Annual Earth Day river clean up

Yesterday was a most beautiful day for a river clean up. If the few sites I managed to get to were an indicator of participation then we had a great turn out for it, too. The clean up is sponsored by Milwaukee Riverkeeper and there were many sites along all of our rivers. I stuck to the Milwaukee River. Started at Lincoln Park and made my way downstream to Caesar's Pool, although by the time I got to the end it was indeed the end and the volunteer staffers were heading off to the after party at Estabrook Park. Here are are few of my photos. More can be seen on Flickr.

Members of girl scout troop 20055 lend each other a helping hand. Lincoln Park.

Lincoln Park

Lincoln Park

Lincoln Park

Estabrook Dam

Members of Chinmaya Bala Vihar Hindu community at Estabrook Park

Estabrook Park

This chalkboard has to be the catch of the day! Hubbard Park.

Bicycle cop on the West Bank Trail at North Avenue.

Wrapping up for the day at Caesar's Pool.

See the complete Earth Day river clean up album on Flickr.

The Menomonee River gets its annual makeover

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We weren’t there to pick up wildlife, but seeing this tiny turtle did put the day’s primary purpose in perspective. After we clean up their habitat the animals will go on living in it.

On Saturday hundreds of volunteers flocked to Milwaukee’s three rivers for the annual clean up. For nineteen years in a row Milwaukee Riverkeeper has sponsored the event, which is a combination spring-cleaning and Earth Day celebration. After our particularly brutal winter there was a lot of trash to collect.

Covering a small segment of my Menomonee Valley beat, I spent most of my time between Miller Park and 3 Bridges Park, which is also the route of the Hank Aaron State Trail. I met a lot of folks and managed to make photographs of a few of them. Let me introduce them to you. 

A large crowd gathered near the Sausage Haus at Miller Park for a brief orientation before heading for the river.

The irony was not lost on Jeff K. He chuckled as he lifted the bruised baseball he found half buried in the ground.

Nicholas and Carol work their way up the steep slope next to the stadium parking lot.

Todd H. was among a group with the Gilbane building company.

Marc S., a member of Trout Unlimited, came prepared to wade in the water. When I asked if he'd fished here in the Menomonee, he said no. But he quickly added that he planned to do so.

Larry K. crawled into the snarl of this large deadfall to retrieve some trash.

Members of Marquette University's Alpha Omega Epsilon sorority take a break to pose in the field along the Hank Aaron State Trail.

Little Lennon, with her parents, Tighe and Nicole, was the youngest river cleaner I met. She proudly brandished her grabber like a sword.

Accenture is a business technology company with offices in Chicago and Milwaukee. Here are a few of them sporting T-shirts emblazoned with the company logo. I was told that some Accenture volunteers had come all the way from Chicago to clean up the Menomonee River.

Glen and Mike, here hamming for the camera, are also members of Trout Unlimited. Mike teaches a workshop on fly fishing for the Urban Ecology Center.

They made good use of their waders, pulling up some heavy items submerged in the river.

John Paul and Bennett were the perfect size to scout for trash caught underneath the Valley Passage Bridge.

I intercepted Patrick, Braden and Julian on their way to the Urban Ecology Center to deliver this animal skull they had found.

This group from Anderson Pest Solutions is heading down the Hank Aaron Trail with their bags of trash.

At Stormwater Park I found site captains Anne and Lauryn commanding the day's haul.  Anne and Lauryn work with Menomonee Valley Partners.

Like these newborn animals we hold the earth in our very human hands. We have the power and the agency to trash the entire planet; but it is springtime and we have chosen another path today. The turtle and the snake were set free to slip away through the bent grass. They will find their home a little cleaner.

This post is one in a series that relates to my Menomonee Valley Artist in Residency. For more information about the residency and links to previous posts and photographs, go to MV AiR.

Full disclosure: I am a former board member of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, a current board member of the Friends of the Hank Aaron State Trail and Menomonee Valley Partners sponsors my Artist in Residency. I find my work as an artist and my life in the community to be integrally related; were I to tease them apart I would feel like a turtle placed in an aquarium. 

Clean Water Act at 40

The early 70’s were a heady time for nature-lovers. The first Earth Day was in 1970. I remember that early energy of what became known as the “environmental movement.” We had marched for Civil Rights; we had protested the Vietnam War. Now we were going to save the earth. And do you know what? A lot of good came from that energy. The Clean Water Act is one of the highlights.

October 18 marks the 40^th anniversary of the passage of the Clean Water Act. Last night at Discovery World, Milwaukee Riverkeeper hosted an anniversary party to celebrate the enormous positive impact that this legislation has had. As a former Milwaukee Riverkeeper board member I’ve been to many of their annual fall “River Bashes” and this was the most well attended one that I can recall.

Todd Ambs, director of the national River Network, was the guest speaker. His talk focused on both the progress that has been made since the 1972 passage of the act and on the many challenges that we still face. You can read his “40 thoughts for 40 years” on the River Network website. 

We are at a critical moment and the “environmental movement,” despite its indisputable success, has been vilified by a surprisingly large segment of an increasingly polarized populace. (In 1972 a bipartisan Congress overrode Nixon’s presidential veto to pass the Clean Water Act.) Ambs commented on the perceived negativity of the environmental movement, using the Civil Rights Movement as an example. He said that when Dr. Martin Luther King made his most famous speech in 1963 he didn’t call it “I have a complaint.” We in the environmental community often have been guilty of predicting gloom and doom. But it doesn’t take long to become either despondent or antagonistic in the face of unrelenting bad news. We can’t afford to emphasize problems without simultaneously celebrating successes. We must hold up our dreams for the earth instead of our complaints.

Ambs quoted Carl Sagan: “Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.”

One of the literal sparks that ignited the Earth Day movement and motivated Congress to pass the Clean Water Act was the burning of the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, OH in 1969. In fact, it had caught fire many times over many preceding decades. As Ambs pointed out, rivers no longer catch fire in the U.S., thanks largely to the Clean Water Act. He didn’t go on to add that now, unfortunately, tap water has begun to catch fire instead due to groundwater contamination by the oil shale fracking industry. (If this is news, check out the sobering movie, Gasland.) There is still work to be done.

My dream is for my children and grandchildren -- and their compatriots in other parts of the world -- to have safe and secure drinking water, fishable and swimmable rivers and lakes, and an unabashed love of nature, even if they live in densely populated cities as so many must. 

Taking care of our planetary home also will benefit everyone's bottom line. Another Ambs quote, from former WI governor Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day: “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”

For more information on the Clean Water Act and the 40^th anniversary, go to the Office ofManagement and Budget website or to an article in the Huffington Post.

Happy birthday, Clean Water Act, and congratulations, Milwaukee Riverkeeper!

A recent outing of the Milwaukee Riverkeeper boat on the Milwaukee River, which is much cleaner today than it was in 1972.

Annual Earth Day river clean up draws thousands

It was a glorious spring day, which always helps. Over 4,000 people came out to participate in the annual river clean up sponsored by Milwaukee Riverkeeper. Today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has the complete story but I got around to a few sites before I settled in at Krueger Park, along Underwood Creek, where I mostly pulled garlic mustard and baby buckthorns. Here are some images.

Large contingents fanned out along both sides of the Milwaukee River near North Avenue.

Volunteers working among the sandbar willows next to the rushing narrows just north of Caesar's Pool.

A plastic bag flutters like a defiant banner in the upper branches of a tree while volunteers collect an enormous volume of trash below.

It took a lot of heft to remove this old, rusted tailgate from a remote part of Krueger Park in Brookfield.

Furniture was the item of the day in Underwood Parkway, near 115th St.

Milwaukee Celebrates Earth Day in Style

As the crowd looked out at Lake Michigan, Dale Olen, the featured speaker, described the mile-thick glacier that would have filled the view, had anyone been around to see it. The wind, symbolized for the event with the figure above, was off that ultramarine lake on this beautiful, sunny Earth Day. When Olen asked us to imagine the glacier, it was not too difficult: I was stamping to keep warm and still my feet felt encased in that great block of ice. A typical April day in Wisconsin!

Except for the arctic temps, the event was wonderful. The program promised and then delivered an ambitious variety of activities, speakers, and special features.

John Clifford, a Lakota leader from South Dakota, introduced one of the most eclectic interfaith blessings I've witnessed. He opened by explaining his belief that "things happen not by planning or design, but by synchronicity." The Lakota do not believe, he went on, that everything is relative but that "all things are relatives," with a dramatic emphasis on the plural.

"Ommmmmm..." began Urmila Bharadwaj, representing the Hindu Temple of Wisconsin. She gave a litany of peace: "May there be peace on the land..." peace on the water... and then "May all the divinities bring us peace."

Sharon Lerman, of Congregation Shir Hadash read from the Torah: "We live in a world that we do not own...," an ancient Jewish echo of the Indian assertion that we live in community with the earth and the many speakers who lamented the common contemporary view of the earth as a commodity and resource for the accumulation of wealth. Jan Rutkowski, a member of the Buddhist Soka Gakkai International followed with "If the mind is not pure, then the earth is not pure."

There were Christian and Islamic participants as well; a truly ecumenical gathering, as is appropriate. Care for the earth is clearly not a sectarian issue, nor should it divide people.

The imaginative program included singing and speakers who impersonating Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir. Antler, the esteemed former poet laureate of Milwaukee, carried off the latter with appropriate gravity. One of the highlights was when another "earth poet," Suzanne Rosenblatt led the group with a kinetic and onomatopoetic rendition of water.

Congratulations are in order for Dianne Dagalen of the Sierra Club-Great Waters Group, the event sponsor. She pulled off this remarkably complex event with grace and aplomb.

My feet finally started to thaw during the Native American round dance that concluded the festivities.

Milwaukee Celebrates 40th anniversary of earth day

Come celebrate Earth Day, which, despite turning 40 this year, shows no signs of being over the hill. Going strong; even becoming mainstream.

The Sierra Club has put together a terrific and varied program for the occasion. I say that because, although I am honored to be one of the featured speakers, there are many other fun and informative activities planned.

Click here to go to the Sierra Club pdf with details.