Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

Nowadays the situation of the planet's ecology is getting worse and worse. Everyday people pollute our home with such a big amount of waste that is hard to be even imagined. Those thoughts have not been able to leave my mind since I found out what the waste is and when I actually realized that every day I see it laying on the streets of my town. Then I started thinking about organizing a team with my friends and go to the particular place in my town that is considered to be one of the dirtiest there and clean it. We were thinking about going to the place for a long time, but no one was able to or maybe was too lazy to organize us, until I found out about this project, that pushed me to take an action, not just think about it. And we went to the place.

A long time ago that was a beautiful river, called Guslitsa, where people in the town could drink water from, but throughout the time it became a dirty place, full of empty bottles and other objects that no one would even think of finding there. A century ago the river was full of life, it was a house for several kinds of fish, but today it is just a home for a family of ducks that live there just because it is the only river in the town.

Before coming there we bought twenty huge plastic bags, because we thought that we knew what an amount of rubbish was waiting for us at the place, but we were wrong, it needed much more than that. This is why we decided to stretch the project for several days and use those twenty bags for one. We picked up every bottle, every cigarette we could find. When the area around the river was clean, we went further: to the shores. These were muddy shores, but the love towards nature and ten more bags that were left made us dirt our shoes and continue picking up trash. The things that we found in that area were more interesting that around it: a 20-year old net full of fish skeletons and a toilet in the middle of the river surprised us a lot. Then we saw a duck family and that made us pick up trash from the river as far as we were able to reach, because it made us realise that we are fighting for life.

By the end of the say we took out twenty full bags and brought them to the closest area where trash was collected. Later we talked to local people and they said that this was their trash dump area, because the trash station that the government provided for them has been to far from their houses. This made me think about working on another project: providing those people with the place nearby, where they can put their waste.

This project made me think more serious about the situation on our planet; it gets polluted every single day, and there are lots of places like Guslitsa, that are becoming trash dump area for local people, instead of being habitats of different animals. It made a very big influence on me: I decided to choose an environmental engineering as a major in college. I really want to create something that would solve the problem of waste forever and make the planet cleaner.