All this week, Penn students and faculty are getting trashed. They’re participating in River Rescue — a campus-wide initiative in which volunteers clean up garbage along the Delaware River.
Over 1,500 pounds of trash and recyclables were collected at Sunday’s kick-off alone. But this initiative is laudable for more than just its contribution to beautifying the site at Neshaminy State Park.
We also commend the administration and student groups for organizing River Rescue because it’s helping to create a sense of a larger Penn community. Organizations from across the spectrum — including the Undergraduate Assembly and Eco-Reps — are sponsoring the initiative, and many more have scheduled times to go to the river play a part in the clean-up. At a school as decentralized as Penn, it’s impressive to see different segments of the population come together.
The initiative should further be celebrated for making Penn’s Year of Water more relevant to students. Though the University has held theme-year programming in the past, on average, freshmen don’t participate in it much beyond the Penn Reading Project, and upperclassmen may not even know what the theme is at all. Because of River Rescue, hundreds more students have hands-on interaction with the Year of Water and will potentially think about the water-related issues challenging our society. We hope the University can get even more students thinking.
