Saturday, April 23, 2005

If a river could cry... Earth Day 2005. A perfect steelhead day: blustery north winds, snow squalls and water warmer than air. There were a couple steelheaders working the deep runs on the Milwaukee River above Capitol Drive. But instead of joining them today, I teamed up with hundreds of volunteers for the 10th annual Friends of Milwaukee's Rivers river clean-up. This event is always held on Earth Day Saturday, and it comes none too soon after a winter's worth of trash is washed into the rivers. FMR staff, board members and volunteers met at 10 designated sites on the Milwaukee and Menomonee rivers and their tributaries at 9:00 this morning, donned rubber gloves, grabbed trash bags and headed for the water. I was the FMR "site ambassador" for the Humboldt Avenue/Capitol Drive segment of the clean-up. My role was to assist site coordinator John Knitter in handing out gear, registering volunteers and passing out incentives, such as invitations to the FMR picnic May 14 and coupons worth 3 bucks at Starbucks. By 9:30 we had over 20 volunteers out patrolling the banks and water. Two of them, Sara Stum and Bill Morley, launched kayaks and headed upstream, planning to pick up trash on their way back down. Joe Aussem brought his golden retriever pup, Ben. A gang of UW-Milwaukee students brought enthusiasm. The north wind bit through the layers up in the UW-M commuter parking lot, but down on the river, we worked up a sweat in no time, pulling trash from the bottom, banks and brush. The first thing you notice when you start picking up trash is how much of it is plastic. Plastic bottles, buckets, broken toys and every size and shape of plastic bag. Many of the bags had become part of the fabric of the riverbank, half rotted, buried by silt and sand, with grass and brush poking up through them. I filled a five-gallon bucket several times with trash and dumped it into a big plastic trash bag. The bucket was much easier to manage in the wind. The most unusual thing I found was a heavy electric pump of some sort. It took two of us to lug it up the bank. I was surprised and pleased to find very little debris obviously left by fishermen: a few dozen yards of monofilament, a couple lures with hooks rusted off, a bait container. One of our crew pulled up a burlap sack with a bunch of lures stuck in it. No doubt many anglers had hooked it and felt just enough give to think they had a steelhead or salmon for a moment at least. We also pulled out two very rusty car hoods, one of which still bore a legible Federal Emissions Guidelines plate. Anyone need a replacement hood for a Mazda 626? We also hauled out a tire, a tire rim, part of a bed frame and enough other trash to completely fill a pickup and the back of a Suburban. The UW-M gang came back with a live snake and an animal skull. Together, they made an interesting still-life in the bottom of a bucket. The skull looked like that of a fox. The snake was a brown snake, formerly known as a DeKay's, named for the naturalist who first identified it, no doubt. They found the snake inside a Cheetos bag, where it was probably soaking up radiant heat and avoiding the wind. I took it to naturalist Randy Hetzel's house a couple miles downstream. He said it was a big specimen (about 12 inches long) and guessed it was a pregnant female. He said he'd photograph it with a smaller one he had and then release it where the students had found it. When the two trucks headed for the dumpster in Estabrook Park, we all felt we had accomplished something, even though we could see the east bank of the river was festooned with more trash than we had picked up on the west side. The students said they'd come back on the first nice day and police the east bank. If the other crews gathered as much trash as we did, then the total could be measured in tons, and yet there are tons more up and down the river, with more added daily by mindless litterers and more washed into the rivers with every rain. And perhaps the greatest irony of this day's efforts is that, ugly as it is, tons and tons of plastic are not the worst thing plaguing these rivers. Oh, sure, discarded fishing line and six-pack carriers will strangle a duck or two, and some youngster will cut himself on a broken bottle, but most of this trash is relatively inert. Plastic trash is an eyesore, more than anything. The real harm is less visible. It comes in the form of runoff from parking lots, rooftops, lawns and other surfaces that drain to the river. Even sewage overflows, nasty as they may be, likely don't do as much damage to the rivers and Lake Michigan as the nonpoint contaminants that are flushed into the watershed with every rain. The parking lots at Miller Park and State Fair Park alone probably contribute more contaminants to the system than all the plastic that floats downstream. We all felt good after our efforts, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we have stemmed the tide by filling a dumpster with plastic. The real work is yet to be done. About the best one can say about today's event is that is removed a lot of visible trash and perhaps raised the awareness of the participants and others who happened by and saw what was going on. Let's hope that awareness will translate into more meaningful action to work for runoff control and construction practices that create buffers between sources of pollution and the place most of it now ends up. If the river could talk, it would thank us for our work today. But if it could cry, it would let us know it still carries contaminants we had no way to deal with and many of us didn't even realize were there. Later... 8:59:49 PM    comment []