In exchange for using Tamanend Park for Scout events, the park asks Playwicki District to support occasional park-wide activities, this weekend’s activity was a clean-up of the Mill Creek that went through the park and 10 of us were there to help. There were some other groups also helping and they broke into four main groups:
- Other Scout units
- Church groups (Jehovah’s Witnesses in this case, I think)
- A girl’s high school soccer team
- Juvenile parolees
The parolees had the blank stare of death in their eyes but the Jehovah’s Witnesses all had excessively long skirts for a creek clean-up. I’m not sure which I found more unsettling but the most heart-breaking part of the day was the clean-up tallying. We’d found about 80 plastic bags and 50 plastic drink containers totaling 30 pounds or so and one kid said “yea! We made a difference!” … sure… considering that through the 70s and 80s the garbage dumped into the Atlantic from the US was measured in the millions of pounds per hour, our difference came out to undoing something on the order of a 1/6th of a second of that waste. Wooo!  Oh, yeah, this number also assumes that the act of collecting the garbage generated no externalities like the granola bar wrappers we generated and bottled water we drank.