Archive for January 22nd, 2008

Environmental Corps

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

Passport to Texas from Texas Parks and Wildlife

Environmental Corps is an AmeriCorps program,
http://www.americorps.org/, helping to preserve and restore state parks and empower people. We caught up with them at this year’s EXPO.

Actually, someone came by the booth from San Antonio. He’s in a hiking organization and he said they’ve already been on six of our trails.

Donald Jackson is a volunteer with Environmental Corps.

We do a lot of work with local non-profits that are involved with the environment. We do work with local schools on environmental education. We do work with some community gardens.

Invasive species removal and trail building are two major E-corps projects.

Invasive species removal means a lot of chain sawing. So we’ll spend about seven hours sawing down cedar trees and anything else that is sort of invasive and not supposed to be in a site and dragging it and piling it up. So a lot of hard work. When we’re doing trail building, it’s more sort of fun and interesting. We do a lot of rock hauling and we try and use a lot of found materials. We just use whatever rocks and logs we can get from the area.

E-Corps has statewide impact; Teresa Turlick is another volunteer

We go around the state doing conservation work in different parks. We had a spike trip out to Big Bend earlier this year, one out to Possum Kingdom.

More information about E-Corps is available at passporttotexas.org. That’s our show…with research and writing help from Kate Lipinski… For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.
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American Youthworks, Environmental Corps:
http://www.americanyouthworks.org/ecorps.htm