Community Corner

Spotlight on Volunteers: Janet Weber

Weber is a volunteer with Keep Rockland Beautiful

Janet Weber is an artist, interfaith minister, teach and photographer who has been a Rockland resident for the past 27 years.  Born and raised New Jersey, she now lives on the border of Pearl River in Nanuet with her husband Peter.

Environmentally aware from a young age, Weber’s later work with indigenous elders was a large part of what inspired her environmental awareness and activism today.  She volunteers her time through Keep Rockland Beautiful, which is an environmental organization located in West Nyack. 

Weber, along with her close friend Sona Mason, organizes and leads a group to clean up the Nauraushaun brook in Nanuet.  Weber also utilizes her talents in photography and film to document and publicize the abundance of environmental cleanup efforts going on in Rockland County.  Her documentary, "Run Off--The Journey of Water: A Film About Water Awareness" is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccBFtCJyVnU.

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Weber’s sense of community, personal responsibility and appreciation for her environment are illuminated through her environmental activism to stand as examples of what it means to be a socially responsible citizen in our world today.

What is your primary volunteer work?

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It’s cleaning up the Nauraushaun Brook in Nanuet.

What is your role within that?

Last year, I connected with a neighbor that I didn’t know through Keep Rockland Beautiful and we’ve become amazing friends.  Her name is Sona Mason.  She is an ecologist and she also does the water quality monitoring of the stream.  Last year, she and I went door to door.  I made up my own flyers and printed them and I went door to door to meet all my neighbors.  In the neighborhood, we probably had about 100 and put posters up in the libraries and supermarket trying to get volunteers.  There was a little drizzle in the morning and our cleanup was at one o’clock and no one came.  Sona and I did the cleanup alone and it was pretty heart-wrenching to do this cleanup.  Not even to do it alone, but to have to do it at all.

This year, we kind of shouldered on and Andy Stewart, from Keep Rockland Beautiful, would get calls from different people and they wanted to volunteer, so he sent them down to us because he knew our ranks were thin and this year we had 60 people.  We had a church group, scout group and I met a couple of neighbors who actually showed up this time.  So, it was pretty amazing.  People travelled from all over, they even came down from Orange County from their church group but people from Tappan and Nyack came over to our cleanup in Nanuet, because they wanted to help and maybe they only had that day available or they were just more interested in the Nauraushaun. 

Through Keep Rockland Beautiful, they had a dinner meeting for the crew leaders, which I went to and I met a woman from Valley Cottage who had 180 volunteers in her group and Andy recorded that in Stony Point this year, they got a turnout of 250 people.

So KRB, Keep Rockland Beautiful, I think has been going for seven years, so we pick up the seasonal trash, but the more volunteers we get, we get to do the deep trash, which means stuff that’s been there for decades and that’s what we pulled out again this year.  We pulled out the shell of a Volkswagen that’s been there for god knows how long.  We also pulled out a dishwasher, a tub, hundreds and hundreds of beer cans and liquor bottles.  On our cleanup report, we always have how much trash, how many tires did you find, most unusual piece of trash, most disturbing piece of trash, and the amount of drinking that’s going on in the county amongst young people is pretty sad. 

I have a little tributary in my yard, which feeds into the Nauraushaun, and I’ve been cleaning it up on my own for years, just taking out hundreds and hundreds of beer bottles and liquor bottles pretty much every Sunday morning, in addition to drug bags and condoms out in my yard.

When I find out about Keep Rockland Beautiful, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, here’s people who are proactive. They want to help the community."

So I joined them because I was doing the cleanup on my own and last year, after meeting Sona, who’s an ecologist, and I had this heart-wrenching experience, where I saw these ducks swimming in a pond that was just full of trash, and all of this stuff goes into the reservoir, and so, from that experience, I was motivated to make this little documentary.  It’s a film about runoff.  It’s a ten minute video that features the storm drains of Nanuet and the whole process of water and water awareness.

I’ve also done a lot of work with indigenous elders and their view of water is significantly different than the world's.  Water is the most important thing in your life and we treat it with such neglect, which is why there’s so much water pollution.  So, bringing that awareness to people that, without water, we could only live for a few days and if all the water’s polluted, then all the animals are sick and what are we going to do.  We’re not above that, we’re all interconnected to those things.  So, this is a very important piece that I really think is missing in our industrial society.

So, that film was shown at this volunteer-leader dinner and there were some municipal supervisors there and it’s really wonderful to see this collaboration that’s starting to happen with the municipal department.  Like the roads and highways, they’re thrilled that people are picking up trash.  Also the sewer department and the water people all are happy to know that more and more citizens are willing to step up in monitoring and taking care of this problem.  There’s so much trash that’s being swept into the system, inadvertently or deliberately, so with more citizen, proactive watchdogs out there, everybody wins.

There’s another project going on in Rockland County and it’s an eel-monitoring project.  Through Keep Rockland Beautiful, the Hudson River Estuary Program and the DEC, Department of Environmental Conservation, there’s a whole bunch of citizen scientists who are on this team that they set up this special net, they’re catching the eels, they’re weighing them, they’re counting them and then they get released further upstream, because the eel population is in severe decline and they’re trying to figure out why.  Obviously, there are environmental stressors in all of the efforts to cleanup.  So, I just almost finished with a little documentary about that.

So, I volunteered for this cleanup and it has snowballed.  It’s been wonderful to meet the neighbors that are concerned about the drinking water.  Most people just don’t seem to be interested.  So, we’re just trying to keep on doing what we’re doing and hopefully the time will come when more people will help out, because the trash never ends.  There’s deliberate trashing and then there’s unconscious trashing where people just throw stuff out the window and it gets swept into the storm drains and it goes into the creek.  Then we have all this plastic decomposing in our water supply.

How do you dispose of all this stuff?

We gather the trash as something that’s been split up.  The recyclables we put in clear bags, the cans, the bottles, so I’m actually not fully clear.  We consolidate the trash on the roadside and there’s signs that say volunteer litter pickup through Keep Rockland Beautiful, so people know that the trash is there deliberately and also to advertise that it’s citizen volunteers doing this work.  So, the highways department might pick up some of the stuff and then we have the recyclable stuff.  There’s a little jurisdictional issue, because they’re not sure whether it’s the town’s property or the water company’s property, but they picked it all up last year.

So where does Keep Rockland Beautiful come into in all of this?

They’re the umbrella and they orchestrate all the cleanups.  They have a website, they have all the cleanup locations listed, the dates, so if you live in Suffern or Stony Point or whatever and you want to help locally, you can find a site, contact a crew leader, they’ll give you the meet-up information. 

In Sparkill, this church sponsored breakfast and lunch for the whole cleanup team, there’s wonderful community support for that.  Sometimes the crew leaders go buy pizza or coffee or whatever, they have a little reward for the workers.  Keep Rockland Beautiful has some other things on, they have a barbecue, they have a golf outing, and it’s to help connect the cleanup crews and do some fundraising.  We have corporate sponsors that help Keep Rockland Beautiful.  It’s to provide equipment like the trash bags and grabber bars and they bought waders so we can go out in the creek in these boots to pick up trash that’s in the water.

So this has stemmed out of an impact on your life that you then took to the next level?

Yes.  It’s really a societal problem and it’s just about lack of awareness and lack of respect that people have for other people’s property, or they just don’t think about it or think it will just go away.  So after personally cleaning out the woods behind my yard, the creek there that’s not my property, I’m still doing it 25 years later.  The townships can only do so much and it’s really up to the citizens of Rockland to keep this place livable.

Were you environmentally aware before this or was it an awakening process for you?

I did my first stream cleanup when I was in seventh grade back in 1968. I think it was the first Earth Day.  I just had a sense of things very early on and I made a pollution movie when I was in seventh or eighth grade.  So, I’ve been on this track my whole life, trying to eat organic foods and have a low carbon footprint.

You’ve given so much volunteering your time, has it given anything back to you?

A tremendous sense of accomplishment and the exhilaration you get at the end of the cleanup with the crew.  To see those families out there and senior citizens out there, to meet other people who have community awareness and want to help, there’s a sense of pride when you meet other people in your neighborhood who care about where they live and want to help.  Those are the best neighbors to have.  So, by doing civic volunteer work like this, you meet the most amazing people.

What is your most meaningful memory about doing this work?

When I drive by Nauraushaun creek every day, I know that it’s cleaner than it was and that I had a hand in that along with a lot of other really great people.

What advice would you give to someone who’s interested in getting involved but hasn’t yet taken that step to begin volunteering?

I would recommend they check out Keep Rockland Beautiful.  There’s also a Shade Tree Commission.  There are plenty of organizations around the county that are doing all kinds of things depending on your level of interest.

What’s the best way to get involved with Keep Rockland Beautiful or any of these others that you mentioned?

The Keep Rockland Beautiful website.  Their phone number is (845) 623-1534 and they are located in West Nyack.  Their email is info@keeprocklandbeautiful.org.  They also have a litter hotline where, if you see someone littering, they have a report form and you can write down a license plate and you send it into them and they send it to the sheriff and the sheriff sends it to the car owner and it’s a warning.  So, it’s trying to create awareness.

Know a volunteer who deserves some recognition and would be willing to be interviewed about their work?

Please contact Sam Schaeffer using the “email the author” button at the top of the article.


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