Cook County is a great place to live. Our citizens are an interesting bunch. Always ready to argue about something—the community center, the golf course, property taxes, religion, or what lake is best for fishing. But also always ready to come to a neighbor’s aid when help is needed. Liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, if your car slides off the road on a slippery spring day, an adversary will likely rescue you.
And we are all passionate about the earth, water and sky around us. Evidence of that is more arguing. At any given moment, at the corner coffee shop, a local bar or a governmental meeting, you will hear arguing over how our natural resources should be used and by whom. Community members argue over whether we should log public lands or if controlled burns should be allowed. We argue over fishing limits and whether paddling or paddleboats are more fun. We debate whether mining can be done safely and if the jobs it could bring are worth the possible environmental effects. We argue over the reasons for the declining moose population and so much more.
Fortunately, along with the talk, there are a lot of people in Cook County who are walking the talk. There are people heating their homes and fueling their vehicles with used cooking oil. There are people composting their kitchen scraps. There are people heating their homes with solar power and wind power. There is a concerted community effort to make everyone’s home energy efficient.
And there are amazing artisans who take odds and ends and create art. Like Terry Lewis of Hovland who takes beat up silverware and odds and ends and creates beautiful wind chimes. Like Tod Sylvester of Grand Marais who takes pieces of broken tile and glass and creates mosaic masterpieces.
Like Mary Jo Flack of Hovland who turns tossed off clothing and interesting bottles into amazing recycled works of art.
Evidence of our community’s passion for the environment can also be seen by the number of cleanup activities that take place—not just on Earth Day, April 22—but nearly every day somewhere in the county. Girl Scouts clean up beaches. Moms and kids clean up playgrounds. Families and groups adopt sections of Highway 61 to clean up trash.
I’m one of those Girl Scout beach cleaners. I had the pleasure of picking up trash with the Daisy and Brownie troops back in March. The girls—kindergarten through second grade— were troopers, climbing down into the recesses of the huge granite boulders on the east bay to recover coffee cups, pop cans and miscellaneous food containers. They are little kids though, and even after over an hour of cleanup, we had barely made a dent. As we walked back up the hill to where their parents would pick them up the Girl Scouts agreed that they would have to do it again. And they hoped that others would do the same.
I’m also an adopt-a-highway trash picker. The Cook County ATV Club, of which I am a member, decided to conduct its Highway 61 Adopt-AHighway cleanup early this year. The weather had been so nice we scheduled our cleanup in the Hovland area for Tuesday evening, April 24.
I thought it was apropos that we were doing our cleanup so close to Earth Day—April 22. Then the weather turned cold. And we remembered why we usually don’t conduct our highway cleanup until quite a bit later in the year. Oh well, we will still do the cleanup; we’ll just have to bundle up under the shiny reflective vests that MN/DOT makes us wear.
I’ve always been a fan of picking up trash. Perhaps it’s because I remember when April 22 became a special day. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Earth Day 2012 is the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day. I was an impressionable 13-year-old and the concerns about polluting the planet resonated with me. Pictures of trash-filled rivers, oil-slicked beaches and DDT-sickened eagles disturbed me and I pledged to do my part. I’ve tried to walk the talk.
I know there are some people who don’t believe it. There are some folks who I sometimes argue with about the joy of exploring Cook County’s back roads on an ATV who think because I enjoy motorized recreation that I don’t care about the planet. But I do.
We all do. We may argue about the right things to do, but I know we all want to do the right thing.
The earth is what we all have in
common.
Wendell Berry
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