“We haven’t accepted — we can’t really believe — that the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk, but that is so.”
Wendell Berry
GO BOX Storage wants to help keep the Thompson River clean by picking garbage in our local neighborhood. You can help too!
April 22, 2013 is Earth Day. To celebrate Earth Day, GO BOX Storage has volunteered for the Kamloops Adopt-A-Road Project. We have agreed to pick-up the garbage from Bowers Place, Roper Place, and a section of Lac Le Jeune Road. Actually, we have been cleaning most of this area for the past five years. If you would like to read more about why garbage clean-up in your local neighborhood is so important for keeping the Thompson River clean please read: Solidarity… of a Sort. Included is some Solidarity Homework for anyone who would like to learn how to reduce their personal waste stream.
In return for being formally part of this clean-up program, the City of Kamloops will give GO BOX an Adopt-A-Road sign. If you would like to find out more information about Communities in Bloom events in Kamloops please see: KamClean Week.
Updated May 1, 2013: We completely filled our garbage cans twice with over eight large bags of garbage. There is still some big pieces of garbage on Lac Le Jeune Rd that we will clean up later, including a blown-out windshield from one of the many accidents we have seen on that particular corner.
Even after five years of garbage picking there always seems to be more garbage. Garbage is picked up by the wind and blown around the Ironmask Industrial Park.
I would encourage other corporations interested in helping keep the Thompson River clean to volunteer for the Adopt-A-Road Program.
In closing, just as Wendell Berry says, “the most characteristic product of our age of scientific miracles is junk,” he has also seen the river, is where it all goes:
“As a country person, I often feel that I am on the bottom end of the waste problem. I live on the Kentucky River about ten miles from its entrance into the Ohio. The Kentucky, in many ways a lovely river, receives an abundance of pollution from the Eastern Kentucky coal mines and the central Kentucky cities. When the river rises, it carries a continuous raft of cans, bottles, plastic jugs, chunks or styrofoam, and other imperishable trash. After the floods subside, I, like many farmers, must pick up the trash before I can use my bottomland fields. I have seen the Ohio, whose name (Oyo in Iroquois) means “beautiful river,” so choked with this manufactured filth that an ant could crawl dry-footed from Kentucky to Indiana. The air of both river valleys is seriously polluted. Our roadsides and roadside fields lie under a constant precipitation of cans, bottles, the plastic-ware of fast food joints, soiled plastic diapers, and sometimes whole bags of garbage.”
This is why we must stop dumping our waste. We must also clean up the waste in our ditches and ravines, so this waste will not find its way to the river, and finally, the ocean.
Updated June 10, 2013: I still haven’t seen the promised Adopt-A-Road sign. I learned later, that it can take one to two years before the city will put up the sign! That piece of information has made me very cranky. The government — once again — is living up to my very low expectations.