Community Comes Together To Help Silver Lake Nature Center On Earth Day Weekend

About 100 volunteers gathered at the Silver Lake Nature Center in Bristol on Saturday morning for the center’s annual Earth Day weekend volunteer work session.

Roughly 85 volunteers showed up for the work session, while about 15 more showed up to help an eagle scout work on his eagle scout project. Their work varies throughout the nature center.

Arden Williams, the volunteer coordinator for the nature center, was running the show on Saturday.

Keeping the center clean is important for a number of reasons, Williams explained. The land acts as a watershed, filtering water before it has the chance to reach the Delaware River.

“We really get great support from the community for these cleanups,” Williams said.

The sheer manpower provided on the Earth Day cleanups means that jobs that would take the staff of five days to complete can be finished in a few hours. On Saturday, a large focus was on mulching trails and gardens.

“I just find it incredible that this many people show up to help,” Jerry Kozlansky, the director of the Silver Lake Nature Center.

He added that volunteers often bring their own tools, and that really shows their commitment to their neighborhood and community.

The Earth Day session joins a number of other work events throughout the year. On the first Saturday of every month, volunteers gather at the center to clean up the grounds and work on labor intensive projects. The biggest of these sessions, by far, is the Earth Day gathering.

The Earth Day work day is sponsored by Dow Chemical. In addition to Dow, the Greenbelt Overhaul Alliance of Levittown, Pro-Act, Girl Scouts, Mill Creek Elementary School students, and a team from Disney Volunteers were present helping out with the cleanup.

Dow sponsored the cleanup by buying lunch, T-shirts, and helped to procure certain pieces of equipment like a log-splitter.

For Williams, the most important aspect for Earth Day is focusing on recycling. Reducing your waste impact, especially on a day where people are putting in effort to clean up the environment, is very important to Williams, she explained.

“I wish we could get two or three more of these [Earth Days] a year,” joked Kozlansky.