On a mission to do good
English romantic poet William Wordsworth once wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours… For this, for everything, we are out of tune; it moves us not.”
The daffodil-loving Wordsworth set out with this sonnet to criticize his own materialist era. His poem, composed about 1802, was a kind of lament for the natural world that people had been distanced from by the industrial revolution.
In our era, with all our electronic devices, it is the news of the world that is too much with us. We can’t escape Trump’s latest idiotic tweet or fresh bombings in Syria because we’re always plugged in.
Last week it was the Toronto van driver who set out to murder and maim. The 10 innocents included a 94-year-old grandmother, a student at Seneca College and a visitor from Jordan.
Reportedly the suspect in the Yonge Street tragedy, like the gunman in the Montreal massacre of 1989, was a misogynist. Targeting “a bunch of feminists,” the shooter at the Ecole Polytechnique aimed at 28 people and murdered 14 women.
Aiming to follow Wordsworth’s call to seek out nature for respite, we trekked over to Huntington Point for a walk on the beach. Generally this time of year, there’s tons of garbage to pick up, but I rejoiced to find way less rope and plastic junk than other springs. Of course, the rocky beach could already have been the focus of an Earth Day clean up.
En route home, we saw members of the eight teams that Landmark East School students divided themselves into for their annual litter clean up. Hard at work, they roamed from the west end of Wolfville into Greenwich. During the afternoon, they managed to pick up about 70 bags of roadside garbage.
“Every year it’s disappointing the amount of debris,” said longtime teacher Kim Thompson. He noted that 14 bags alone were collected along the road heading up from Greenwich corner to Highway 101. What a great service these students offer the community at large.
They aren’t alone in showing they care. Grade 6 student Hana Hutchinson at the Booker School in Port Williams emailed me about her drive to have single use plastic bags banned locally. She’s on a mission.
Meanwhile, other students at the school have keen initiatives underway. Colin Stephens, for example, is
giving old bikes a new life in the school’s garage. He’s hoping people will consider donating bicycles before the spring pick-up days provided by Valley Waste.
Dropping into the Troy Restaurant in Wolfville for a special event, I was cheered to see Matt Stockdale sipping a drink through a glass straw. The owners, like those at several Halifax restaurants, made a change about eight months ago. Their priority is to try and save hundreds of thousands of plastic straws from going into the landfill each year.
Thinking of Mother Earth is laudable all round. It’s wonderful to see folks in the Valley choosing to do something positive for the planet. Boomerang reusable cloth bags, I’m told, are coming to the Valley.
We’re driven sometimes to put on blinders and ignore the rest of world, which isn’t very practical. But we can help celebrate the good that people here are doing.