According to an article in Conservation Voices, 24-year-old Chad Pregracke has been cleaning up along the Mississippi River with his Mississippi River Beautification & Restoration Project, which covers 362 miles from Guttenberg, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri. His "catch" includes the following: 1,507 tires, 116 pesticide jugs, 57 gas cans or tanks, 458 55-gallon steel drums, 85 55-gallon plastic drums, 1,116 bags of trash, 136 propane tanks, 5 250-gallon diesel drums, 76 refrigerators, 136 5-gallon buckets, 14 freezers, 44 coolers, 16 washing machines, 13 water heaters, 1 Ford Econoline van, 2 V-bottom boats, 1 top of a school bus, 1 garden tractor, 290 antifreeze bottles, 17 television sets, 24 sinks, 6 bathtubs, 8 toilets, 33 metal chairs, and enough Styrofoam to cover a football field one inch thick.
Pregracke's two-year-old cleanup mission is a love affair - his with the river. He began by raising a small donation from Alcoa and using his own $5,000 savings account. Since then, sponsorships have grown along with publicity about his cleanup project.
Rainforest Facts; Lyme Disease
Conservation Voices also reports the following three rainforest facts:
- "One of every four medicines in use today stems from research done in tropical rainforests
- Of the 3,000 plants know to possess anti-cancer properties, 2,100 are from the tropical rainforest
- Less than one percent of all rainforest plant species have been thoroughly examined for potential benefits
And finally, Voices reports that migratory birds carry deer ticks and rabbit ticks, which are responsible for Lyme Disease. Voices quotes researcher Tom Nicholls as saying that this bird transport may explain how the disease has moved rapidly across long distances.
Adopt and Acre with The Nature Conservancy
The Nature Conservancy, the nation's premier nonprofit land preservation organization offers an Adopt-An-Acre program that lets you adopt your own acre or acres of rainforest with a donation. Since its inception, this program has protected more than 200,000 acres in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The current adoption project seeks to help increase the 1.6 million-acre Noel Kempff National Park, Bolivia to 3.7 million acres. The additional acreage would bring within the park, more than 60 bird species not found within the present park boundaries.
Other TNC adoption locations include a biological corridor in Costa Rica, biosphere reserves in Panama and Guatemala, a conservation and management area in Belize, Coastal Atlantic forest in Brazil, a forest reserve in Paraguay, and the Pantanal region of Brazil. The latter is 10 times the size of the Everglades ecosystem and is the largest continuous wetlands system in the world.
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