CLEANing up Croton: It’s a thankless job, but thank God we have hardy, civic minded villagers to help do it--even in the rain.
The Chronicle was there for the latest big cleanup by the Croton Litter-Free Education Advocacy Neighborhood (CLEAN) initiative. A bicycle, microwave, and Christmas tree were among the big scores.
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It’s a rainy Saturday morning on North Riverside Avenue in Croton, and the volunteers are beginning to assemble across the street from the Washington Engine Firehouse. It’s a muddy mess out here on the highway shoulder, but the leader of the crew, Croton resident and documentary film producer John Ealer, had no intention of calling off the latest cleanup campaign.
Ealer is the current leader of the Croton Litter-Free Education Advocacy Neighborhood (CLEAN) initiative, a subgroup of the village’s Conservation Advisory Council (CCAC.) Every month or so, he puts out the call on CLEAN’s Facebook page that it’s time to pick up the plastic bottles, scraps of paper, beer cans, hygiene pads, and countless other items of debris that somehow make their way onto village streets, highways, parks, and the riverfront.
Of course, we know how it gets there: People do it. Ealer waxes ecological about the attitudes that lead to careless littering. “The litter problem is maybe the most tangible example of The Tragedy of the Commons,” Ealer says, referring to a theory promulgated in the 1960s by biologist Garrett Hardin. As Wikipedia explains the concept:
“[S]hould a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up destroying its value altogether. Even if some users exercised voluntary restraint, the other users would merely supplant them, the predictable result being a tragedy for all.”
“The mindset is, it’s not my trash,” Ealer says. “But it ends up being the trash of the entire community.” From the looks of the litter on this stretch of road, it seems likely that some drivers going north on Highway 9 and getting off at the Senasqua exit slow down just enough to toss a beer can or a plastic bottle out the window.
And once a stretch of road gets trashy, it seems to attract other debris as well. By the end of CLEAN’s one and a half hour trash pickup session, the crew had filled 12 large black plastic bags and assembled a Schwinn bicycle, a small tire, a large microwave oven, an old Christmas tree, a real estate sign, some orange fencing, and a bunch of discarded coaxial cable—an accumulated collection weighing an estimated 265 pounds, Ealer said.
CLEAN was originally the brainchild of former Croton resident and CCAC member Anthony Magardino, who founded the group in 2021. When Magardino, a Westchester businessman, moved to Katonah a year ago, he “handed the reigns to the very capable” John Ealer, Magardino told the Chronicle.
(Magardino is also the Board President of the Catskill Fly Fishing Center & Museum in Livingston Manor, NY.)
Ealer says that not every piece of litter is the result of malicious intent, but rather results from the false assumption that no one is going to see the trash—nor see the person who is putting it there. What Ealer wants to foster with CLEAN is a sense of “collective responsibility,” he says.
“If everyone spent five minutes a week cleaning up, we wouldn’t have to come out and do this ever again.”
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Well done and much respect to the volunteers.
Many thanks for all the valiant volunteers! I try and clean up around our streets but probably should do more. If everyone did a bit this would be a great help