Trash Sculpture

The weather here this weekend was gorgeous, so Jason and I went out and did some weed warrioring at a park near our place. Weed Warriors is a Montgomery County parks program which trains ordinary citizens to become certified to identify and remove non-native invasive species of plants in the local parks. It's a fun and rewarding way to help the local environment as non-natives can really wreak havoc and throw entire ecosystems off-kilter. So look into it if interested to see if there might be a similar program in your area. But, anyway, while we were out, we gathered some trash and made a little sculpture and then threw the trash away. I was thinking it would be cool to try this on a larger scale, by perhaps organizing a community trash clean-up day and having a trash sculpture contest as a fun way to clean up the Earth and get creative! Find a particularly trash-ridden area, gather some folks (you could work in teams or individually), gather trash and then make sculptures. Then, if you wanted to make it a competition you could have some type of judge or have people vote on the sculpture they think is best. Then, of course, have everyone throw the trash away. As I'm writing this I'm thinking someone has probably already come up with this idea...I'll look into it, but in the mean time if someone wants to make a trash sculpture and post a picture of it on the Idea Farm, it would make me really happy! Ours kinda sucked because thankfully there really wasn't that much trash to work with and it was very windy, but some more artistically gifted folks like yourselves could probably come up with something really rad. Just an idea.

This made me think of one of my favorite documentaries, Rivers & Tides, about the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who makes nature sculptures. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor and witness the beauty of his creations and patience. Here's a clip: