El Cerrito's Earth Day: A Morning When the Community Pitches In and Helps (and Enjoys a Free Lunch)

El Cerrito residents, who have a long history of interest in protecting the environment, will show the love Saturday, April 16, by taking on projects at upwards of 30 sites across the city as El Cerrito celebrates Earth Day.

Started in 1970 in the United States and since expanded internationally, Earth Day is celebrated in many communities with events like festivals with games, music and parades, albeit with an environmental message. In El Cerrito, Earth Day is a working holiday, with hundreds of volunteers throughout the city taking on projects such as picking up trash, pulling weeds, planting trees, bushes or flowers, and developing or improving pathways or even painting.

It hasn’t always been that way. In the early days, Earth Day in El Cerrito was more political, with handout-filled tables set up in the Community Center and lots of political speeches. At least in the latter days of this format, residents stayed away in droves.

Longtime Earth Day chairwoman and City Councilwoman Janet Abelson remembers staffing one of those tables before Joel Witherell, who served as the city’s parks and recreation director for more than two decades, changed the nature of the event. One of the people he approached was Abelson, who first served as the Earth Day coordinator for Harding Elementary School, where she was active in the PTA, in about 1996. Witherell asked her to be part of the city’s Earth Day committee and by about 1998 she was serving as chairperson.

What’s special about El Cerrito’s Earth Day, said Abelson, is that volunteers feel ownership of their projects.

“They get an idea of something they think needs to be done in El Cerrito and follow through with it,” she said. Rather than complaining about a problem and expecting someone else to deal with it, Earth Day volunteers, perhaps with a friendly nudge from Abelson, follow “I’d like this to be fixed” with “I have the power to fix it.”

Some sites and their coordinators are repeats from  previous years and may carry over volunteers from past years as well. New projects are added each year, too, with Abelson urging people with ideas to serve as the site coordinator but helping them drum up volunteers and work out the logistics as needed. She may also propose projects as she meets with community members on other matters.

Schools frequently participate in clean-up efforts, with public schools tending to take on projects on their campuses and private schools more likely to volunteer for off-site community service efforts. Not all efforts take place on the official date of the city’s Earth Day celebration.

What individuals and groups get from joining forces with the city is official sanction to work on public property as well as such support as bags and gloves, the loan of tools and hauling away of trash, with the specifics varying from project to project. Sometimes the city partners with other agencies, such as for a clean-up along a strip between El Cerrito High’s football field and Ashbury Avenue that requires cutting an opening in a fence and reclosing it afterward, or around the city’s two BART stations.

Earth Day work is planned for 9 a.m. to noon April 16. Volunteers are invited to gather for a complimentary lunch beginning at noon at the Community Center,  7007 Moeser Lane.

El Cerrito’s service-oriented observation of Earth Day is just a part of its long history of support for the environment. Long before talk of global warming prompted may communities to step up their conservation efforts, El Cerrito was doing things like operating its own . Originally called ECology and run by volunteers, operation of El Cerrito’s recycling center was taken over by the city in 1972.

Abelson said another sign residents are willing to support environmental efforts came around the time she was elected to the City Council in November 1999. In reevaluating the city’s recycling efforts, the city surveyed residents and found they wanted to continue to have a city-run recycling center and were willing to pay for it. It remains unusual, she said, to have a city-run center.

More recently, the city’s Environmental Quality Committee, established in 2008,  has become the most active of the city’s many boards, commissions and committees.

The committee has a broader reach than most, with authority to advise not just the council but other boards, commissions, and committees, staff, citizens and businesses as well, since, Abelson explained, environmental concerns stretch across so many areas.

Abelson said after attending the US Conference of  Mayors' Climate Protection Summit she asked that the council consider creating a citizens' environmental committee.

”While we were doing some things, we weren’t doing enough,” she said.

Abelson said it is the city’s most active committee. In addition to the monthly committee meeting, there are subcommittee activities as well, and members do more than just vote yes or no on things. They get out and dig and pick up trash. The committee is behind El Cerrito’s which do Earth Day-like projects year round and is also one of the parties engaged in a discussion of

Members were initially appointed by the city council but now new people, after proving their commitment by attending at least three meetings, can have their names forwarded by the committee to the council for approval. Abelson said the committee has attracted a different sort of civic involvement, with residents of a variety of ages, many in their 20s and 30s, coming to events not to express dissatisfaction but to get to work on an issue that concerns them.

People interested in suggesting an Earth Day project or volunteering to help are encouraged to sign up as soon as possible by sending an email that includes their name and phone number to earthday@ci.el-cerrito.ca.us.