Tufts students take part in river cleanup

Last Saturday, 50 volunteers, including 12 Tufts students, cleaned a half-mile stretch of shoreline of the Mystic River in Somerville as part of Coastsweep, an annual state-wide initiative to clean the shoreline.

Janet Kovner, Director of Stewardship and Outreach at the Mystic River said the Watershed Association was pleased with the number of volunteers who showed up last Saturday. "This is a pretty good turnout," Kovner said. "For people to come here on a beautiful Saturday morning and pick up trash is great. Our goal is to have people be eager to help out, to actually want to get involved in the community and work to better the environment."

The point of Coastsweep is to excite and motivate people to volunteer for similar projects, Kovner explained. Last year, over 4,000 volunteers scoured 180 miles of coastline in Massachusetts and removed close to 70,000 pounds of trash and marine debris.

"All we want is for people to get involved in the many programs available," she said. "Getting people down here and realizing that this is a resource worth protecting is what it's all about."

"Water is the most important resource in the world," one volunteer said. "We have to work as a community to keep it clean."

Several corporations, including Coca-Cola, Bank of America and Shell, sponsored the event, along with the US Environmental Protection Agency. The University was also a sponsor.

"Our goal is to try and make the Mystic River swimmable and fishable by 2010 through river clean-ups and education of children about the water," said senior Caitlin Majocka, a Tufts volunteer.

The Mystic River begins at the Lower Mystic Lake on the Arlington/Medford town border and runs southeast into the Boston Harbor, where it converges with the Charles River.

Man's use of the Mystic River dates back over 300 years, to when Native Americans and European settlers used it for travel and as a source of freshwater. The river has also been used for various industries, such as brickyards, shipyards, and tanneries.

The Mystic River Watershed Association (MRWA) is the only grassroots membership organization with a watershed-wide focus. A watershed is a land area that drains to any body of water; and over 400,000 people live in the Mystic River watershed, which includes the Tufts campus.

The MRWA coordinates the activities of community-based organizations active on water issues and works closely with municipal, state and federal agency staffs that have watershed responsibilities.

At Tufts, the Institute of the Environment (TIE) tries to raise awareness about the environment and to actually help the community and the surrounding areas.

Mass Community Water Watch is a statewide program on college campuses that works to engage students in water quality issues in their local communities. Massachusetts has the second-worst water quality, after New Jersey, of any state.

"Sometimes it can be very frustrating, there is a lot of apathy out there regarding the environment," said Michael Hart, a sophomore volunteer. "However, if we can only make baby steps towards improving water quality, I appreciate it."

Water Watch is a project of MassPIRG, Americorps and the Mass Service Alliance, and focuses on organizing river cleanups, educating school children and running stream-monitoring programs. Eleanor Bates, the Americorps volunteer organizer for the Tufts Water Watch chapter, hopes to set up a monitoring program in the watershed this semester to document pipe locations and activity along one of the streams.

The core staff in the Tufts chapter is made up of approximately ten students, and about 30 students attended the first general interest meeting last week.

"Water contamination is one of the largest ecological problems in Massachusetts," said Emily Estrada, a sophomore. "If you go to the Mystic River, you can literally pick up handfuls of garbage, ranging from bottle caps and used needles to shopping carts and sink fixtures. It's hard to turn your back on that kind of thing."

The next big cleanup is scheduled for Oct. 26 for "Make a Difference Day," a nation-wide service day.

"I think that people think that the problem is so big that there is nothing that they can do," Majocka said. "But what people don't realize is that just by doing something little, like putting flyers to advertise a clean-up, or taking water samples on the Mystic for an hour, or talking to a third grade class makes such a difference."

"It's about getting the word out, getting people aware of the problem and aware of how they can help," she continued. "It really is within out reach to make a huge difference as long as we are dedicated to the cause.