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Earth Korps

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Rocking the Richmond Folk Festival

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Virginia has a pretty wide and varied number of public festivals and events every year.  There are wine festivals, Earth Day events, and music events like Floyd Fest.  Sometimes they promote Virginia products or regions, and sometimes they benefit a specific group, like our friends at Earth Korps and their Belgravia Beer and Wine Festival.  One thing that they all have in common is that they’re fun.

The City of Richmond had its own this past weekend, and over 200,000 people joined in the revelry.  We were overjoyed to attend and play a small part in the Richmond Folk Festival.

Richmond Folk FestivalOur Capital city was the host to the National Folk Festival for several years, and when they pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 2007, Richmond decided to continue what was becoming a pretty successful gig.  Over 30 groups performed on seven stages over the course of 2 ½ days.  Bands of musicians and dancers from around the world entertained as merchants peddled crafts, served up delicious regional and ethnic foods, and demonstrations highlighted folklife and arts.

Here’s where we pitched in:

We were able to partner with MeadWestvaco and the Richmond Clean City Commission to purchase 100 recycling carts.  The City of Richmond keeps these carts in storage and are at the ready to pull them out for any and all events held within the City.  We were able to pull out all of these carts and distribute them throughout the Richmond Folk Festival.  The Folk Festival had a Green Team that worked throughout the event and kept everything tidy.  You couldn’t miss the hundreds of volunteers in their green t-shirts and in addition to picking up trash and keeping things neat, they physically sorted through trash to make sure that everything that could be recycled was recycled.  The Folk Festival, Venture Richmond and the Richmond Green Events Committee go to great lengths to make sure that this event has as small a footprint as possible.  Dawn with a Bin

As you can imagine, a festival attended by 200,000 people will generate a great deal of trash, and much of that can be recycled.  We were plenty pleased to see so many attendees make good use of the bins, and they were emptied continuously over the course of the weekend.  We also placed almost 30 cigarette receptacles across the grounds, and they certainly went to good use.  We handed out over 2,000 pocket ashtrays (they were almost as big a hit as Rosanne Cash!), and over 5,000 people signed our banner, thereby pledging to join us in our mission to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  We’ve engaged Virginians to sign our banner at other events, but we’ve never had one as full as this, and so many people making that promise.

Again, we can’t say thank you enough for the help and support of MeadWestvaco and the Richmond Clean City Commission.  And we certainly appreciated the help of a number of volunteers to distribute things and assist in cleaning things up.  And our hats certainly are off to the Richmond Folk Festival, Venture Richmond, and the Richmond Green Events Committee.  It’s easier to have a green event like this when you come out of the gate swinging, and these guys really care about that.  And, yes, we got to see some great music and eat some wonderful food.  But more than anything, we wanted to thank the thousands who came to the Folk Festival, used our recycling bins, put their cigarette butts where they were supposed to go, and joined our commitment to Keep Virginia Beautiful.  Even with so many people gathered in one place, it can still be done.

The Featured Image for this post is Courtesy Joe Mahoney via Richmond Times-Dispatch

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Our Reactive Approach

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We’ve become a very reactive society.  We respond to things that have already happened.  We take drugs to ease the effects of ailments that we’ve eaten ourselves into, we buy insurance after experiencing loss, and fix the faucet whenever it leaks.  Nowhere is this more evident than when we look at our environment.

After centuries of polluting our planet, we’re now beginning to take steps to hopefully correct the wrongs that we committed.  In 1969 the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire.  Runoff from industry had so polluted the river that Time magazine commented that a person who fell in would not drown, but would decay.  The river first caught fire in 1868, and a fire in 1952 caused much more damage, but the resulting press in 1969 caused such an outcry that we now have the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency.  It was a reaction to a river that oozed with chemicals instead of flowing with clean water.

When you look at the work done by many of our friends, it is a reaction to the thoughtlessness of others.  They paint over graffiti, pick up trash, and refurbish neglected playgrounds and parks.  Guys like Earth Korps fish trash out of our waterways.  Bull Run Mountains Conservancy spent a day filling up trash bags with roadside litter.  Many of the events on the Keep Virginia Beautiful site are calls to action for a “clean up” or some sort of project to right a wrong.  It is only when we realize how badly we’ve screwed up that we begin to take action.

Perhaps we could all do well to remember our three R’s:  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

One of the things that Earth Korps has done is proactive.  Part of the reason that they started their organization was the fact that trash in the river was impeding their enjoyment of it.  Those Valley boys like to fish, and their lures were spending a lot of time getting tangled in discarded fishing line.  When you’re fishing and your line gets snarled, it’s easy to just cut it loose and start over.  After spending a few years cleaning garbage out of the Shenandoah River, they spent a day putting up Mono Bins.  A cheap hunk of PVC pipe with a cap on the end, hanging at a convenient spot near a prime fishing hole.  It now makes it easy for a fisherman to discard his line in a place where it won’t foul the attempts of other anglers.  They’ve put them up at a few spots, and hope to have them lining the banks of the river wherever people like to fish.Mono Bin

Sometimes it’s not easy to do the right thing, but it does put us ahead of the curve.  It can be as simple as putting something in a trashcan.  Choose products that have smarter packaging.  Choose a product that you know will have another life at the end of its use.  Plant some flowers because you want to.  Plant a tree where you may not need one.  Think of it as Paying it Forward for our environment.

Perhaps if we did a better job of actively protecting our environment we’d find ourselves less reactive.  We could all do a better job of making smarter choices in our lives, from our purchases to our transportation to our homes.  The time to worry about your roof is not when it’s raining in your living room.  We change the oil and get a tune-up so that the car won’t break down.  We eat healthy foods so that we won’t have to go to the doctor.

When it comes to our mission to Keep Virginia Beautiful and making smart decisions, look at it as preventative maintenance.

 

 

 

 

Getting Busy at Earth Korps

Earth Korps Going for 60,000 lbs with Grant!

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Not your typical 30 in 30 Grant Winner post, but not your typical grant winner.  We love these guys.  They are resounding proof that YOU can effect change at a grass-roots level.

Earth KorpsThese guys started out in 2009 with a 22 year-old who wanted to do something about the trash in the Shenandoah River.  He gathered some like-minded friends with canoes, and they got to mucking about.  To date they have gathered:

647 tires, 22,070 pounds of metal, 10,530 pounds of trash, 4 ovens, 26 fifty-five gallon drums, 3 washing machines and a car chassis from the river.  They are hitting the 50,000 pound mark and are well on their way to 60,000.

 

We are proud to announce that Keep Virginia Beautiful is awarding Earth Korps, led by the unstoppable Captain Beau Morgan, a $500 30 in 30 Grant in the Litter Prevention Category.  It was tough to pick a category, though, because Earth Korps beautifies their part of the Shenandoah Valley, they educate others as they haul trash from the river and its banks, they prevent litter from ending up in the water, they sort and recycle as much of the trash as they can, and we have no doubt that they are careful about what they bring into their expeditions, thereby reducing their own waste.  They do a great job of engaging neighboring communities to get involved, and are deeply committed to creating a sustainable effort that will not only restore this great river to its former glory, but create a movement that will continue to engage their children, and their children’s children.Getting Busy at Earth Korps You can join them on Facebook here.

These fine folks have cleanups all the time, and host some great events.   If you’re around in the middle of June you can join them in Berryville for the 2012 Shenandoah Riverside Festival, two days of arts, crafts, food, music, and camping, all with a little environmental education thrown in.

We have some great partners in our Second Annual 30 Grants in 30 Days Program in Capital One, Waste Management, and Lowe’s.  But it takes the fantastic effort of people like Captain Morgan and his band of Earth Korps Pirates, cruising the high seas of the Shenandoah Valley in search of discarded booty, to move our Commonwealth forward and Keep Virginia Beautiful.

Earth Korps PiratesThe accused

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shenandoah SchoonersRiver spoils