As a kid, I was fascinated by ants. Much to my mom’s chagrin, I would leave crumbs around the kitchen floor and watch the insects navigate the linoleum expanse, leaving behind a chemical trail for their sisters. I loved how they selflessly worked together to carry crumbs much larger than themselves back to the colony.
I hadn’t thought about this much until earlier this year, when I was participating in a volunteer trash cleanup organized by River Aid San Antonio, a grassroots group focused on cleaning up San Antonio’s garbage-lined urban creeks and rivers. I stood on the banks of Salado Creek pulling plastic wrappers from a tangle of branches when Josh Sarkardehi, one of the group’s field captains, called me over to help lift a length of plastic water pipe that had washed into the creek.
The pipe was about 20 feet long, one foot in diameter, and must have weighed at least 700 pounds. But when a dozen of us wrapped our arms and lengths of strap around the pipe and heaved upward, it began to lift. Using our collective strength, we hauled it up a steep hill to a parking lot, where city crews could take it away.
We had become ants, and it felt great.
Over the past two weeks, with horrible news pummeling me from my social feeds, I’ve often felt like an ant — tiny, insignificant, powerless. However, I feel most at peace when I act like an ant, binding together with my fellow workers to accomplish something bigger than myself.
That’s why I joined the board of River Aid, which earlier this year earned its official nonprofit designation from the IRS. This month, I wanted to take a break from a typical Trailist post to let you in on what we’ve been up to — and invite readers to join us in our mission to make portions of our waterways clean enough for swimming again.
All groups have an origin story, and River Aid’s begins with Gardopia, the Eastside gardening nonprofit headed by Stephen Lucke that’s become a hub of environmental activity in the city’s urban core. A group of Gardopia volunteers and staff, all in their 20s and 30s, began to discuss finding a long-term solution to the city’s rampant trash problem. They threw themselves into hosting cleanup events almost every weekend, drawing hundreds of volunteers through their relentless posts on Facebook on Instagram. I followed the posts for a few weeks before deciding I couldn’t miss the chance to be involved in a movement like this.
One of the first places I met the crew was at Olmos Basin Park, the choke point in the watershed that drains much of north-central San Antonio. Even after slight rains, trash piles up in the park behind Olmos Dam, built in the 1920s to protect downtown from flooding.
My first visit to Olmos Basin was in 2016, when Lissa Martinez, a local environmental advocate and Texas Master Naturalist, agreed to let me tag along with her on one of her regular visits. Martinez serves as the park’s unofficial volunteer steward, hosting cleanup events and taking regular water samples of the segment of Olmos Creek that cuts through the park.
Whenever the creek floods, a wave of plastic, aluminum, Styrofoam and glass washes in. During our meeting, Martinez peeled back the layers of trash and organic debris, revealing plastic bags plastered to leaves and sticks in thin sheets, like some kind of cursed baklava.
I came away from that encounter feeling like no one could ever get a handle on this problem. That San Antonio is doomed to live with trash-strewn public lands, and I might as well get used to it.
At the time, San Antonio’s one major annual cleanup event, Basura Bash, was the only occasion when volunteers were able to make significant progress reducing the load of trash in the park. Every February, hundreds of people would descend on the site, one of dozens of cleanup spots around the city. They’d bag and remove thousands of pounds of trash — only to see a new wave washed in after the next rain.
That was before River Aid, of course. Since we’ve been in Olmos Basin, the park has become visibly less cluttered with litter than it has in several years.
At my first Olmos Basin cleanup, I met Charlie Blank, the group’s director and the engine that drives River Aid. Blank grew up in San Antonio and New York, and his personality mixes Texas friendliness with East Coast efficiency. You’ll often see him on River Aid’s Instagram feed, tromping through creek beds and spotlighting the worst illegal dumping spots in the city.
Blank’s special talent is recruitment. Over months of cleanups, the group snowballed to include people of all of all ages, backgrounds and political perspectives. The group’s remaining three board members are Athena Santos, a lifelong San Antonio resident and Veterans Affairs professional who never fails to be the adult in the room; John Hamilton, a CPS Energy environmental analyst earning his master’s degree in water management; and Seth Stephens, a financial advisor from Charlottesville, Virginia, who brings a wealth of experience with grants and financial metrics.
We’re all pretty different, but when we’re working side-by-side on a muddy slope cleaning up discarded shingles from a contractor’s dump site, we find that we don’t talk about what divides us. Instead, we focus on getting the job done.
Not that the job is easy. During these cleanups, I’ve learned how a milk carton, baked for months in the sun, becomes so brittle it shatters at the slightest touch. I’ve learned that a water-logged spring mattress is much easier to grab and pull than a crumbling foam mattress. I’ve stood on my tiptoes to gather ribbony strands of shredded plastic bags twined into the upper branches of creekside trees. I’ve learned that used needles need to be dropped into a discarded water bottle so they don’t poke through the trash bag and jab our volunteers.
With logistical and trash-hauling help from the City of San Antonio, we’ve accomplished a lot in one year. From March 2021 through March 2022, we held 46 cleanup events at 14 different sites, drawing more than 600 total volunteers. We weigh our trash trophies at every cleanup, and our first-year tally added up to nearly 67,000 pounds. That’s greater than the weight of three (empty) school buses.
Still, local trash statistics indicate our haul barely makes a dent in the problem. According to the city’s annual stormwater reports, city workers removed anywhere from 3.1 million to 278 million pounds of trash per year from 2012 to 2021.
As dismaying as it may be to see how much litter blankets the city, we believe everyday residents need to take charge of the problem rather than leaving it solely up to local government.
We also know endless trash cleanups can burn people out, so we’re coming up with other ways to plug our volunteers into existing opportunities. In May, we brought River Aid volunteers to the Headwaters at Incarnate Word sanctuary to help clear invasive trees from the preserve. We’ll be working with the City of San Antonio on similar efforts in city parks.
In June, we took our first water samples of Salado Creek as part of our participation in the statewide Texas Stream Team citizen science initiative. We’re identifying new sites to test along Salado Creek and the San Antonio River and are looking for volunteers to get trained and begin monitoring their backyard creeks.
We’re still at an early phase of our journey. If we want to make San Antonio’s waterways safe for swimming again, we’ll have to address more complicated pollutants than trash. According to local watershed experts and state data, bacteria pollution is the main reason for the impairment of our creeks and rivers. This originates from a variety of sources — sewage spills, runoff from paved surfaces, pet waste, feral hogs and wildlife. Reducing the bacteria load will involve rethinking how our city develops and uses land.
I want to believe in the power of individuals to make change. That belief is why I became a journalist and, more recently, someone who pushes for environmental quality as a full-time job. Lately, I’ve struggled to maintain that optimism. Like the trash that washes through our city, society’s dysfunctions keep piling up. Sometimes it feels like any efforts to improve our world are futile.
But then I remember another thing I always loved about ants: they’re never alone. Every individual has a job to do. Whether we succeed or fail, we do it together, and that itself brings fulfillment.
Want to join us? Email us at info@riveraidsanantonio.org or follow River Aid San Antonio on Instagram or Facebook. Everyone is welcome.
