Preserve your lake shore

In the accompanying image, turtles bask comfortably on fallen timber at the restored lakefront of a summer home.

Some Minnsota residents have begun to realize that manicured lawns and the golf course look can kill a lake if all the shoreline residents adopt it. The same chemicals that kill the lawn weeds kill off the useful plants at the water's edge, and the same fertilizer that greens the grass, ripens the lake with a superabundance of algae, turning once sparkling waters to a murky green.

That's because of the loss of the lake's "kidneys," the wildflowers and bog life at the margin.

To read more about the problem -- and the solution -- see Kim Palmer's 8/18/05 article Lakeshores Go Wild in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Minneapolis, being the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes, appreciates these things. Her article was reprinted tonight in my local paper, the Willimantic Chronicle (I wont bother with a link to it, because its online paper is quite unsatisfying).

Something you may find interesting in the article is the lesson offered on how a small number of people can teach and inspire others to likewise preseve their shoreline property.