<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

Diverse group of volunteers plant trees on MLK Day of Service

Fort Vancouver High, King Elementary students among hundreds who help

By Scott Hewitt, Columbian staff writer
Published: January 19, 2015, 4:00pm
8 Photos
Hundreds of volunteers made their way to the Burnt Bridge Creek Greenway Trail to plant trees as part of the annual MLK Day of Service on Monday.
Hundreds of volunteers made their way to the Burnt Bridge Creek Greenway Trail to plant trees as part of the annual MLK Day of Service on Monday. Photo Gallery

What’s reputedly the most gang-affected area in Clark County became the most volunteer-improved area on Monday morning.

Hundreds of volunteers swarmed the swampy zone near East 18th Street where the Burnt Bridge Creek Greenway passes between Fort Vancouver High School and King Elementary School. Many volunteers were students from those schools, and more than a few said that planting trees and shrubs here on the Martin Luther King Day of Service has become an annual tradition they take seriously.

“We see the trees we planted before,” said Fort Vancouver senior Valeriya Golikova. She and her friend Abby Pop enjoy strolling or jogging along the Burnt Bridge Creek trail, and seeing how this spot has grown lush with vegetation they installed with their own hands is an extra treat, they said.

“It’s not even bad,” added Fort Vancouver junior Manuel Avalos, referring to the cold, slimy ground and the chilly, misty morning. (Then the shallow hole his group dug for their first sapling started producing cold, slimy earthworms and everybody started screaming.)

Alejandra Anaya, a student at King, confessed that she hadn’t realized exactly what the task was going to be — she showed up in fuzzy slippers and sweat pants for an outing that really demanded blue jeans and waterproof boots — but was looking forward to exploring the trail for the first time ever, she said.

“You are amazing for being here today,” Eddie Esparza told all the volunteers in a pep talk at Fort Vancouver before they all marched down the sidewalk to the trail entrance. Esparza added that, on this day honoring the slain civil rights leader, a march down the street would help young people experience for themselves at least a little bit of what King himself experienced. Without the protest marches and demonstrations of the civil rights era, Esparza said, such a multicolored group of volunteers never could have come together today at all.

Esparza added that the student group he mentors — the One of A Kind Drumline, a percussion-driven citizenship- and leadership-development group — has planted trees along Burnt Bridge Creek on every MLK Day, always the third Monday in January, since 2008.

On that first outing, Esparza remembered, there was little wildlife around. But lately, he’s seen blue herons and bald eagles.

“We are making it better,” he said.

Tim Esary, supervisor of the city’s greenway/sensitive lands program, ran down the numbers. Since 2008, he said, 300,000 new trees and shrubs have been planted along the greenway, 50,000 of them by volunteers on annual Martin Luther King Day outings.

When mature, he said, those 50,000 plants will provide sufficient oxygen for 25,000 people to breathe and intercept 11 million gallons of stormwater runoff. They’ll provide habitat for 70 different species and add $12 million in value to the community overall, he said.

‘Impressive group’

Sunrise O’Mahoney, executive director of the Vancouver Watersheds Alliance, said in the morning that 7,000 trees and shrubs would go into the ground along Burnt Bridge Creek on Monday. Between students and teachers from Fort and King, scout groups, churches, families and other nonprofits — as well as such companies as Kaiser Permanente and Port of Vancouver — approximately 400 volunteers turned out.

“That’s a pretty impressive group,” she said.

Esary seconded Esparza’s observation that this section of the Burnt Bridge Creek Greenway, which used to be choked with non-native canary grass, gets a little healthier with every new planting. But it still needs work before it can be removed from an official state list of polluted waterways, he said.

“What do you expect when you’ve got 200,000 people living nearby, all adding to the pollution?” Esary said.

This year’s addition of low-growing berry shrubs also should help stabilize the steep slope to the south of the site, Esary said. A few volunteers climbed that slope to plant small bundles of bare-root shrubs that should spread quickly — and to admire a high-altitude view of the volunteer swarm.

“They say this is the most gang-impacted part of the city, with Fort over there and King up there,” Esparza said, pointing northwest and then southwest. “That may be true, but look at this diverse group we’ve got, people from all walks of life, hundreds of them coming together to make this a better community.”

“I always wanted this to be something good. But I never imagined all this,” he added.

Other events

King-inspired Monday events also drew volunteers who extended a new trail along the west side of Vancouver Lake, cleaned up the beach and added plantings near the Water Resources Education Center, painted and decorated the YWCA’s domestic violence shelter and stitched “security blanket” quilts for ill and needy children.

Also, Washington State University Vancouver hosted a day of workshops and discussions about educational justice; its King observance continues this week with a two-part screening of a documentary called “Visions of Abolition,” which explores connections between mass incarceration and the war on drugs, and between slavery, capitalism and the prison-industrial complex. Part one, “Breaking Down the Prison Industrial Complex,” is set for 11 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. today.

Part two, “Abolition: Past, Present and Future,” is set for 3 to 4:15 p.m. Wednesday.

A facilitated discussion will follow each screening, set for the Dengerink Administration Building, Room 129. The campus is located at 14204 N.E. Salmon Creek Ave.

It all winds up with a live stream of the Martin Luther King Celebration at the main university campus, WSU Pullman. The speaker will be Angela Y. Davis, a renowned civil rights activist who went on to become a professor (now retired) at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The event is set for 7 p.m. Thursday at the Firstenburg Student Commons at WSUV.

Loading...