October 12, 2007

Trash 101

The Hood River campus hasn’t opened, but a true learning experience happened Saturday at Columbia Gorge Community College. Trash 101: What an education.
The 30 members of the class gained true hands-on learning, complete with mud-filled shoes and yellow jacket stings.

Kudos to the crew that turned out to clean up trash from Indian Creek and its banks. Volunteers ranged from a couple and their teenage daughter, and a mom and her 7-year-old son to maintenance and project workers for Farmers Irrigation District, Columbia Gorge Community College, and Hood River County Parks and Recreation District, and the Watershed Group.

Jeff Cook, Debbie Kochis, Joe Garcia, Matt Cooper, James Young, Steve Stampfli, Jamie Gomez and Rick Ragan spend their days either fixing things or cleaning up messes, so it was heartening to see them spend most of their Saturday doing it again, and with gusto.

What they found in the gulch raises a larger question that many landowners should ask:

What’s buried under the lawn, or under the blackberries down the back slope?

The college trash heap, as it stretched over a 100-yard area of trees, thick undergrowth, and boulders, was hardly unique. There are others out there, perhaps right under our feet.

As a culture we used to just dump stuff into ravines and other places we thought were out of the way. As Stampfli of the Watershed Group put it, “This was dumped before we had laws in the county. No stones are being cast when we do a project like this.”

What the work party found was the by-product of another time. Just as we now know the perils of pouring raw sewage and industrial waste into our rivers and air, communities have a fuller understanding of land dumping — particularly one so close to a creek that could bear many fish.