Friday Night Folk at All Souls, the region's bastion of folk music to joyfully support social justice and outreach activities, has picked a truly local grassroots cause to honor at its second annual tribute to American folk icon and political activist Pete Seeger.

This Friday night, a handful of locally and nationally recognized folk musicians will take the stage in the Unity Hall of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in New London in tribute to Seeger. Free-will donations will benefit Save the River-Save the Hills, Inc., an all-volunteer nonprofit organization that seeks to protect and preserve the Niantic River and the neighboring Oswegatchie Hills.

More than a handful of locals in this region had the honor of knowing, singing, protesting and working beside Seeger over his many years of music and social activism, from anti-war, civil rights and disarmament, to his efforts to clean up the Hudson River. That includes professional folk singer Geoff Kaufman, director of the annual Mystic Seaport Sea Festival, who has sung with Seeger and spent time on Seeger's Clearwater Sloop on the Hudson. Kaufman is emcee of Friday night's event.

Nick Evento, who dreamt up Friday Night Folk in the late 1980s, got the inspiration for an annual tribute to Seeger while listening to a sermon shortly after the folk icon's death in January 2014.

"We're a folk organization; who else can do this? I thought, for Pete's sake, we have to do this," says Evento, who also was moved to compose "For Pete's Sake," which he and Kaufman performed at the first tribute last April. More than 300 people crowded the hall that night to celebrate Seeger and to benefit Save the Sound, a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.

"It was something that came to me, I felt like I needed to touch upon the inspiration of Pete Seeger, who was an icon of hope, enthusiasm and hard work for our environment, social justice and so many things that I believe we need in this country," he says of the song.

Fred Grimsey, STR-STH founder, is one of the locals inspired by Seeger and the Clearwater.

A retired engineer who decided to sail up and down the East Coast, Grimsey docked in Kingston one evening about 13 years ago on the way back from Lake Champlain. He ended up spending a weekend working on the Clearwater Sloop on with a bunch of college kids. They were passionate about saving the Hudson but knew little about boat repair or how to use the many tools in Grimsey's sail boat.

"They inspired me. It was on the deck of the Clearwater, with these college kids, that Save the River-Save the Hills was born," says Grimsey. "A few weeks later, Greg Stone, then The Day's editorial page editor, pointed out if a local grassroots organization was going to be formed, someone needed to do it. So I took him up on it."

In the past 13 years, STR-STH has been advocating and acting to prevent and reduce pollution in the Niantic River and to protect the remaining acreage of the undeveloped Oswegatchie Hills in East Lyme. One of the development proposals is to put 1,700 condominiums on the remaining 243 acres near Interstate 95.

"We have input from the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection and multiple scientists that the kind of development proposed would destroy the upper river through disruption of the forest and pollution runoff," says Grimsey.

STR-STH and Friends of the Oswegatchie Hills Nature Preserve, the nonprofit organization that maintains the 400-plus acre OHNP formed in 2007, are interveners in the ongoing lawsuits between the Town of East Lyme and the developer that owns the remaining portion of the Hills.

Although much of the Niantic River is a shallow tidal estuary, four communities embrace it, from fresh water coming out of Salem and Montville on the north to Waterford and East Lyme. Grimsey and STR-STH initiated the marine pump-out boat service that runs on the Niantic during boating season; more recently, he has taken on water quality monitoring and bacterial counts on beaches further inland on the river. Since the organization has heard of anecdotal reports of illnesses among people who get in the river after heavy rains and runoff, one of its future quests is to design and study the prevalence of waterborne illnesses caused by pollution in the river.

For a full listing of performers at the Pete Seeger tribute concert, go to www.fridaynightfolk.org.

When she's not gardening, Suzanne hosts a weekly radio show, "CT Outdoors," on WLIS 1420 AM and WMRD 1150 AM from 1 to 1:30 p.m. Saturday and from 7 to 7:30 a.m. Sunday, or listen to archived shows in the On Demand section of www.wliswmrd.net.