This is a guest post by Leah Muller, student at New Vista High School in Boulder, CO and member of the New Vista Earth Task Force.

When anybody in Boulder, Colorado litters, sooner or later it ends up in the creek and river system. This is a major problem because not only does it destroy diverse creek ecosystems, but it also contaminates the water. Contamination is the last thing the river system needs because much of the water in Colorado runs off into the rest of the country, which animals, and people, use for their drinking water. It’s a life source that a simple careless act can spoil.

New Vista High School’s Earth Task Force, sponsored by the Cottonwood Institute (ETF) took note of this issue, and decided to help out. On October 1st, 2011, group members, teachers, and students from the larger New Vista High School community went to local Skunk Creek for a bit of tidying up. ETF partnered with the Keep It Clean Partnership to pick up a surprising amount of trash! They covered just a two-block stretch of the creek in two hours, picking up any trash they could find. The number of cigarette butts alone was daunting. Nine bags of trash and one bag of recyclable materials was collected and the ETF covered only a fraction of the area they had planned to cover. Students were shocked by how much trash they found.

As a result of this action project the Earth Task Force plans to adopt this stretch of Skunk Creek by returning to it throughout the year to keep it clean!