Although I have been an avid reader of Daily Kos for several years, essentially ever since Kos became the best and most rational voice confronting the propaganda of the Iraq War, this is the first time I have felt the urge to write a diary. Meteor Blades compelled me to do it with the "anything that you are doing to make your community a better place" urging. Although I am a political news junkie, I don't feel the urge to do enough research to be able to write what I would consider a justifiable diary, however, MB's gentle urging made me think of something that I am doing that I feel falls into the category of "making my community a better place".
As my screen name indicates, I live in Brazil (Brazil is spelled with an S in Brasil and a Brazilian is called a Brasileiro which has a very close phonetic sound to my name, hence brasilaaron),though I am still a US citizen.
I live in a beach town that has tourism as its main economic motor. This town has grown rapidly in the last few years and as such its economic growth has given residents purchasing power that far exceeds the environmental education knowledge that would allow them to deal with the trash and environmental degradation that comes along with it. So here comes what I do to make my community a better place...
I do two things principally, revegetation of degraded Atlantic rain-forest dune forests and random acts of recycling.
My town has spectacular cliffs that overlook the Atlantic Ocean and tall sand dunes that sit on top of those cliffs. We are situated at the very northern tip of what can biologically be called the Mata Atlantica, or Atlantic Rainforest, one of the most threatened ecosystems in the Americas. The dune forest vegetation is probably the most threatened sub-set of that very threatened ecosystem. The dune forest is kind of like a pygmy forest, it has trees but they are super-small, sculpted by the wind and starved by nutrition-free sand as a soil substrate. Strangely, the vegetation has no thorns to protect itself, whereas just a few hundred meters in from the dunes scrubby secondary vegetation consists of cactus and thorny acacias and other scratchy, prickly plants.
This lack of self-defense by the plants makes it very easy for people to walk over them and in the process, kill the plants. Over time, so many tourists and locals have walked all over the dune vegetation that it has completely died back away from the cliffs, exposing the soft, white sand underneath. Now, the dunes are retreating because the wind and rain is causing massive erosion. That, and the kids now have taken to riding motorcycles all over the dunes and "sand-boarding" down the slopes.
Many of the hotels in my town plant agaves, cactus and other drought-resistant or succulent plants and will periodically dig them up and throw them on the street side trash. This is where my project starts. I collect those plants and take them out to the dunes and plant them there. I am fully aware that the plants that I am using to re-vegetate the completely degraded dunes are not native within the dune vegetation itself, but they are all native to the region and all can be found growing within 300 meters of where they end up getting planted. The reason why I use the agaves and cactus is because they have spines and are unpleasant to walk on. The reason why there is no vegetation is because the native plants all got trampled to death and will not return while people are trafficking over them. The agaves and cactus then act as little "nurseries" where other plants, like grass and heathers, can sprout and grow. Otherwise the native grasses and heathers would have nowhere to germinate and grow before being trampled or ground up under motorbike tires.
Some of the erosion is so severe, and the slope is so great, that I am only hoping to slow it down with my plants but in some places the "nursery" effect of my plants is already starting to yield more vegetation. Eventually, the hope is that the native heathers, bushes, vines and trees will overgrow the cactus and agave, shade them out and kill them. They will no longer be invasive at that point, but that is probably decades down the road.
The owner of one of the bars on the beach below the cliff where I am planting on the dunes, has already thanked me for my work, saying that I am the only reason that those dunes are gonna be there in a few years. He also lamented how the people had no respect for "the nature" and how easy it was for people to thoughtlessly destroy the beauty that they came to enjoy. Not everyone likes that I am planting cactus and agave there, I have had a guy complain to me that I am ruining the trails and dunes that he likes to walk on. He didn't recognize the irony of his complaint.
I don't plan on living in this town forever, but I felt compelled to act to preserve the natural heritage of the area because it is so beautiful, rare and fragile. It makes me incredibly sad that many people who live here are not aware that they are destroying the natural inheritance that they received and will eventually pass on to their kids. Maybe what I have planted will accomplish what I hope it will, maybe not, but I feel like my work has helped make my little corner of the world a little bit better.
The other thing that I do to improve my community is not nearly as dear to my heart, but I still feel compelled to do it. People here like to throw their garbage on the ground, partly because there are so few trash cans available to throw said trash in, but also because public education on the issue has been so weak. My neighborhood is full of working-class families, a couple of high-walled super-rich houses and a few mud-wattle and thatch "tapera" houses. It is an extremely mixed neighborhood. Trash accumulates everywhere, on every corner there is a pile of trash and in the street itself there is trash everywhere. It's quite depressing to me, but it apparently doesn't bother most anybody else. I make a point of picking up plastic bottles and metal cans that are casually discarded in the street, I collect them and set them in a bag on the corner for the local "catador", recyclables collector, to get. He makes a couple of extra bucks and my street is a little bit cleaner.