Benm6
Registered: December 2007
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The Drexel Woods Clean-up: October 2007
The words rang in my ears months later. I had first heard them during the summer when I was an assistant at a nature camp. One of the little girl’s mom had noticed the trash and debris that lined the edge of the stream that cut through the woods. She looked at me and said “Someone should do something about all that junk.” I could not shake the feeling that the “someone” was me.
School started a month later and I became determined to mobilize the members of the high school environmental group to have a stream clean of the Drexel Woods Nature Preserve. With the approval and guidance of the head naturalist, the recreation department and the friends of the Drexel Woods, we met on a sunny October morning. My dreams of 20 or 30 cleaners met with the reality of 8 dedicated people who arrived to remove some of the trash that was clogging the water way.
Our team of eight waded into the stream. We began with easy to remove items such as bottles, cans and plastic garbage. Bag after bag was filled and sorted into recyclables and trash. We were muddy and wet, but our group was determined to remove as much of the rubbish from this section of the stream as possible. We knew from talking with our naturalist friend that aquatic and plant life would return if the stream could be restored to a cleaner and more oxygenated state.
Soaked in the mire and sludge at the bottom of the stream, we began digging out rusted oil drums, broken glass panels and metal frames from various household tools and equipment. It was unbelievable what we pulled out with everyone working together. The sucking noise as the refuse was released from the muck was loud and our group was heartened by each object we dug out.
As some of our team worked along the shoreline lifting more cans, canisters and bottles, four of us came together as we saw some wire edges protruding from the water. We heaved, yanked and dug through the mud. Finally we yanked a shopping cart from the stream bed. Years of dirt and muck hung from its frame. We all had a great feeling of accomplishment as we hauled it to the bank of the stream and our friends towed it down to our pick up place.
The pick up place was filled with bags of trash, buckets of bottles and cans to recycle and larger items for special retrieval. The eight members of Students Against Violating the Earth sat with the Drexel Woods Naturalist and rested in the October sun. The water of the stream babbled back in the woods and we knew we had started down a path to reclaim this beautiful habitat from the damage human beings can do.
We are planning a spring clean up and an education program so all of the residents in our town can learn the value of protecting nature. We know that we all can make a difference by changing our actions and that a small group of people can have an effect on improving a small part of our environment. If we can do it-anyone can!
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