Earth Day in Rhode Island

I was noticing the other day how much litter there is along some roadways. It's time for a good cleanup or two, or several dozen throughout the state in honor of Earth Day, April 22nd. Several general websites for Earth Day are:

• Earthday Network
• Federal government Earthday Portal
• Sierra Club's Earth Day Page
• International Earth Day

Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management maintains a list of cleanups throughout the state, arranged by date. We've already missed some cleanups scheduled for the first weekend in April, but there are more than 5 pages of cleanups still to come on April 14th, 21st, and 28th and on May 5th. An April 8th Providence Journal article describes the volunteer opportunities for Earth Day listed by the Volunteer Center of Rhode Island. A search on Monday, April 9, of upcoming volunteer opportunities for Earth Day in Rhode Island produced 128 events. Some cleanups are not on this list yet, though.

One cleanup I will highlight is that of the Friends of India Point Park, who will be hard at work there on April 21st. No doubt there are other cleanups around the state that are not yet on a master list. The list of activities is much too long to add to the Providential Gardener's Calendar, so please refer to the DEM's and the Volunteer Center's master lists.

Also, on the front page of the Providence Journal, April 9, there's a story about cleanups throughout the state in our more than 3,000 cemeteries. Evelyn Wheeler of the Advisory Commission on Historic Cemeteries is organizing the first statewide cleanup of burial grounds in Rhode Island on April 21 and 22.  Because of Rhode Island's way of separating church and state, which meant that towns and cities did not have a commons with the main church in the center of the town or city, graveyards were also not centralized, leading to burials on private land and a proliferation of graveyards. Some of these cemeteries are still on private land, so anyone interested in cleaning up a cemetery should check with Evelyn Wheeler first at (401) 789-3503 or by e-mail.