Vol. 3, No. 2 Contents
Headline Back Issues
Spring 1999
|
Charlie Swain: Cape crusader champions clean boatingFalmouth, Massachusetts ---- In his youth, Charlie Swain would walk down to Quisset Harbor on Buzzards Bay nearly every day. He'd shellfish or row a dinghy out to the buoys to fish for scup and rock bass. Or sometimes he'd head over to the family boatyard on the Child's River, a tributary of Waquoit Bay, to help paint buildings or just hang around. After high school, Swain spent more than 20 years working for the Mead Paper Co. in Ohio until his father and uncle asked him to come back in 1979 to take over the boat yard so they could retire. He returned to find his hometown harbor a mess. "The first thing I noticed was you couldn't catch any more fish in Quisset Harbor for some reason," he recalls. "All the eelgrass had disappeared and shellfish were getting thin." And Waquoit Bay was suffering the effects of pollution as well. While living in Ohio, Swain had followed the cleanup efforts on Lake Erie. "Before I left," he recalls, "The commercial fishery was back, the beaches were opened." Work was also under way to clean up Ohio's notorious Cuyahoga River ---- at one time so polluted that it caught fire. "So when I got back here and saw the mess, I said, 'We should be able to clean this up, this is terrible,' " he says. A new course
Appointed by then-Governor Michael Dukakis to MCZM's Coastal Resources Advisory Board (CRAB), Swain also became involved in reviewing the agency's programs, informing the public about coastal environmental issues, and especially educating the marine business community about ways to clean up their own operations. Swain favors education and support over regulations and fines. He believes people are inclined to go along with greener methods once they understand more about their benefits and that "clean business is good business." For example, he is looking for funds to help boatyards that are not hooked into municipal sewer lines to install systems to collect runoff from their boat-washing and servicing operations. These sorts of systems help prevent the contaminated runoff from draining into coastal waters, but are not affordable for some businesses. His own boatyard's service areas have concrete floors with drains and sediment traps. "He's amazingly dedicated and forward-thinking in terms of environmental awareness, particularly as it relates to marina and boatyard operations," says Truman Henson, MCZM's Regional Coordinator for Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard. Swain, who also campaigns for environmental concerns as a member of the Falmouth Planning Board and the local planning committee for the Cape Cod Commission, suggests that most environmental damage on the Cape has resulted from a combination of explosive growth and inadequate planning. "When I was a kid there were only 8,000 people in the town of Falmouth. Now there are 32,000," he notes. No leaks allowedSwain requires each of his customers, some of whom have been coming to the Edwards Boatyard for generations, to sign a contract binding them to adhere to the marina's environmental practices in order to keep their slip or mooring. Requirements include using nontoxic antifreeze and biodegradable cleaners; properly disposing of hazardous and septic wastes; and keeping bilges scrubbed clean of oil and sediment. Marina staff show customers how to fill their fuel tanks without spilling any fuel into the water. And, says Swain, "We don't allow any leaky engines." He also claims to have provided the town's first pump-out station for marine septic waste tanks ---- a service he provides for free. Customers, employees, and fellow marine business owners didn't immediately warm up to Swain's rigorous methods. "To begin with, a lot of people objected and kind of harassed me a little bit, but once we got going and started educating people, after a while people started helping, and now there's not a person in the boatyard that doesn't support it," says Swain, who employs about 16 people in the off season and 20 in the summer to staff the boatyard and to sell and rent canoes, kayaks, sunfish, and sailboats. Swain sees his business as an opportunity to inform his customers about clean boating not only through his green policies, but also by distributing brochures on environmentally safe boating products, fuel conservation, locations of septic pumpout facilities, and local habitat protection and conservation efforts. Swain's marina also brings its philosophy into the surrounding community, co-sponsoring, along with MCZM, an annual cleanup of the Childs River. "We started out with two huge dump truck loads of debris the first year. Now there are just a few odds and ends each year," he says. He attributes the decline in rubbish to the efforts of a more educated and involved community. All hands on deck"I try to do what I can for the environment because I like to fish and shellfish like everybody else," says Swain, though he finds little time to relax on the water. He has been recognized with awards from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency for his environmentally-minded business practices. But Swain also believes that protecting the environment is the right thing to do, and makes good business sense. "It's expensive at first, but after awhile it isn't. You find clean business is good business. You can actually make money by having a clean marina," he asserts. "He's been very vocal in his advocacy for clean boating and its immediate impact on the maintenance of pristine marine environments," says Henson. "He's been very successful in bringing others into that way of thinking ---- recognizing that a pristine marine environment is the backbone of the marine industry." Swain recruits MCZM staff to come to boat shows to speak with attendees about ways to safeguard the marine environment. "He's always encouraged me and our agency to take advantage of opportunities for public outreach," says Henson. An informed public is top priority, according to Swain, who says, "We have to stop educating the planning boards and the conservation commissions. We need to get the message to the people because that's the only way we're going to get things turned around." Marine businesses are an effective conduit for information, according to Swain, who has convinced federal and state agencies, harbor masters, and other organizations to provide marine businesses and boatyards with informational brochures they can distribute to their customers on pump-out services for marine septic tanks and other marine-related environmental topics. Swain has also helped launch TV public service announcements about clean boating, and has worked with the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve to develop educational campaigns. A grandfather himself, Swain delightedly points out that children are also learning about environmental stewardship in school, which should bode well for environmentally-sound business practices in the years to come. Community members are becoming more aware of the need to protect the marine environment, and this is showing up in positive changes along Falmouth's coastline, says Swain. Shellfish beds in Quisset Harbor that had been closed due to contamination are now open for harvesting in the winter. He expects that the planned construction of a new sewage treatment plant in West Falmouth will help improve water quality even more, potentially allowing shellfishing there in the summer as well. Improving the coastal marine environment is, acknowledges Swain, "a big project, but it's not insurmountable." The way to do it, he explains, is harbor by harbor, and marina by marina, with each developing and carrying out its own community-supported plan for improving its waters. He advises, "You can turn the environment around and head it in the right direction, but it can't be done by a single person. Everybody has to help." |
||||||||||
PDF Version
Upon his return to the Cape, Swain immediately became involved in efforts to designate Waquoit Bay, which opens into Nantucket Sound, as an Area of Critical Environmental Concern under the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program (MCZM). His own concern eventually led him to pursue a gradual environmental make-over of his business.