Prospect Park’s Litter Mob

Once on a tour, which I wouldn’t recommend, with “Wildman” Steve Brill, we bushwacked through a condom-littered section of the woods in Prospect Park, and someone said, sotto voce, “Damn, these are the safest woods I’ve ever been in.”

Neighbor and blogger Marie Viljoen has been organizing a team of volunteers to clean up the Midwood in Prospect Park. She calls the hardy picker-uppers the “Litter Mob” and she’s always looking for new hands. Gloves and long-handled grabbers are provided.

Volunteers meet every other Tuesday, at 9am at the corner of East Drive and Center Drive in the Park. This Tuesday, September 27th, is the next scheduled Mob-up. If you can make it, it’s a great way to give back to the Park.

The Litter Mob blog details how and why Marie started the Mob after inaction from the Parks Department. Note that the pictures on her blog of items collected by Mobbers can be blunt. The Midwood is not just a paradise of warblers in migration. It’s also used as a cruising ground for men who have sex with men, and, boys being boys, they sometimes make a real mess of it with their party supplies. Marie’s been getting some flak for publicizing the resulting mess, and the damage done by off-path tracks (landscape designers don’t call them “desire” paths for nothing), but I share her sense of the basic rule of the woods: you have to take out what you carry in, in the mountains or in Prospect Park, regardless of what you’re doing there.