It started with one neighborhood on one waterway. It became a pilot aimed at spreading good stewardship practices across the inland bays watershed.
By Ken Mammarella Ken Silverstein simply wanted to engage his community in environmentally friendly activities and inspire residents to care for Love Creek. His community, Hart’s Landing, fronts the waterway. Love Creek empties into the Rehoboth Bay two miles west of Rehoboth Beach. The community has a pool, as well as a dock for crabbing, kayaking, and birdwatching. Silverstein did much more than inspire his neighbors. He prompted the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays to design the Bays to Backyards Community Engagement Program. Bays to Backyards aims to inspire the 100,000 residents to take good care of the Inland Bays watershed. The effort began in 2022 with a meeting of the homeowners association for Hart’s Landing, where Silverstein and his wife had retired in 2010. During the meeting, Silverstein volunteered to form a green team for the community. “We need to be good stewards of the wetlands behind us,” he told the group. After a year of building the team, he came up with the idea of getting all communities on Love Creek to join the effort. Having no idea how to start, Silverstein reached out to the Center for the Inland Bays. The program was born. “The program aims to support healthy people, water and wildlife across the Delaware’s inland bays’ watershed,” says Lisa Swanger, the center’s director of outreach and education. “Our focus area is the inland bays’ backyard, including residential communities from the coast to the countryside. They’re going to have access to resources and high-level guidance from our collective partners. “The goal is to have fun and build community. We’re working together to foster a resilient future for all, and that starts right in our own neighborhoods.” Getting with the Program The 32 square miles of shallow inland bays are an environmentally critical component of coastal Sussex County. They are Rehoboth Bay in the north, Indian River Bay below it and, to the south, Little Assawoman Bay west of Fenwick Island. The Maryland Coastal Bays Program covers Big Assawoman Bay and four more coastal bays. The inland bays watershed in Delaware spans 292 square miles from Lewes in the north, Georgetown to the west and the state line to the south. The area encompasses eight sub-basins with dozens of tributary creeks and 7,300 acres of salt marsh. It includes 11 Sussex municipalities and about 200,000 acres of unincorporated area. Though teeming with residential subdivisions, much of the area remains agricultural. Over the decades, water quality in the watershed has been significantly diminished. Many sources of pollution and old, failing septic systems have been largely mitigated, but agricultural runoff such as chicken waste and fertilizer continues to degrade the water, leading to occasional large-scale algae blooms that rob the water of dissolved oxygen and occasionally cause significant fish kills. Bays to Backyards helps bay lovers understand how measures at home can protect water quality. Bays to Backyards focuses on:- Inspiring community action, including education and outreach.
- Encouraging best practices for managing stormwater and coastal flooding, such as creating rain gardens, no-mow zones and vegetated buffers around stormwater retention ponds. “Plants are effective sponges” of pollutants, Swanger says.
- Landscaping with nature in mind, using native plants that are well-adapted to the local environment and support the local food chain.
- Sustaining and creating wildlife habitats, such as enhancing open space with pollinator meadows.
- Reducing and preventing waste. This includes composting workshops and ways to deal with litter.
- Considering climate change and energy usage. Goals include promoting electric vehicle charge stations, bicycle paths and edible gardens. “The sky’s the limit,” Swanger says.
- Developing site-specific management efforts of core habitats.