At Kennedy Park, the Oxbow District and other parts of the city, some 150 people gave two hours of their Sunday morning to pick up the trash and scraps littering what should be the community’s quieter spots. Their efforts revealed not only the too-common bane of food wrappers, cans, needles and other leavings carelessly tossed aside, but much larger throwaways – up to car wheels and carpets – that reminded some volunteers why their work remains necessary, nearly half a century after the first Earth Day.
“We really appreciate it; they’re here because it’s a day of advocacy and action and awareness,” said Margaret Smetana, who captained a cleanup drive around the Kennedy Park boat launch. Other residents pitched in to remove waste at the wetlands off South Jefferson Street, as well as downtown Napa Creek and Salvador Creek, in an effort coordinated by the Napa County Resource Conservation District.
 
 
Smetana, who attended an ecological fair in San Rafael during the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, planned to have her team record the results of what they found and send it to state officials as a measure of the site’s environmental health. “These are citizen scientists and naturalists, and we want them to do the sorting themselves, so they can see exactly what people are letting out of their hands,” she said as men, women and small children combed grasslands, trails and picnic grounds nearby.

“I like volunteering; I like to make things better,” said Valerie Cameron, one of several workers from Cakebread Cellars in Rutherford helping to clean Kennedy Park. “Napa’s a beautiful place and we need to keep it that way, because a lot of people don’t appreciate what we have.”
Beside a blue tote for recyclable materials and a black one for scraps headed for the landfill, the pile of decidedly unbeautiful discoveries steadily rose on a blue tarpaulin. Tires from a car and a bicycle were placed on the sheet within the first 10 minutes, later to be joined by a plastic pipe, whole and partial garbage cans and innumerable fast-food bags and boxes.

Read the full article here.