Keep America Beautiful:
Ways You Can Help
(& Reasons You Should!)
Spring is just beginning, and as the snow melts and the flowers begin to bloom, it's time to get a jump on cleaning up lawns, curbs, and other green spaces. Why not start now by joining in with millions of other volunteers across the nation to keep America beautiful?
The main goals of "Keep America Beautiful" month are litter prevention, waste reduction, and community improvement and beautification. Show your pride in your community by doing your part to clean up your home, and then lend a hand to other community organizations or public spaces that need some tidying up! Every little bit helps, and if everyone does a little, the end result will be astonishing!
What can you do? "First, do no harm." Do some of your actions detract from a clean and safe community? Resolve to stop littering or writing on the walls of public spaces--and stick to that resolution! Consider your consumption activities: do you buy a lot of disposable products like plastic baggies and paper bathroom cups, or do you buy a lot of heavily-packaged products? Try to notice where your trash comes from, and then find a way to reduce your consumption of your most trash-intensive products.
Then you're ready to start some proactive beautification. Pick up litter-- extra points for putting appropriate articles in recycling rather than waste bins. Compost your food and yard waste whenever possible. Plant a garden--vegetable or flower, or both! Or, if space doesn't permit a full garden, just do a window box or a couple of potted plants. Find an aspect of your community and home that you love, then try to improve it. If it's wildlife, put out a (humming)bird feeder. If it's your local parks or nature preserve, find out what help they need, and provide it! If it's a particular building, help maintain it and its grounds. All of these ideas are very intuitive--but the fact that they're obvious doesn't mean that they are unimportant.
At the Oberlin Heritage Center, we're proud of our town. We encourage you too to take pride in our community, and to show that pride by helping make Oberlin the best place it can be. And don't forget that next month--the morning of May 20, to be exact--Oberlin has its annual Pride Day for community clean-up and beautification. We'd love to have you join us here at the Oberlin Heritage Center--each year we have a posse of volunteers who help us weed, plant, trim, and more. Contact us for more information.
And just in case you'd like a little bit of reading about historical gardens and city improvement, check out some of these recommended books:
"American Gardens of the Nineteenth Century: 'For Comfort and Affluence,'" Ann Leighton, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA (1987)
"Grandmother's Garden: The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865-1915," May Brawley Hill, Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York (1995)
"Gardening in America, 1830-1910," Patricia M. Tice, The Strong Museum, Rochester, NY (1984)
"City Beautiful in a Small Town: The Early History of the Village Improvement Society in Oberlin," Barbara S. Christen, Lorain County Historical Society, Elyria, OH (1994) (Please note that this volume is available for purchase in the Oberlin Heritage Center Gift Shop.)