up a little, see the COVID-19 virus update page at the button below.  The long and short of it is that activities such as group cleanups are still verboten, while tennis, boating and some other activities are now allowed.  

Just remember to take a bag and gloves along with you when you go for a walk in the park, and you can be a much-appreciated one-person clean-up crew!  Put the trash/recycling in the new cans that have sprouted up at trailheads, or take it home with you.  And remember to keep that safe distance between you and the others out on the trails.  This virus is revealing itself to be a real bear, even for the young. You really don't want to get it or give it to anyone else!

At our Feb. 4 meeting, Dr. Kathleen Michels described the toxic effects of microplastic pollution on aquatic life and seabirds. Dr. Michels stressed that plastic pollution includes the broken bits and dissolved toxins from artificial turf.  She displayed samples of the rug of plastic grass and the pulverized used tire crumbs that most often serve as infill for cushioning and to hold the blades up. Soccer fields contain roughly 675,000 square yards, or 40,000 pounds, of carpet with 400,000 pounds of infill. By the time the turf is too worn to use, a lot of the "grass" blades and much of the infill has already left the field and entered our waterways. But disposal of the rest is a serious problem, since it is not currently recyclable in the U.S.  Other microplastics are the result of the breakdown of larger plastic objects such as our ubiquitous plastic bags.

Unfortunately, none of the bills that would have reduced plastic pollution managed to pass the shortened session of the Maryland Legislature, even the balloon release ban, which had seemed very promising. However, a similar balloon release ban is still awaiting action in the Montgomery County Council.  Please let your state and county legislators know you support reducing killer plastic pollution, and we'll try again next year. 

Find your legislators at MDelect.net.  Use your right to be heard! 

The absurdity of wasting scarce education money on these fields has been captured by the comic strip Big Nate.  In case you missed it, here's the URL. https://www.gocomics.com/bignate/2020/05/08.

The NNWB August meeting included reports on the beltway-I-270 expansion plan and a proposal to build a new middle school in the NWB floodplain in Hyattsville, both  using Public-Private Partnerships (P3). We also discussed the Montgomery Parks pilot project to allow certain mechanized bikes and scooters on paved park trails and NNWB plans and speakers for the fall.