I went to Asbury Park, New Jersey yesterday for the 34th annual Clearwater Festival.  The Clearwater Project is an organization started by musician Pete Seeger in 1966 to protect New York City's Hudson River.  Now the organization has chapters in other areas on the east coast and they hold events where environmental activists, musicians, and regular people come together to have a good time and raise awareness about water pollution.

Events like this are really important in New York and New Jersey, two states not known for their well-preserved natural environments.  The thing is, we still have great beaches and it's important that we protect them from further harm.  The friends of Clearwater know this, and they put on the Clearwater festival to get the word out to everyone from music fans to school kids, running informative booths about local wildlife and providing great entertainment.

It's good to see Asbury Park playing host to these sorts of events because just a few years ago, the beachfront resort town was almost completely devoid of tourism, or any other kind of business for that matter.  There were few businesses, fewer jobs, and almost no visitors.  Asbury Park was a popular resort with bathers from New York City who would arrive by train in the 1900's, but the arrival of automobile highways resulted in wealthy tourists taking their business to more secluded beaches.  The old resorts at Asbury Park, unfortunately, were left to rot.

Asbury Park's main drag, Ocean Avenue in 2006 (before the recent 'renewal').  Courtesy of Wiki Commons.

Now Asbury Park is playing host to events, new businesses and believe it or not, people are actually coming around!  Here's hoping that the renewal efforts in Asbury Park and the conservation projects being undertaken by the Clearwater Foundation find great success!

Who is Peter Vanderkaay? If you don't follow swimming too closely, you might not be familiar with Peter, but he was a two-time Gold Medalist swimmer in the 2008 Summer Olympics, and this summer he's planning to compete in the American Nationals. Whether Peter can win another gold remains to be seen, but he's not just competing for himself or even for his country. He's swimming on behalf of the one billion people worldwide who suffer from a lack of access to clean drinking water.

Vanderkaay has teamed up with a clean-water advocacy organization called Blue Planet Run, and he's planning to raise one dollar for every lap he swims between now and nationals. That's 900,000 meters of water-travel between now and July 7, if all goes according to plan, and Peter's relying on people like us to donate for the cause.

A day in the life of Peter Vanderkaay. This is the kind of training that Peter will be doing to raise money for people who need better access to clean water around the world.

You can donate to Peter's project through the Blue Planet Run website, and the money will be used to educate people who could use the help finding, filtering, collecting, and drinking clean water around the world. Peter Vanderkaay is using his high-profile competitions to attract a broad donor-base, but Blue Planet Run also provides resources for athletes at every level of competition who would like to use their sports to collect funds for clean water.

This is the kind of equipment that many people could use to collect drinkable water, if they only had the education and supplies.  That's where Peter Vanderkaay, Blue Planet Run, and people like us come in!

If you're running, walking, swimming, or riding in an athletic event anytime soon, you can use the occasion to collect money for this 'Blue Planet' of ours and everyone on it.

Peter Vanderkaay is doing an interview with PlayCity blogger Trina later this week as well, so stay tuned to the blogs for more info on Peter's swimming, the need for clean water, and the ways Blue Planet Run can help improve access to the most important resource on the planet-- fresh, clean water.

What's just as fun as tossing around the baseball, but less likely to break your neighbor's window?  A frisbee!  Maybe I should correct myself-- a flying disc!

Sunscreen and drinking water are crucial pieces of equipment no matter what sport you're playing this summer.  As for the discs, ring-style frisbee's like the pink one in this picture are weighted so that they can fly further and straighter than regular discs, even in windy conditions.

Frisbee-style discs are a favorite piece of equipment on the beach and at college campuses around the country, and people have adapted all sorts of old sports to be played with discs-- golf, football, and classic catch games like monkey in the middle can all be played with flying discs, and the wackiness of frisbee flight makes for games that are highly accessible and fun to people at all levels of athletic ability.

Flying discs, like skateboards and yo-yo's, were originally made by toy companies to cash in on recreation fads that sprang up in the 1950's, when the generation of children born after World War II (the so-called 'Baby Boomers') were creating a big new market for toys and games.  The name "Frisbee" was trademarked by Wham-O toys in 1957, but many other companies produced their own discs as well.

Today, the accessibility of disc games has made them popular with college students, many of whom use frisbee-thons to raise money for good causes.  Now that the weather is nice, the amount of Frisbee-tossing that I am involved in personally has skyrocketed, and I know that I'm not alone.

Freestyle frisbee!

The aerobic workout and hand-eye coordination that disc sports can provide can certainly make you break a sweat, the same as any other game.  It's always important to stay hydrated, especially when the weather is hot and humid.  Clean water is so accessible here in America that there's no excuse the become dehydrated.  In other parts of the world, however, water resources aren't so abundant. 

According to Blue Planet Run, over 6,000 children die each day due to a lack of access to clean water for drinking and bathing.  Check their site out for more information about water issues, and consider contributing to their fundraising efforts, if you enjoy being able to drink cold, clean water or take a refreshing shower after your heated summertime disc-tossing!