Breaking Water with the Kingston Hub
Swim Drink Fish is highlighting members of our incredible ecosystem. This Breaking Water segment features Georgia Cross-Bermingham, the Kingston Community Based Water Quality Monitoring Coordinator. Georgia spent the summer on the shoreline of Lake Ontario representing our Kingston Hub. We asked her about her role, why sampling is important, and her motivation.
Tell us a bit about yourself, what’s your name and your role with SDF?
Hi! I’m Georgia. I am the Kingston Community Based Water Quality Monitoring Coordinator at Swim Drink Fish (quite the mouthful, I know) and a recent environmental science graduate of Queen’s University.
What’s a regular day in the field look like?
Going out sampling is like going to a party or some sort of reunion – it’s very social. Every day I meet so many new people. This includes all the amazing volunteers who have signed up to come sampling, but also people just passing by on a walk or visiting the beach who are curious to know what I am doing stomping around in the water with a bunch of funny equipment.
Now that I have been sampling in Kingston for about two months, I have some regulars I see when I go out. We always stop and chat about the water quality or whatever we left off talking about the week before. It’s pretty fun stuff.
What is your favourite part about sampling?
I love getting people excited about science! I believe it enriches our lives (just like art, music, and sports), but unfortunately, it has been professionalized to a point which makes it seem inaccessible for far too many people. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. We can all be inquisitive about our surroundings and engage in science recreationally. Volunteering with Swim Drink Fish is just one way you can bring a little science (and fun) into your life, but there are so many more ways. Here are a few:
Ask big questions and come up with a plan to answer them
Download an app like eBird, iNaturalist, or Globe Observer (and contribute to the development of human knowledge)
Ferment stuff in your kitchen!
What is the wildest thing you have witnessed or experienced in the field?
I actually saw a group of around 15 mermaids this morning!
Ok, maybe not real mermaids, but rather a group of open water swimmers who call themselves the mermaids because they swim at the end of Mermaid Lane.
In all seriousness, I see some pretty wild and cool things when I am out in the field. Here are just a few examples:
An osprey catching a fish and carrying it back to its young in the nest
A dog diving 3 ft underwater to retrieve rocks from the bottom and having to be literally dragged from the water when the owner wanted to leave
A lady paddling her dog over from her yacht on a paddle board to let it out to shore for its morning bathroom break
Why should someone volunteer, and what's one piece of advice you would give them?
We need you! With so much change occurring in our environment we need community scientists more than ever. We can no longer rely on traditional, lab coat-wearing, professional scientists to carry out all the monitoring we need to ensure good public health and the health of the planet; there are too many constraints (be it finances, geography, time, or other resources).
By signing up to volunteer, you can gain the tools and knowledge you need to safeguard your own waters.
What motivates you to continue to do this work?
We are all connected to water, whether we acknowledge it in our day-to-day lives or not. We drink it, play in it, eat food that grows in it, and allow it to feed our souls spiritually. Monitoring allows us to understand what is polluting our waters and provides the basis for better environmental management so we can all live in the types of healthy communities which sprout from healthy water bodies.
Do you have anything else that you’d like to share about your watershed, your connection to water, or how we can encourage people to join the movement for a swimmable, drinkable, fishable future?
Find your local water body and go for a swim (check out Swim Guide if you need inspo). Think about how nice (or not nice) the water is.
Clif Family Foundation is proud to support hundreds of organizations that are working tirelessly to strengthen our food system, enhance equitable community health outcomes, and protect the places we play by being stewards of our environment and natural resources. Their desire is to leave the world a better place for our children.
