Crow’s Nest: Force of Nature cleanup

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager

Force of Nature volunteers made a lot of progress this weekend at Crow’s Nest Preserve, cleaning up a dump that is on land that is a relatively recent addition to the preserve. This is the third FoN workday we’ve spent on these acres; for the first two we focused mainly on invasive plants. But our interns also worked on the bigger trash items over this past summer. Now we’re left mainly with household trash, bags that were dumped in the woods instead of disposed of in a landfill. The bags decomposed just enough that they broke into little pieces and all the cans and bottles had to be picked up and put in new bags.

This is one of two piles we generated Sunday. Three TV’s, a child car seat, a bunch of tires we will take to be recycled, and a dozen bags of trash for this workday. On the plus side, our cleanup over the summer generated scrap metal that we traded for $99!

Some of the trash contained artifacts from the late 1980’s or 1990’s—so after a time when people should have known better than to throw their trash in the back 40, not to mention that it could have been recycled. Most of the dumps we have cleaned up at the preserve in the past were much older, from a time when dumping was a common, even accepted.

I am aware of the irony of picking up trash in one place only to bury it in another, but I work from the understanding that a landfill is a place where the trash is managed, contained, and where it has a less negative impact on natural resources.

We’ll have another workday here in the winter of the new year, feel free to join us for a satisfying afternoon. Check back for details.