Sally Boswell’s story starts like most Sussex Countians’ nowadays. After coming to the area for many years, a change in her life led her to take the plunge and make the beach area her permanent home. It is a home she loves and respects — and a home she wants to protect.
Coastal Point • Monica Fleming
Sally Boswell stands outside the Center for the Inland Bays entrance.
After moving to the area more than five years ago, Boswell worked as a substitute teacher for a while, teaching at Ingram’s Pond for the Indian River School District and at the James Farm Educational Program for the Center for Inland Bays, teaching seventh- and eighth-graders, reinforcing activities that they learn in the classroom.
Her real “break” came though when the education and outreach coordinator position opened at the Center for the Inland Bays. The position allows her to mesh her passion for natural history and environmental science with her years of experience in public affairs and communications.
“I love it. I have the best job. I get to do my passion!” exclaimed Boswell.
Boswell came to the Center with 15 years of communications and public affairs experience with Johns Hopkins University. For 10 years, she ran her own business and was a founding director of BioTrek Naturalists in Baltimore – a non-profit that organized field trips for adults relating to natural history and environmental science. She has always held a passion for all things related to nature and science and their history.
“I’m a canoeist, a bicyclist. I always loved being outside,” she said.
According to their Web site, The Delaware Center for the Inland Bays was “established as a nonprofit organization in 1994 under the auspices of the Inland Bays Watershed Enhancement Act (Title 7, Chapter 76)” and their mission is to promote the wise use and enhancement of the Inland Bays and their watersheds through habitat protection and restoration, science and research and outreach and public policy.
Congress declared the Delaware Inland Bays “an estuary of national significance” in 1988 and the bays are one of 28 members of the National Estuary program. The inland bays include the Rehoboth Bay, the Little Assawoman Bay and the Indian River Bay, which along with their tributaries cover “about 32 square miles and drain a landmass, called the watershed, of about 320 square miles.”
Boswell said she is especially proud of the partnerships that the Center has established — one being with her former employer, the Indian River School District. The Schoolyard Wetlands Habitat project is one of her pet projects and is a big hit with students and volunteers alike. Last year, they worked with Long Neck Elementary and Phillip C. Showell Elementary. This year, they are working with East Millsboro Elementary and Indian River High School.
“Building wetlands at the schools is every exciting. They are very fertile, so it’s dramatic — big impact. The native plants bring native butterflies and dragonflies, and a lot happens very quickly,” she shared excitedly.
Boswell explained that the CIB works with Environmental Concern out of St. Michael’s as their “technical partner” on the schoolyard habitat projects. Then they have a Plan Our Wetlands (POW) workshop that includes students, teachers, administrators and custodians to learn about wetlands and their value. They plan the design and talk about what they want to attract, then they walk the schoolyard to figure our where to build it.
“Each year, they’ll add to it. It’s great. It’s like a field trip without having to leave school. And you get the obvious science lessons, but it is also great for math, for data collecting, creative writing and art,” Boswell explained. “We also have a Schoolyard Habitat Newsletter that reports on the habitat building and progress. For schools that have the habitats, it gives them ways to use them, and for schools that don’t, they can get excited about starting them.”
Another thing she is especially proud of is her relationship with Pat Drizd, a CIB volunteer who serves as the volunteer coordinator for the Center and who won the Governor’s Outstanding Volunteer Award this past year. Boswell said Drizd as been very influential in recruiting and inspiring others.
“We have over 100 volunteers for the oyster program alone and probably have 50-75 active volunteers,” said Boswell. “We can’t restore and protect our inland bays by ourselves. Volunteers really extend our reach. They get interested and become knowledgeable and those informed citizens become influential to other citizens – they carry that message to their homeowner’s association, their churches and their community groups.”
Boswell said that many of the people that she talks to doing outreach are newcomers to the area, but that many of the people involved in the schools have lived in the area for generations, and the fun part is seeing those worlds combine.
“The community needs the schools, and the schools need the community,” she said. “Many of the people moving here might not have children or grandchildren close and volunteering with the habitats gives them a reason to get involved with the schools.”
“The people that come here — they choose to live here, in part because they are attracted to is in some way. In Philadelphia or Baltimore or Washington, D.C, the soil is different, the climate is different, the vegetation. It’s different,” Boswell noted.
“The downside to people coming is there are so many people! But the upside is that many people that come here are eager to learn about where they live and make a contribution,” she added. “They want to be a part of a community and to think of this as home. They want this place to stay the way they found it.”
The center is also involved in demonstration projects. One obvious is their own headquarters, located off of Route 1 near the Indian River Inlet. They used a “green architect” to provide them with a menu of ways to “green up” their building, which was renovated (recycled) from its original use as Coast Guard barracks.
It is equipped with solar panels. It was constructed with 6-inch-thick walls for good insulation. The windows are low-E insulated and many green products can be found inside, from recycled material in the drywall to the carpet to the countertops. Outside, they used native plants in the landscaping and have a rain barrel and a rain garden to use rainwater in ways that don’t contribute to runoff.
Other demonstration projects are increasingly being created around the entire area. The first one will be finished in Millville this May. Volunteers with The Center for Inland Bays have helped the town introduce native plants around the town hall parking lots, as well as a rain garden, a rain barrel and a demonstration buffer along the tax ditch, so people can see what each of those things does in a small-scale, residential-size landscape. Resources will be also available inside Millville Town Hall, on subjects like reasons to have a rain barrel and where to buy one.
As for the future of the center, according to Executive Director Edward Lewandowski, they want to maintain continuity in the watershed and step up to the plate with funding challenges as state and federal budgets are pressured. They have recently hired a development coordinator to help with this. They also want to stay on top of the demanding needs of a bulging population.
“As our landscape changes from agriculture to more urbanized, it presents new challenges,” said Lewandowski. “And we are adapting and changing to the needs of just having more people.”
As for Boswell, she hopes to continue to educate and reach out to the people of the watershed — and hopes that they will take rightful ownership of declaring its need for restoration and preservation.
“Water quality is absolutely essential to life,” she declared. “So much in our society is about being the same and losing our uniqueness. We live in an exceptionally beautiful, rare place with incredible resources and natural beauty.”
“It’s the people that live here that love it who are the only ones who can protect it,” she emphasized. “One organization or a handful of people can’t protect it.
“My mission is to get as many people involved in our cause that I can — from the children to the communities. That’s what’s going to do it,” Boswell said. “I can’t do it. When the citizens become knowledgeable they become empowered to speak out and call for changes to protect the things that are so important. And clean water is as important as anything gets.”
For more information on the Center for Inland Bays’ many programs and partnerships, or on how to get involved, visit www.inlandbays.org online or call (302) 226-8105.