Montgomery County Environmental Learning Center
Cassidy Count, 2020 Cohort
One of
the most memorable and impactful experiences I’ve had this semester with the
River Stewards Program was our field trip to the Montgomery Country
Environmental Learning Center. The sophomore cohort went on this field trip on
our own, and it sticks out in my memory for many different reasons. One reason
being what we saw and learned at the center. We were going on a tour of the
facilities, when we walk through this door and all the sudden we were in a dark
hallway with a huge glass window spanning one wall, allowing us to see a huge
area just filled with trash. It is hard to describe this image, but imagine an
area the size of a football stadium covered in trash piles as tall as a dump
truck. There were trucks in there pushing the trash all together that would be
pushed in trash trucks that would come to take it to a land fill. The even more
shocking part was that this was at the end of the day and most of it had
already been taken for the day. I was awestruck and just stared at all of this
as our leader was telling us the specifics of how much there was and how much
of it could have been reused or recycled. I could tell by the looks on the rest
of my cohorts’ faces that they were just as impacted by seeing this as I was.
We often talk about the importance of sustainability, but seeing it was a whole
different thing.
But this
trip wasn’t just solemn. After we saw this, we walked into this huge room full
of little games and activities about trash, recycling, and sustainability,
obviously intended for kids to engage them in the subject matter. However, our
cohort of 19 to 20 year-old college students spent a good 30 minutes in that
room playing with the games and exploring all the different things all the
while learning all about this common factor that drew us together as a program.
Getting to have this hard-hitting experience, but also getting to have fun with
my cohort was a really cool experience and is one of my favorite memories so
far.
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