Hey everyone!

Here is a great example of a community working together to defeat a landfill. 1,000 people protested by attending a county commission meeting wearing green shirts that said "Stop the Landfill", the created a motorcade over a mile long to lead everyone to the meeting and used lawn signs to express their dismay at the potential.

TCWN’s Elizabeth Murphy has been working with the community and they won. The Marshall County landfill is dead. Congratulations!!

I spent Earth Day with Science Clubbers from Seymour High School. They wanted to do some service learning on Earth Day and approached the network about a river clean up. With generous support from the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, we were able to use a Clean Streams Grant to get the students out into the creek. We teamed up with the National Park Service who helped us find a location and organized all the gear necessary gear: gloves, vests, bags, truck for hauling off the trash. The High School provided lunch. The kids picked up enough trash to fill a NPS truck.

We had 66 students participate and they pulled out a lot of trash!

Sadly, not everyone thought the efforts of all these students were admirable. The Seymour Herald carried a story and the blog comments were quite unkind. The kids rallied and you can hear what they had to say for themselves and all the work they did. These kids are really committed to taking care of the environment and I am proud to have spent the day with them.

Click here to see their comments.

Tues night I had the great pleasure to visit the Watauga River Watershed Alliance and talk to them about what we do and how we can work together. While there I visited the Radford Quarry that this group has recently filed a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue for polluting Doe Creek - a lovely trout fishery.

I then went to the Watauga Chapter of the Sierra Club’s meeting. My goodness, the spread! The food was fabulous and the company highly entertaining.

Carl is the stream clean up man and he had an interesting story to tell: While doing a stream cleanup, he found two plastic bags stuffed under rocks. When he pulled them out and looked inside, he discovered the bodies of two pit bulls. Perhaps the losers of a dog fight? A little while later he found another bag with drug paraphernalia in it. He called the Sheriff’s Office and they came out and conducted an investigation. If you find drug items or other items that look suspicious during a clean up, do not hesitate to call the authorities. Please be careful when handling trash during clean ups.