During this holiday weekend trash clean-up, a group of teenage volunteers from Oak Park and River Forest High School truly embodied what Thanksgiving is all about.
This group of 14 students spent three hours on a cold Saturday morning cleaning up trash at Thatcher Woods. A determination was shown that was truly inspirational as these young adults put the environment before themselves, climbing out on branches over the river to reach plastic bottles, getting on their stomachs and squeezing their arms into small openings just to grab a bottle cap, and finding things in the woods that no one should have to see yet staying until the clean-up was over. By the end of the morning, it was hard to find one member of the group who hadn’t gotten a little muddy, yet no one complained and everyone wore the mud proudly as a sign of what they had accomplished. To say that the morning was a success would be an understatement as the group removed a total of 193 pounds of trash from the forest preserve.
This particular trash cleanup was a joint effort between Clean Up - Give Back and Oak Park & River Forest High School’s Environmental Club, and it was amazing to see how combining the two groups could have such notable results. The clean-up was organized by the Environmental Club and supplies were provided by Clean Up - Give Back’s Oak Park chapter. After recruiting many OPRF high school students, the atmosphere was able to be fun while still accomplishing hard work. The question that repeatedly came up at the end of the clean-up was “When will this happen again?” Hopefully, the two organizations can host more clean-ups and collaborations in the future.
Two things strike me as I think back on the morning, the first is the amount of support that we got from the other people out in the woods. I'm not sure what was so different about this Saturday but no other time in my many experiences picking up trash have I had so many people come up to me and say good job, thank you, or show an interest in what I was doing and care. This makes me hopeful for the future and determined to create more opportunities for these people who care for the environment to help protect and conserve it. Secondly, as the person who set up, organized, and ran this clean-up it served as an awakening for me. I had hosted clean-ups in the past but not ones where we weighed the trash or that had such a good turnout, so I never realized before that If I hadn’t led this cleanup, the trash would still be there. This might seem like an obvious statement, I mean of course the trash would still be there, but in this case that would mean one hundred and ninety-three pounds of trash would be in the woods and the river. That, to me, is unbelievable, and it shows that you do make an impact. Taking this forward, I am even more determined and fueled to pursue and continue working to make not just my community, but my earth a more sustainable, clean, and environmentally friendly place.
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