By Zeus Smith As a US National Team rower, Belmont resident Maggie Fellows spends a lot of time on the Charles River. Since 2021, the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA) has mobilized a cohort of passionate community leaders like Fellows to push for climate-smart policies and practices right in their backyards. Called River Advocates, this program brings together volunteers from various backgrounds and experiences to learn effective advocacy strategies and steward a more climate-resilient future. The River Advocates program is a crash course in civic engagement––by joining, volunteers find a community of like-minded individuals interested in learning about direct actions [READ MORE]
Let The Charles River Run Free of Defunct Dams
By Julia Hopkins For more than 400 years, the Charles River has been altered, controlled, and dammed to bend to the will of industry and profit. The river we know today is not free. Instead, a river radically changed by the long history of human intervention. We dammed its waters to power industry, leaving a legacy of toxic pollution in our wake. We straightened its gentle meanders, buried its tributaries, and hardened its shores, constricting its natural flow. We drained and filled its wetlands to free up more land and let our parking lots sprawl right up to its banks. [READ MORE]
CRWA Works to Keep the Charles River Clean
By Julia Hopkins and Lisa Kumpf Have you ever thought about what happens to that rain when extreme storms hit? If you call Belmont home, it ends up in the Charles or the Mystic River. The town of Belmont is sandwiched between the Charles and Mystic Rivers, two beautiful, fragile natural resources that provide habitat for wildlife and enjoyment for humans. The town is split between the Charles River watershed and the Mystic River watershed. A watershed is a land area that channels all rain and snowmelt into ponds, brooks, and streams that drain into a single river, and eventually [READ MORE]