The light rain that fell didn’t stop us. In fact there was a lot of enthusiasm amongst my fellow Rotarians as we planted 47 trees at Brook Nature Reserve on Fairyview Drive in Huntsville. It was part of celebrating Rotary’s 113th birthday and honouring Rotary International president Ian Riseley’s request that every club in the world plant a tree for each of their members. In the case of the Rotary Club of Huntsville, the 47 trees represented the number of members and our visiting exchange student, Madeline Gosset from Belgium. There are 1.2 million members in Rotary around the world.
The environment is one of the Rotary’s areas of service.
“We did the project and planted the trees in two hours,” said committee chair Cameron White. “It was warm and that helped as no one complained about it being too wet.”
The club purchased the trees as well as planted them in the reserve. The property had been left to the District of Muskoka by Catharine Brook .
“Hopefully, five years from now it will be all grown up,” said White, “and it will become part of the forest. We’re making a big commitment around the world to having trees that provide oxygen and absorb carbon dioxide.”
That was May 1st.
Fast forward a few weeks and the Rotary Club of Huntsville completed another environmental project clearing a section of roadway of litter. It was the 17th year the club has gone out, usually on a Saturday morning, and cleared a designated area of garbage left behind over weeks and months in the roadside ditches.
“In the first year I was involved,” said White, “we picked up 115 bags of litter. This past year we picked up only 25. And most of it today is plastic. It used to be cigarette packages and butts and all kinds of stuff. Now it’s all plastic. We had twelve garbage bags of plastic bottles on Earl’s Road.”
“I’d like to see us expand and I think we can. I’d like to see the town come back and have an Earth Day where they involve everybody instead of letting each group do their own. I think we would have more success if we were to do that.”
The club this year focused their efforts on the Highway 60 and Golf Course Road area.
“There’s not a lot of homes there,” said White, “so it has a fair amount of litter on it.”
Cameron White is now 80 years old and one of the senior members of the Rotary Club of Huntsville. The environment has always been a passion of his.
“I grew up where my dad was very aware. We would go into the bush to hunt and you want to have the feeling it’s the first time that anyone has been there. When you see a Coke or Pepsi can it’s kind of a downer so we made a commitment we would pick it all up and in a week we picked up a half ton truck load of stuff,” said White. “I’ve been doing it for sixty years. Part of it is being a Rotarian but I have a lot of partners in this and it works out well.”
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