Amina, 9, and Sunil Rayamajhi, 6, do their part to clean up litter collected over the winter in the yard around their home in Moorhead.

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Next week Moorhead residents are invited to join in a campaign to clean up one specific corner of the planet – the city where they live.

Earth Week, observed from Monday, April 18, through Earth Day, Friday, April 22, has been part of America’s calendar since 1970, when the city of Philadelphia first proclaimed it to focus on the environment. Since then it has spurred a variety of events, from educating school children to calling on communities – like Moorhead – to take action to clean and brighten their environments.

Moorhead’s Parks and Recreation Department has teamed up with Public Works to marshal Moorheaders to make an impact on their city. The week-long focus – dubbed Restore Moorhead – focuses on gathering volunteers to clean up litter and other nuisances in parks, ponds and flower beds, as well as along the city’s trail system and public streets.

Volunteer coordinator Trevor Magnon explains that volunteers can participate in the beautification program in one or several ways. The first is for families, organizations or individuals to adopt an area for the entire summer season. If time does not allow, there’s an alternative: Sign up for the times you can help, and let the Parks Department customize a plan that fits your schedule. “There are always clean-up needs,” Magnuson points out. To volunteer for either seasonal adoption or a more limited assignment, contact him at 218.299.5296.

More than 60 teams had signed up to adopt a street as of early last week. Among organizations are the Concordia Handball Team, Creative Clovers 4-H, Moorhead Midday Central Lions, Gate City Bank, Girl Scout Troops 30475 and 30928, Boy Scout Troop 276, Clay County Abstract, Cricket Wireless, Noridian IT Group, RDO, Soroptimists of Moorhead and Clay County Master Gardeners, along with many families and individuals.

Crystal Rayamajhi, the city’s newly hired sustainability coordinator, has helped put together the daily activities from Monday through Friday in which residents of each of Moorhead’s four wards are invited to join their council members on specific projects. (See sidebar.)

“Our goal is to reduce pollution, improve water quality and restore our natural habitat,” she says. The council members’ projects focus in public areas – along bike paths and in neighborhood parks, for example – as well as addressing a growing problem of invasive buckthorn in the city’s two largest parks, M.B. Johnson on the north side and Gooseberry along the river.

They suffer from the same collection of casually discarded waste materials as the others, of course, from blowing plastic bags to discarded cans and fast-food detritus. But they share another annoyance, the invasive species known as buck thorn. Seeded by birds who eat its berries in the fall, it grows to be a tall shrub of up to 20 feet. Ripening from red to glossy black, they seed the shrub far and wide.

That’s the problem, Rayamajhi explains. The fast-growing non-native plant outcompetes those that are native to the region. Like other nuisance plants, it was introduced in the 1800s as an ornamental hedge or landscape addition. Only later did forest management experts recognize the problems that it now causes, including crowding out more desirable native species in the understory of the forest.

“We want to make the cleanup as easy on volunteers as we can,” she says. The forestry crew will identify and cut down the offending species. Volunteers (wearing sturdy gloves) will be asked to gather and pile the branches so that Public Works can pick them up and dispose of them.

Rayamajhi says the Earth Week clean-up campaign means more than just picking up clutter on local byways and landscapes. “Not many people intentionally throw out their garbage,” she says. “Maybe you get out of your car and something blows away.

“But researchers have found that people are more likely to pollute in environments that are already polluted,” she notes. “Not all of the trash in our community was left there intentionally, but it is important to clean it to help send the message that we value a clean and beautiful city.”