At 8:30 this morning, I parked my car on Beaumont Road in Worcester and walked around the corner to Kirkland Street, where I met up with a group of volunteers from the Greater Worcester Land Trust.  Two staff members had arrived first, then the rest of us straggled in; we were a small group of about ten — young and old, men and women.

I thought the undeveloped land in this area was all owned by Mass Audubon, as it seems to be contiguous with the Broad Meadow Brook Sanctuary, but apparently the GWLT holds a conservation restriction on this parcel where we were working:

I’ve done this Earth Day cleanup before, and each time I swear I won’t do it again, but here I was, holding a large yellow trash bag and removing what seemed like the dregs of western civilization.  I still can’t believe that people care so little about their surroundings that they would just toss this stuff into the woods.  We worked steadily along Kirkland for a couple of hours, until we filled an entire dumpster with the trash we collected, everything from leaking propane tanks to car batteries to tires to lawn figurines.  Then after we called for the dumpster to be hauled away, we moved over to the end of Dunkirk Avenue, which is a trail-head entrance to the Sanctuary, where hikers and strollers can enter the property via the Cardinal Trail.  At first I thought the area wasn’t that bad, but as we moved just a short way into the woods, I saw all the glass, mostly broken of course.   I filled a trash bag so full of glass that it began to break as I hauled it to the edge of the street for pickup.  There was a lot more that we left behind, because eventually we ran out of time.

So it was a warm, beautiful day, and I guess I should feel some satisfaction in a “job well done” but I still despair of how careless people can be and how oblivious to any sense of stewardship.  So people, please think twice about how you dispose of trash.  Remember the three Rs: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.  We only have one earth.