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Last Saturday, while most people tended to their lawns
for the first time this year, I was wrenching blackberry shoots
from a steep hillside. Two hundred others were tackling ivy
and bamboo, stripping clean an abandoned transient camp, planting
hemlock seedlings and demolishing a dangerous, dilapidated
play structure.
Work? On the weekend? Well, these days it seems as if everyone
does. But why volunteer your meager free time for the environment
when you could be hunting for glue-gun cartridges at Home
Depot, devouring VH-1's Behind the Music, kick-boxing
or washing your car? Maybe once the ozone layer is completely
eliminated, but right now Blondie's on cable.
You have good intentions, of course. Deep down, you'd love
to deliver meals to the less mobile, weed out Scotch broom
or teach Sunday school, but today you need to catch up on
last week's news, buy pet food and play catch with your
sons and daughters. There will be plenty of time for community
service when you retire--perhaps. With rampant workaholism
and the dire future of Social Security, it doesn't look
like anyone's going to get to retire until age 73. For most
people, the only voluntary improvement project that warrants
the effort is the self.
Don't brace yourself for a lecture--I'm no different. Sure
I volunteered when I first moved to Portland two years ago.
As a recent college graduate, I knew that I was as likely
find a fulfilling paid job off the bat as I was to be mooned
by a priest. So I signed on with the Red Cross to do office
and archival tasks. But it wasn't long before I landed at
WW, and I haven't had a free minute since. I've become
so stingy with my time that when Earth Day came around last
year, I didn't lift a finger.
Regardless of whether it should be, Earth
Day is not everyday. Like Mother's Day, it arrives
every spring to lay a big guilt trip on us and remind us
why we're here and how we got into this messy world of adult
responsibilities.
April 22 marks the 30th anniversary of Earth Day. How are
you going to celebrate the state of the planet? Would you
consider leaving your jumbled house for a few hours to tidy
up a park, hiking trail, beach or dumping site instead?
And furthermore, is there any fun in such an undertaking?
Many of you have probably participated in cleanup projects
before and know that the answer is well, yeah. Field work
isn't amusing in the way that watching The Wedding Singer
is, but it is meaningful for the right, trite-sounding reasons.
You feel rewarded for doing a good deed; it's honest, back-breaking
work; and there's satisfaction in mingling with dirt and
ripping up roots with your bare hands.
Last weekend, at an early Earth Day activity, an enthusiastic
group found such satisfaction at Lower Macleay Park. Called
Go
Into the Woods, the event was organized by Portland
General Electric, which formed a partnership with the
Friends of Forest Park a year ago. This was the first big-scale
Earth Day event that the
PGE people had been involved with, and they didn't hold
back. It felt good. It felt like a party.
Outfitted in team T-shirts, employees of Fred
Meyer and PGE
competed against each other in an ivy-removal race while
pep squads cheered. Draft root beer flowed from a keg during
the congratulatory barbecue, where I discovered that Cheetos
taste really good after two hours of wielding a ground-breaker.
Though it seemed a bit like a carnival, the toilers were
doing serious work. Sandy Diedrich, a vocal representative
for the Forest Park Ivy Removal Project (a.k.a. the No Ivy
League), estimates that 20 percent of Forest Park has an
ivy problem and that ivy is the single biggest threat to
forest health.
Ivy is pretty, and blackberries are delicious, so why eradicate
them? Because both are fast-growing, invasive species that
crowd out native plants. Ivy is especially a pest in the
Northwest because of the climate; it can grow even with
as little as one percent light. (The No Ivy League groups
wage war on ivy 9 am-noon every Saturday, excluding holidays;
call 823-3681 to get involved.)
Groups such as The Nature Conservancy, Friends of Forest
Park, REI and SOLV regularly conduct energizing and inspiring
restoration and maintenance projects. With its festival-like
atmosphere, Go Into the Woods may not be typical--but it
doesn't hurt to turn environmental volunteerism into a party.
Diedrich guessed that it would have taken a normal-sized
No Ivy League group five days to accomplish what more than
200 volunteers did at the Macleay site. It's a sacrifice
to commit your precious time to an environment-improvement
endeavor, but it's likely that doing so will invigorate
your "self" more than running errands ever could.
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 21,
1999
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