Cleaning Up the Town

Do you have an annual cleanup day in your town? This is the third year for Andover and about 200 people participated, including girl and boy scout troops, as well as a local track team. In New Jersey, grant funds are available for towns to purchase gloves, T-shirts, vests, road signs, etc. for the volunteers. A bagel breakfast and pizza lunch were served. I can tell you from experience, food always draws more volunteers.

While anyone can say they “love the environment,” actions speak louder than words. Lois not only pitched in and recruited her husband Dan for Cleaner, Greener Andover Day, she also signed up the Environmental Commission to work as a team. Pictured top, from left are Commissioners Linda Hubbard, Bob Green, Lois, Open Space Chair Dan Freed, and Commissioner Peter Spinney. Not pictured is Commissioner Diane Gillespie.

The Environmental Commission team patrolled its assigned neighborhood collecting tires, a discarded lawnmower, two bags of recyclables, and six bags of garbage. They couldn’t reach the tires that had been thrown into the pond.

It was interesting to hear comments such as, “Why don’t the people who live here clean up their own neighborhood?” An interesting question, indeed. Because, if we all did that on a regular basis, there would be no need for all of those volunteers to scour our roads. Too often, it’s not the residents themselves who toss the litter. Not infrequently, I garden to the clink of bottles and cans as they hit our lower ledge after being tossed out of windows of passing cars.

Being angry at strangers who litter and dump tires, furniture, and other household junk along our roads and waterways doesn’t help the environment. Picking it up does. If your town doesn’t already host an annual cleanup day, start one yourself.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which ...
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery...
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have...
Keep reading