Are we just cleaning up trash at the Barge Canal?
Are we just cleaning up trash at the Barge Canal?
We’re doing another clean up - this time the second annual Reverse Tashlich - and we hope you’ll join us.
In the beginning (Fall, 2021) of our work as FBC, much of the land was blanketed in decades of abandoned encampments and we felt the need to clean it up. We did exactly that with the help of hundreds of you. But, that simple desire shifted to something more almost as soon as we began hauling trash out of the woods. Now, after 2 years, the desire to “clean up trash” has grown broad branches, reaching up and out, and that desire has put down roots both in the ground and deep in our vision of the land.
Cleaning up trash means many things. It means spending time on the land, and that has meant getting to know the place, the Pine Street Barge Canal. Paying attention (as we work together with others), we listen to voices beyond our own, hear the land, notice what is happening, and come to know the good feeling of a work completed. In this way, we invest in the land, we offer something of ourselves, and we get something back. Reciprocity: we can feel that our work is mutually beneficial as we are somehow fed by this basic work.
It also means having to come to terms with the remnants of peoples’ lives and their struggle to live here. Of necessity, life at the Barge Canal is transient, it is a place where people pass through. The collapsed tents, sodden bedding, the toys, the books, the tools abandoned, are the pieces of lives left behind. Often we are cleaning up after people we haven’t met, folks who might have stayed there for a night or a week, chased away by a stretch of bad weather or moved on toward the hope of a better, drier, warmer option. The Barge Canal land is a transient place, ever a wetlands even as it was filled in to accommodate a burgeoning lumber industry, then becoming the site for turning coal into gas to light up Burlington’s growing wealth. It holds the legacy of Burlington’s prosperity, the desires, the dreams and the nightmares and it is also an essential aspect of Burlington’s future.
As we care for this land, we ask: what is our responsibility to the people who live here or have lived here? What is our responsibility to the land and its healing? What is our responsibility to the future?
We have entered into an exchange with the land and its inhabitants. We are no longer just takers, benefiting from the work the Barge Canal does - managing increasing amounts of stormwater, sequestering carbon, containing the toxins that have been dumped there. We are now caring for an urban wild green space for all the living beings who call this home. We are offering our own simple gifts to the land, and to each other.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer suggests that
“Restoration is imperative for healing the Earth, but reciprocity is imperative for long-lasting, successful restoration. Like other mindful practices, ecological restoration can be viewed as an act of reciprocity in which humans exercise their caregiving responsibility for the ecosystems that sustain them. We restore the land, and the land restores us.”
This is a lot, especially with all its complications. Is it too much to suggest that this simple but complex act can be revolutionary? Even evolutionary? What is Earth asking of us?
