Clean Rivers Clean Lakes Conference 2018

Last week we had the joy of returning for a third year, to cover the Clean Rivers Clean Lake Conference for our friends at Sweetwater based in Milwaukee WI at the school of fresh water siences.

This year’s Clean Rivers Clean Lake Conference was held at Alverno College. Alverno College has such a beautiful campus and was a great location for this event, the staff was amazing and very helpful. If you ever have the chance tour this beautiful campus I highly recommend it.

This year’s discussions and panels focused on creating purposeful drainage areas inside the urban landscape, porous pavement, new policies and regulations and how we as good stewards can do out part in these endeavors.  

As much as it is a day of work for us it is also a learning day. I come from a family with farmers and every year I am impressed to see what these fine people come up with. Some of it in the past I have taken back with me to my uncle’s farm to see if there is something we can put into practice as it pertains to curtailing field runoff into the streams and waterways.

Here are some of the photos from this year’s Clean Rivers Clean Lake Conference.

The Water Council - Water Leaders Summit

On May 23rd and 24th we had the privilege to cover The Water Leaders’ Summit for The Water Council of Milwaukee.  It was a great couple of days working in downtown Milwaukee at the Pfister Hotel.
Over the course of the two days while photographing the event we had the ability to hear Mayor Tom Barrett speak at lunch the first day and many other great speakers and panels. Topics ranged from providing clean water in developing countries to being better stewards of our water use here in the developed world. The evening reception was great fun and it gave us the ability to get some good photos of guest interacting with each other.

Sweet Water Clean Rivers Clean Lakes Conference

This past week was a very fun week for Vagabond Photography we had the opportunity to team up for a second time with a great non for profit group call Sweet Water (http://www.swwtwater.org/). This time we were covering their Sweet Water Clean River, Clean Lakes Conference at Discovery World on the Lake Michigan water front. They are a fun and insightful bunch of people, trying to do a wonderful thing by organizing groups and companies and raise awareness to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed to bring it back to swimmable and fishable conditions.

The reason why we really like what they are doing over at Sweet Water besides the obvious is because it gives us the ability to photograph our clients in new(to us) and cleaner locations, in the past we would of passed by because of how dirty and unsafe they were.

Also while at the convention two of the afternoon presenters were from Detroit and Toronto. They both went into detail on how cleaning and restoring/reshaping the water shed in their cities brought people back to the waterfront and revitalized the area. We think this speaks to what Sweet Water is trying doing in our area which we believe can greatly benefit people in general and especially our clients.

The other part of why we this think this is a great thing is, in being good stewards of this blue spinning marble we all live on it is our duty to keep it clean for future generations so we don’t just flush our lives down the proverbial toilet.  In our free time at Vagabond Photography we like to spend our time fishing, swimming and hiking around local waterways so groups like this have a special place near to our hearts. Having grown up around the paper mill belt along the Wisconsin River we can remember times when cleaning operations were under way we would not think about swimming or eating a lot of fish out of the river. Though now it is a great river to go out and have fun on year round. So it’s nice to see several groups trying to clean up the Greater Milwaukee watershed.

We cannot encourage people enough to go over to their website and see what they are trying to do to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed.