Being a Caretaker: Cleaning Up Mother Earth with the Hackensack Riverkeeper

A few years ago, I was looking to do some volunteer work and bring more meaning into my life, and I helped cleanup the Emerson Woods in Emerson, New Jersey, with Bergen SWAN, a group instrumental in preserving them from development during my teen years. A volunteer Carl told me about a group called Hackensack Riverkeeper which he enthusiastically volunteers for, and for the past few years, I've participated in a handful of their multiple river cleanups each season.

Picture to the left is a bag of trash I picked up by the river at Foschini Park in Hackensack, New Jersey.


Trash accumulating.


Among the plastic bags, liquor bottles, soda bottles and cans, fast food container waste and other trash are this: bottled water.

We could drink bottled water, which is taken from a local water supply, then transported by truck (using oil), in plastic bottles (made of oil), often packaged in plastic casing (more oil), shipped to landfills or recycling facilities (using oil), or...

We could fill up a reusable bottle with filtered or tap water, or...

do as those before us did: drink from a fountain.


Pierre, a marketing guru in France, behind the bottled water craze? Jim Gaffigan, one of my favorite comedians, has some thoughts.

Jokes.com
Jim Gaffigan - Bottled Water
comedians.comedycentral.com
Jim Gaffigan Coemdians Stand-Up

Gaffigan has a point. How did we go from "I know I can get water free from any faucet, but I want to pay for it!" Even amid such hard economic times, many of us have been convinced to pay for water.

In Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder recalls her memories of Pa building a well in the chapter "Fresh Water to Drink."

"The water was clear and cold and good. Laura thought she never tasted anything so good as those long, cold drinks of water."

How precious water was to the pioneers and to all humankind who need it to drink, cook in, bath in, launder clothing, and how we give it little thought or respect in modern life.

I think a lot about the fear culture marketers perpetuate to drive our demand of products. Someone asked me about if I worry about pipes in a building bringing in the water, but drinking water that's been lingering in plastic and causes unneeded air pollution and demand for oil doesn't sound very refreshing to me.

While this MSN article, "Bottled Water: A River of Money" is from 2007, I still find the information in it staggering:

"We Americans pitch 38 billion water bottles a year into landfills -- in excess of $1 billion worth of plastic. And 24% of the bottled water we buy is tap water repackaged by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo...

About 1 billion bottles of water a week are moved around in ships, trains and trucks in the United States alone. That's a weekly convoy equivalent to 37,800 18-wheelers delivering water. (Water weighs 8 1/3 pounds a gallon. It's so heavy you can't fill an 18-wheeler with bottled water -- you have to leave empty space."

You don't need to participate in an organized cleanup to pick up trash. I've seen people doing it on their walks in the woods. You need only look outside your window to see the leftovers of our disposable culture.

In the chapter "Pa Goes to Town" an uncomfortable moment arises in Little House on the Prairie when neighbor Mrs. Scott says of the Indians, "Land knows they'd never do anything with this country themselves. All they do is roam all over it like wild animals. Treaties or no treaties, the land belongs to folks that will farm it. That's only common sense and justice."

"Land knows" - "Land," a sacred word and being, for the land is alive and a life force.

I think a lot about what we as individuals and companies have "done" with this land: litter everywhere, air, soil and water pollution. I hear a lot about "job killing" from some candidates for president seeking to lead our nation in reference to environmental protection agencies and laws (again, playing into fears), but our government is supposed to protect these very sacred things - air, soil and water - from those who would harm them. But we as individuals must be caretakers too. That is common sense and justice to me.

I also don't think land truly "belongs" to anyone. We tread on it for a short time. Remember the Native American lesson: go lightly on this world.

Start with a small change. Any change.

Reduce, and if you use, recycle.

Disposable Nation: A Cautionary Essay on Waste

"Can you blame nature if she's had enough of us?" - Tori Amos, Father's Son

For the past few years, I've volunteered with a local group in New Jersey, Hackensack Riverkeeper, picking up trash in parks and directly from the river itself. As they boldly and rightly declare, "Not in my river. Not on my watch."

More than the hours I've given to these cleanups, they've given me an invaluable perspective on how truly reckless we are with protecting our rivers and the life (not only us) that depends on them.

I participated in a cleanup of local woods by the riverside in Paramus, New Jersey. After about two hours, the trash bin runneth over.


The woods behind a Route 4 McDonald's. I thought not only of the waste constantly produced by our eating on-the-go society, but that in a time of high gas prices, people were running their fuel-inefficient cars in a drive through instead of walking into the restaurant.

The woods after the cleanup.

On Earth Day, there was an offensive full page ad in The New York Times that somehow this is a green bottle since it's partly plant-based instead of petroleum. I see nothing "green" about taking filtered tap water (or other companies who rob local communities of their water supply), bottling it, covering it in more plastic casing (which won't be recycled), shipping it long distances, drinking it, shipping it out to a landfill. The vast majority of bottles don't get recycled.

Bottled water to me should be an emergency product for disasters, yet it seems the majority of society (including my loved ones) drinks it. As Ted from On Loving Animals pointed out to me once, George Carlin said, "What ever happened to taking a drink of water before you left the house?"


At a restaurant, I say "no straw please" for water, lemonade and soda. I'm not on Facebook, but if you are, check out No Plastic Straws (Plastic Straws are For Suckers). They remind us:

"That straw, that was unwrapped from a paper wrapper
and unboxed from a box,
unloaded from a truck that drove from the docks
where a ship had carried it from faraway lands
or a railcar had chugged through the once pristine sands
of the Gulf Coast-
Home of the US Petrochemical Industry
and the petrochemical-contaminated fisheries
and the cancers that carry misery..." and so on.

Remember the scene in The Graduate when someone is talking about his future to Dustin Hoffman and had one word: plastics! Was he right. They are everywhere. Think of how much waste we produce with disposable coffee lids.


Remember that how we all gripe about greedy oil companies (I'm no fan of them either), but we refuse to change our consumption of petroleum based-plastics...
Bags that no one remembers or bothers to use.
Reusable coffee mugs that are too much trouble.
Water bottles that are supposedly better than reusable ones (but who knows what is seeping into your water from those single-serve ones).
Plastic utensils that are allegedly more sanitary than real silverware (but the factory farmed and pesticide laden food it's putting into our mouths: well, we choose not to think about that)!
Plastic to-go containers for our carryout food. When I dine out, I've been bringing reusable containers for leftovers to eliminate waste.

Not long after the BP Oil spill, singer Jimmy Buffet, who has a hotel property along Florida's coastline, was assessing the damage of the man-made disaster and said what I completely agreed with: "We're all guilty. We're all using this oil." It's not just in our cars. We are all contributing to the demand for oil and petroleum products that lead to: drill faster, get more, give it to us cheap.

Think of how quick we are to eliminate any species we think is a nuisance. Despite budget shortfalls, New Jersey and New York taxpayer money was used this year to eliminate geese in the dark of night from local parks. While they supposedly cause a risk to airline flights, their droppings were cited. Good thing for us no species can execute us in the cover of darkness for our destruction of the environment.

Consider how much waste you produce. Would the planet be better off if people acted as you did, or worse? How do you go lightly on the Earth?

Please respect the planet for yourselves, your fellow citizen, the other species on the planet, and future generations. Please share this post if you can and keep this message going.