Control What You Can

Climate change. Economic injustice. Healthcare, education, and immigration reform. With so many issues requiring urgent attention, it can be daunting and discouraging to imagine taking on any one problem, let alone all of them. So I ask you: do what you can. Control what you can.

You can't implement a national energy policy to mitigate the effects of climate change. But you can enact a small-scale version in your own household. You can't preserve large tracts of wilderness as habitat for declining songbird populations, but you can make your backyard into a small-scale sanctuary bursting with native prairie plants. If even that seems too daunting, how about just planting a couple of milkweeds for the monarchs?

We all know change is hard. Change on a national or global scale is glacial. It is very hard to make the world a better place--but it is incredibly easy to make your neighborhood a better place.

Four of the seven bags from this winter's cleanup.

Case in point: the Sycamore Greenway. Every winter, when the dried grasses have been matted down by wind and snow, a trash heap is revealed. Piles of cans and bottles that had washed into the Greenway from the streets above; plastic bags, frisbees, tennis balls and wiffle balls that had sailed in from above. The City of Iowa City does not have scheduled cleanups at the Greenway...so I asked for some bags and did it myself. A few hours in spring before everything starts growing, a few hours in the winter after everything dies back, and the Sycamore Greenway gets a fresh, clean look (at least until the next big rain).

It doesn't have to take a lot of time and effort. It doesn't have to be hard. It can be as simple as picking up that empty can you see in the street while you're out for a walk. We can't prevent thoughtless people from doing thoughtless things, but we can take control of our patch and make it better in countless small ways.


Special note to my fellow dog owners: I humbly ask that, if you are just going to chuck your dog's poo into the grass near the trail, please don't bother to bag it. Some poor schmuck trying to make the world a better place has to fish out the brightly-colored plastic grenade and clean up your mess. It's gross.

So. Many. Poo bombs.

For more information about making your yard a better place:

• Habitat Network (Cornell Lab of Ornithology) 
•  Plant. Grow. Fly. (Blank Park Zoo)