Choosing conservation over relaxation
For these teens and young adults, working outdoors to improve the environment, even in oppressive weather, beats staying home for the summer.
Playing video games, streaming movies, sleeping in. Those are activities that may come to mind when you think of what teenagers do during summer vacation. For 30 youth from Yonkers, New York, however, their summer break is filled with early mornings and conservation work.
The high-school and college-aged youth, members of the Groundwork Hudson Valley Green Team, recently spent two days working with U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service staff at Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge in Sussex, New Jersey.
The joint project is part of the Service’s Yonkers Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership. The collaboration, which was made official in 2015, is one of 30 such relationships across the country. Engaging urban communities and their residents in conservation is one of the Service’s top priorities.
Despite sweltering temperatures, high levels of humidity, and no shade for cooling down, the Green Team members worked with refuge staff, as well as volunteers from the Wallkill River Watershed Association, to plant more than 200 trees along the Wallkill River.
The new trees will help stabilize the streambank, reduce erosion and flooding, and provide valuable habitat for wildlife. Despite the 90-minute drive from home, the Green Team youth were helping better their own community, as the Wallkill eventually joins the larger Hudson River, which flows through Yonkers.
Green Team member Brianna Rodriguez is excited to come back next year “and see those plants doing well.” Despite the heat, fellow Green Team member Emperatriz Ojeda remarked that “giving back to our environment and our planet…is a lot of work, but it’s so rewarding.”
The youth followed up their tree-planting visit with a trip to remove invasive plants from another area of the refuge. The Green Team has been coming to this spot with refuge staff for several years to remove non-native species, such as autumn olive, that compete with native plants and have little value for wildlife.
“The size of the autumn olive patches has been reduced greatly since the Green Team started working on removing them several years ago,” said refuge biologist Chelsea Utter.
According to the organization’s youth programs coordinator, Victor Medina, one of the goals of working with the Service is to bring “experiences of conservation in these public lands to our Green Team youth and also to bring that work and that conservation ethic to local areas and parks in Yonkers.”
The Green Team has in fact taken the knowledge gained at the refuge and applied it in their local community. Their Willow Tree-Planting Project is improving the health of the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, another tributary of the Hudson.
These youth could spend the summer indoors in front of a screen but would rather, as Green Team member Jessy Zhang said, “help the environment out…that’s our goal.” The refuge and the Yonkers community are both better for it.
Jared Green is the Wildlife Refuge Specialist at Cherry Valley National Wildlife Refuge in Pennsylvania.
