Stream Cleanup!

Marianas Resource Conservation & Development Council participated in two community events this weekend. On Saturday we helped Beautify CNMI clean up the substation in Koblerville. This project doesn't correlate directly with our Coral Reef Outreach Project, but RC&D's involvement shows that we care about the community and that we are willing to help out on community based efforts, not just our coral reef efforts.

On Sunday we planned to plant trees up at the Lao Lao revegetation project, but the volunteers requested that we have a stream cleanup instead. Who am I to argue with the volunteers? We rescheduled the planting, which should be the final planting of the year, for two weeks from Sunday and drove down to the beach for a stream cleanup.

A few months ago we took some students to Lao Lao on a field trip. We toured the revegetation area and then pulled out 440 lbs of trash from Stream #4. Today we finished cleaning up the trash in Stream #4 that we weren't able to get in June, cleaned up along the beach, and then cleaned up another illegal dumping site just north of Stream #4.

We put everything in garbage bags and piled it up on the side of the road. Tomorrow we are going to drive back down there to transport the garbage to the Saipan transfer station. I'll report back on the total weight of all the trash after we weigh it.

Our photographer went a little crazy with the pictures this morning. When I plugged in my camera to upload the pictures, I saw that she had taken 97 photographs!

Here are a few of my favorites:

What really strikes me with all of these pictures is how beautiful and green this island is. It is truly a shame that people would use such a beautiful place to dump their garbage. We shouldn't be dumping garbage in places like this, we should be taking tourists down there...or at least enjoying it ourselves.

Luckily, we have people like our volunteers who are willing to give up a large part of their day, or even their entire weekend as is the case with MOVER, to make this island a better place to live.