Niceville-Environment

Head Veins

Today we'll clean the oil spill.

Today we'll clean the oil spill and change the planet.

We'll scrub seals with Dove.

And birds too.

We'll reconcile the ocean's wildlife with the town of Niceville and maybe all of Florida, and then maybe we can make plans to fix Japan too.

Saving.

The.

World.

We'll turn the world green.

By bringing our own dishes.

By planting sea grass.

By giving up Spring Break.

We'll drive for nineteen hours and hit the beaches, drinking water instead of beer and camp food instead of seafood, to restore the shores to their former glory.

ASBflo.



Needless to say, my expectations were high. The last few days haven't been exactly what I thought they would be. We've worked hard. I mean, really hard. Today we worked with a Florida State Park Ranger named Patrick, and an Americorps volunteer, Donnie. We helped them clear out an invasive species of tree known as "Ti-Ti" which crowds out the indigenous plants and transforms the sporadically spaced tree giants into dense jungle-like undergrowth.

Patrick explained to us the oil spill forced the state of Florida to invest in its cleanup and the State Parks in Florida have consequently been stripped of a lot of their funding. So basically you have this one guy in charge of maintaining hundreds if not thousands of acres of forest with several types of endangered plant species.

After we'd been working for a few hours, Patrick took us to a place in the park which was cleared out a couple of weeks ago.

It was perfect.

There was a lazy stream idling through a gap between towering Cyprus trees and nesting birds. Small plants beginning to poke through the dirt housed a few spiders and gofers. It was the way things should have been.

Before seeing what the final product should look like, I saw our work-in-progress as mostly stumps and mud. But by the time we finished lunch, our site looked more and more like the utopian-stream-haven we'd just visited.

Patrick told us we got more done in the one day of work with him than the previous group had finished in three. When I thought of that later, I got past the pride of our team and realized if there weren't volunteers down here, Patrick and Donnie would be the only ones doing the work. If we weren't here, the work we did probably wouldn't have been done, at least not for a long time. The trees we saved might have rotted out and the endangered species might have been a little more endangered.

Instead, there are still towering trees and they'll stay there for at least a few more years, safe from wildfire and Ti-Ti. It was the first time I got to see the bigger picture from the detailed work we've done.

Maybe we aren't single-handedly saving Florida and the gulf coast, but hey, one step at a time.

--Steven Dickherber