Posts
When I paddle I usually pick up trash along the way. Over the years I have taken part in river cleanups and made a pledge with American Rivers to pick up 3 pieces of trash every time I paddle. I'm in the habit now, of steering toward a floating plastic bottle or fishing a beer can or plastic bag out of a tree. As a steward of the lake or river, I feel it's my obligation to pick up and pack out litter along the waterways I travel.
According to Mother Nature Network, The earth's oceans have a big plastic problem. They receive roughly 8 million metric tons of plastic waste every year, washing there from its shore and carried thereby inland littered rivers.
Those plastic bottles and bottle caps we all use aren’t biodegradable, but they do photodegrade. That means that the plastic breaks down into small parts in the sun, and releases chemicals into the environment. The worst part, of course, is like the plastic crumbles into smaller pieces called microplastics, it often will fatally trick marine wildlife into eating it.
Food Packaging Tossed Food containers is the largest category of waste usually picked up during cleanup drives. It includes household packaging (i.e. milk jugs, juice boxes, and snack packaging) as well as fast food packaging (i.e. paper, Styrofoam, paperboard wrappings, coffee cups, and drink cups). Almost half of the litter in the United States is food packaging. Think about that on your next picnic and while some of these items could be recycled, most are not, and often these are found weighing down shorelines and waterways.
Plastic Bags Plastic bags are so common in the United States that over 100 billion bags are used each year. Over three times more bags end up as litter in our forests and waterways than are recycled annually. Plastic bags take almost as long to degrade as plastic bottles, leach chemicals into the environment, and inhibit natural water flows. The good news, however, is after California banned most stores from handing out flimsy, single-use plastic bags, according to the LA Times, data has shown plastic bags (both the banned and the legal variety) accounted for 3.1% of the litter collected from the state's beaches during the 2017 Coastal Cleanup Day, down from to 7.4% in 2010.
Aluminum Cans Almost 100 billion aluminum cans are used in the U.S. annually, and only about half of these cans are recycled. The rest goes to landfills or into the environment. Beverage containers account for 50% of roadside litter (though this statistic includes plastic containers), and much of that is washed into our waterways.
Of course, nowhere on this list did you find a picnic table, but my wife and I found one in floating in the middle of Lake Natoma last month. We could only assume it pushed or pulled into the lake by someone who doesn't love the rivers and lakes as much as we do. I find it disturbing that someone could have such destructive malice towards a body of water I love so dearly.
My wife and I did our best to push the floating picnic table to shore. I used the bow of my kayak to navigate to a spot on the shore where we could lift it out of the water. It was slow going. The table continued to fall away from my bow as I angled it toward shore. But each time I caught the table again and inched along closer to shore.
When we got to the shore, a fisherman on the bank helped pull that table as much as we could up on to dry ground. It was wet and heavy, but we got it mostly out of the water.
It was no picnic getting that table out of the water but it does remind us that pieces of trash and things like picnic tables seem to end up in our local streams, lakes, and rivers. So I encourage everyone making cleaning up the waterway part of your paddling routine. Take American Rivers' Clean Up River Pledge to pick up 25 pieces of trash over the next 25 days. Clean up our rivers and help build a virtual landfill! After you take the pledge, take a photo of your trash, and post on Twitter, Instagram or Vine using the hashtag #rivercleanup. Whether you’re out on the water or in your neighborhood picking up litter, show them how well you clean up.
MISSION COMPLETE
Paddler Joseph Mullin ended his 5,000-mile solo kayaking journey to create awareness for Mission 22, a national organization aimed at suicide prevention among veterans and active military members on September 30, in Key West, Florida. Called the, One Man, One Mission, To Save Thousands Expedition, Mullin started his trek on April 30, 2017, at Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Maine. For more read our Q/A with Mullin.
 |
| Courtesy of Joseph Mullin |
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when skies turn gloomy, but it did exactly that when it mysteriously returned Paul Kellner's canoe that had been missing for over a year after a storm raged over Duluth, Minnesota, and Lake Superior earlier this month.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” Kellner told the Forum News Service, “Do I think the lake spit it back out? “No. I like to think it’s aliens, because why not have fun with it?”
 |
| Courtesy of MPR News |
Especially when the gales of November come early.
BWCA TURNS 40
Forty years ago this month, on October 21, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act. The act amended the national Wilderness Act of 1964 to provide management to protect, preserve, and enhance the lakes, waterways and forested areas of Minnesota's BWCA while guaranteeing the elimination all logging, snowmobiling, and mining.
While an estimated 150,000 people visit the BWCA each year, the wilderness area is still under threat from the risks of proposed copper-nickel mining within its watershed.
