Tufts students, community members and local officials pitched into a "Super Cleanup" along the Mystic River Saturday morning.
"We're committed to work to make the Mystic [River] fishable and swimmable by 2010," Somerville Mayor Joseph Curtatone, who attended the event, said. "Sustainable development is part of our economic development initiative."
One hundred bags of trash, several shopping carts, a couch and a baby pool later, river advocates were that much closer to achieving their goal of clean water and widespread awareness of sustainable development.
"I pulled out my weight in trash today," University Provost Jamshed Bharucha said, who cleans along the Mystic weekly near his home with his wife.
Water Watch coordinator Zach Harlow-Nash of the Tufts Institute of Environment estimated that, despite the dismal weather conditions, over 350 people attended the event. Tufts students made up 150 of these participants, organizers estimated.
Some student organizations encouraged their members to get involved. "We wanted to do it with our sisters," sophomore Linda Schultz, a sister of the Alpha Omicron Pi (AOII) sorority, said.
"It's wonderful, really, to get involved," junior Bianca Wyont, AOII Philanthropy chair, said. "It's something that a lot of people don't see about the Greek system. We do one to three [community service] events every weekend."
Tufts students from Water Watch, the football team, and sororities joined community members from churches, the RoadRunner running group and local rowing teams to take on the refuse on a four-mile stretch of river from Route 28 to Route 16.
"The goal is to bring community members to the river by cleaning up the Mystic and learning about it," Julie Horowitz, Mystic Monitoring Network Director, said.
Many faculty, students, and departments at Tufts are officially involved in the Mystic Watershed Collaborative (MWC), an organization that works to educate about and improve the Mystic's water quality. Individuals from the University College, Tufts Institute of the Environment, and the department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning presently offer their resources to other community collaborative groups through the MWC.
The Tufts chapter of WaterWatch, a subgroup of Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group (MASSPIRG), is a nationally funded student group that educates about water quality and conservation both on campus and in local elementary schools.
"Tufts is strongly committed to the Mystic watershed, and very committed to environmental sustainability," Bharucha said. "We care about our communities and our world."
According to a press release, University President Lawrence Bacow reaffirmed the University's commitment to the Mystic Watershed Collaborative, a partnership it entered into five years ago under the leadership of former University President John DiBiaggio.
Such initiatives take academia "beyond the ivory tower," Bharucha said.
According to Harlow-Nash, MWC also helps raise awareness for environmental policy-making.
"Big events like this give us more attention with the representation," Harlow-Nash said. "Working together makes a big difference."
According to Curtatone, such collaboration helps facilitate environmental policymaking. "What we need is commitment of resources from the state, and a strong advocacy coalition makes this easier."
"There's a really unique connection between Tufts and the Mystic Watershed Collaborative," Horowitz said. "It combines the intellectual resources of the University with community groups who need them."
According to Horowitz, the Mystic is polluted with "bacterial contamination from sewage from old and leaky storm drains" and troubled by nutrient loading from fertilizer runoff.
Massachusetts' industrial history has also contributed to contamination - the Mystic's sediments are abnormally high in arsenic and chromium. Additional traces of heavy metals from coal tar plants and Woburn's superfund sites upriver still present a problem.
"It's very important that we keep this going," Somerville Ward 8 Alderman Bob Trane said. "When I was a boy, my friends and I found this old aluminum canoe, and we took it up and down the Mystic from Alewife Brook Parkway down to here. Most kids today don't even know the river exists."
Such recreational and aesthetic benefits, Curtatone said, "are of great value for the region."
