Winnipeg creeks: Garbage dumps or natural spaces?

I know that my face would never be placed beside anything related to "fastidious" or "neat," but one of the spring events that I enjoy is picking up other people's garbage at the annual clean-up of a Winnipeg creek.

For the past few years, I have participated in cleaning up the area around Omand's Creek, which runs past some of the major shopping areas near Polo Park, under Portage Avenue, and into the Assiniboine River. Perhaps because of its location, the creek and its banks tend to be full of all kinds of debris, from plastic shopping bags to cardboard boxes and even shopping carts, which need to be removed each spring.

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On Saturday, for the 14th year in a row, volunteers, with the sponsorship of the local MLA, will help remove some of the garbage that has accumulated over the last year. The event always brings out many different people and provides them with a chance to contribute to the wellbeing of their city.

One of the interesting parts of the afternoon is meeting other people and finding out why they joined the group.

Volunteers are people from the neighbourhood, Portage Avenue Church at the corner of Portage Avenue and Raglan Road (which is how I got involved) and sometimes from other parts of the city.

Each person has a different reason for joining the group. One especially interesting response to my question of why people get involved came from a woman who lived elsewhere in the city but who regularly caught a bus at a stop near the creek, giving her a perfect opportunity to see the need for garbage pick-up.

To a large extent, the clean-up is quite solitary, with individuals or groups of perhaps two or three of the 20 to 30 volunteers assigned to each section of the creek. However, even though they might have little contact with each other while they are working, volunteers can see evidence of the work in full garbage bags at the curbs as they gather for the wind-up barbecue.

Annual clean-up is fun but it's better to keep nature clean

At Omand's Creek, participants see only a sample of what the garbage problem can do, clogging up the stream and making the whole place far less attractive than it could be. While the cleanup is relatively solitary, the problem, unfortunately, is not; the results of worldwide garbage production are even more evident in an area called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a huge area in the ocean where debris from North America and Asia circles around just below the surface of the water.

How did we get to the point where an annual creek cleanup is necessary and where a patch of garbage actually has its own name? We all know that we live in a society where throwing something away is often cheaper and easier than repairing it, and with the easy disposability even of items like contact lenses, Canadians have been throwing out more garbage than ever, more than any other country.

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I have found everything from coffee cups and plastic shopping bags to boxes and packing materials on the banks of Omand's Creek. I've seen how people's carelessness can threaten a small but potentially important ecosystem, but also what can happen when people come together to make a difference.

The annual clean-up can be satisfying and even fun as people gather together at the end to share their stories, but it would be even better if the mess-makers could make an extra effort to keep shared areas and natural spaces clean. I can't make any great claims of fastidious neatness in my own life, but I think that it would make the world better if people could take responsibility for their own messes.

If that happened, maybe events like the annual Omand's Creek clean-up could become unnecessary. It could even inspire me to keep my own space neat.

Susan Huebert is a Winnipeg writer and editor.