Gowanus Conservancy 3rd & 3rd Garden Cleanup – Ciro | The LREI Eighth Grade Social Justice Project

For this fieldwork, we met up with a man named Michael Wasserman who works with the Gowanus Conservancy against the pollution in Brooklyn. We took the subway to 4th avenue and walked a couple of blocks. We then proceeded to enter the Whole Foods building where we found out that we had made a mistake and that we were not supposed to meet at the Whole Foods, but at the corner. We then continued to meet up, and start cleaning the small and long sidewalk garden.

We learned that if you go to the right places, you will find awful messes of garbage and stuff that. in a case like a storm or hurricane, all of it will quickly run into any river of body of water, hence polluting it a LOT.

We saw a lot of people walking by us and some of them seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing. We also found a RIDICULOUS amount of strange stuff. We found a little pot, we found a couple umbrellas, a printer, a huge box of clothing, a stockpile of alcohol bottles and just a lot of garbage in general. If we didn’t do this, the next time it rained, the Gowanus Canal would have even MORE garbage running inside it.

I think that this really explained how problematic the NYC consumers are, and how easily we are destroying our environment.

We intend to possibly work with the Gowanus Conservancy again, and we very much look forwards to helping out more. I think that if we could do a project directly connected to the Gowanus Canal, that could be very interesting because we would learn about the next step in the pollution cycle. Also if we could find a way to help permanently, it would be very interesting to figure out how we could put that into play. Also it would be interesting to create our own way of helping, and ways that we could spread this. Another fieldwork that we want to do is do a NYC beach cleanup with anybody in the 7-8th grades where we would go to a beach and teach the people going with us about the problems that pollution causes and the things we can do to help. We will also, of course, clean the beach of garbage and restore polluted areas.