stewardship

Mike Anderson maintains a blog at www.CleanUpTheRiver.com
One of Mike's ideas is a variation on geocaching. Geocaching is an activity in which a small collection of worthless treasure is cached in wild places and the latitude and longitude of the location is published so that other participants, using a geographic positioning system (GPS) receiver, can try to find the treasure. Typically, they take something from the cache and leave something else. Geocaching is going on all over the world.

Mike's variation is called geotrashing. When Mike or others are canoeing and cleaning up trash they find on the river, they occasionally find a place that is so badly trashed that it is beyond their means to clean it. They take a reading on that location with their GPS, take a picture, and publish that information. Groups and businesses looking for a public service project can pick a site and go clean it up.

Mike is working on this a bit farther downstream, where finding caches of trash that exceed the capacity of a canoe are much more common. While Headwaters Canoe Club* members typically stop to pick up trash when we find it, we don't often find more than we can handle.

A variation of geotrashing that addresses a more critical need in the Headwaters might involve documentation of off-highway-vehicle (OHV) damage on our rivers and lakes. I suggest that we carry a GPS receiver and a digital camera with us on our cruises (if participants have them). When we find places where OHVs are crossing or traveling in rivers, entering lakes, or causing erosion near water bodies, we can take a photo and a lat/long and send that information to the DNR. As a result, we should expect the DNR to address the problem through remediation projects, increased enforcement, and possibly through reclassification of forests to further regulate or restrict OHV use.

Of course, if we find a cache of trash that we can't load into our canoes and pack out, we could photograph and 'GPS' that, too. If we send that info to Mike, he'll post it on his blog.