Switched from big environmental charities to local watershed group and actually saw results in 4 months

Honestly I used to just donate to big national climate orgs and felt good about it. But after a year I couldn't really point to anything concrete happening. Then a neighbor dragged me to a meeting for our local watershed restoration group in Richmond. Instead of just sending money, I spend one Saturday a month planting native trees along the riverbank and cleaning up trash. The group has a simple spreadsheet tracking how many gallons of stormwater runoff we've diverted with each tree. After 4 months we hit 8,000 gallons diverted from the creek. That number felt real to me. Has anyone else switched from donating to hands on work and noticed a bigger sense of progress?

3 comments

3 Comments

sandrat2426d ago

Oh wow that spreadsheet detail really got me! Here's something nobody's talking about though - when you do hands on stuff like that, you start noticing how local ecosystems actually connect to each other. I joined a beach cleanup in my town and realized all the plastic we pick up comes from the same creek that goes through three towns upstream. Now I look at storm drains completely different, like little highways for garbage to the ocean. Makes you wonder how many people even know where their local watershed ends up?

mark_thomas26d agoMost Upvoted

Isn't it wild how a storm drain can lead straight to the ocean like that?

oliviat1714d ago

I read somewhere that each mature native tree can absorb like 100 gallons of stormwater a day, so your group's 8k gallons in 4 months makes total sense. @mark_thomas is totally right about how everything flows to the ocean, seeing that connection in real time really changes how you think about trash on the street.