by Cate White
Director Tox-Ick.org
Member of Sustainable West Seattle

West Seattle resident Laura James has been nominated as a Cox Conservation Hero. Votes for the finalist are being accepted at http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/ June 18 through July 16, 2012. If she wins, a $10,000 award will be given to her nonprofit of choice, Sustainable West Seattle.

The Cox Conservation Hero Award, organized by KIRO 7 Eyewitness News and The Trust for Public Land, has nominated Laura as a conservation hero for her efforts to restore Puget Sound.

This past year, Laura organized a diving team that removed over 1,000 lbs of discarded marine and automotive batteries from a West Seattle scuba diving site. It is for this effort that she was honored with the hero nomination.

Laura was drawn to diving by Puget Sound’s incredible abundance of life and profound diversity of habitat. However, what she has found below the beautiful surface of Puget Sound is a battle for survival going on just beyond the shoreline. It is a battle between the creatures that call it home and a massive influx of debris and pollutants that come from our roadsides, our storm drains, and our beaches.

The exciting part is that if Laura wins the award as much as $10,000 will be donated to Sustainable West Seattle for their Don’t Feed the Tox-Ick Monster program. It’s a program that educates community members about how harmful things like batteries and other debris can be to our marine ecosystems. Even more importantly, it also empowers people to make choices that protect the waters that give us recreation, inspiration, and livelihood.

For this to happen, we need your vote! Select Laura James on the KIRO Cox Conserves Hero website:
http://www.kirotv.com/s/heroes/

Together, many people taking small steps over time can develop into a formidable force that can conquer seemingly overwhelming problems, like Tox-Ick Monsters.