Anne Bright
Most people mean well. I make a mental note to take an extra plastic bag out of the recycling when I walk my dog but only remember when I see an empty potato chip bag or discarded beer can on the side of the road.
Anne Bright doesn’t need to make a mental note because this particular habit is ingrained in her. She walks a lot on the mountain, and she picks up a lot of trash when she does! She is also a good steward of the greenspaces on Lookout and understands we have so many invasive plants that we need to monitor. Monitor is a euphemism. Control is more like it. And even that term is putting it mildly.
The invasive plants like privet, honeysuckle, kudzu and Bradford pears are choking our out important natives, which our wildlife depends on. Privet is easy to yank up when it’s little – not so easy when it’s big, after which it’s generated thousands of new invasive plants.
Anne was pushing her grandchild in a stroller along Lula Lake Road, stopping every so often and putting it in a plastic grocery bag strapped to the handle of the stroller. Spying a fair-sized privet sapling, she went to work.
“With much effort, I ripped a small, but tenacious privet sapling out of the ground and dropped it on the sidewalk. I didn’t want there to be any chance it could re-root. I wanted it to die, die, die! Invasives are worse than litter - exponentially harder to get rid of,” she explained.
“As I turned the corner to go down Rock City Trail, a policemen got out of his car and said told me I dropped something … I thought he was going to fuss at me for uprooting privet and throwing it on the sidewalk. He pointed, and I turned around to see that one of the baby’s blankets had fallen onto the ground.”
Relieved because she laughingly said she feels like she is always in trouble for something, she was surprised when the officer walked right up to her and handing her something – not a ticket or warning.
‘“I want to give you this,”’ the officer said and handed me a medal. He said that the new police chief had commissioned them all to pass out these medals for good citizenship, and he had seen me picking up trash,” Anne said.
Chief Dewayne Steele has charged his department with rewarding good behavior in a sense.
Mayor David Bennett explained that the officers of Lookout Mountain, Ga., give out a coin-shaped medal if an officer sees a citizen of any age doing something good, be it picking up trash or anything else that behooves the community.
Doing something good is second nature to Anne. She agreed to share this story so that other folks would be cognizant of litter and start preventing it or picking it up.
“I do it because I can’t walk without picking things up. It’s my hunter/gatherer instincts - golf balls, trash, rocks, pinecones, seed pods, mosses, interesting leaves, (and pulling up invasives), but I also do it for the birds. We are a bird sanctuary up here, after all,” Anne said. And she I devoted to our wildlife.
“Some entity sprinkled hay all around the perimeter on Wood Nymph Trail and left plastic bailing rope behind. I’ve seen baby birds who got their legs wrapped up in plastic line and when they tried to fly out of the nest, hung themselves by their feet and died there. If it had been organic matter, the mother bird could have cut through it with her bill and freed them. And, of course, there is how dangerous it is for all our wildlife to be ingesting plastic litter,” she said.
Her dream is to start an invasives club and encourage everyone to rid their property of bush honeysuckle, privet, euonymus Fortunei, English ivy, vinca and so on.
Let’s join her!
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Ferris Robinson is the author of three children’s books, “The Queen Who Banished Bugs,” “The Queen Who Accidentally Banished Birds,” and “Call Me Arthropod” in her pollinator series “If Bugs Are Banished.” “Making Arrangements” is her first novel. “Dogs and Love - Stories of Fidelity” is a collection of true tales about man’s best friend. Her website is ferrisrobinson.com and you can download a free pollinator poster there. She is the editor of The Lookout Mountain Mirror and The Signal Mountain Mirror.
Ferris Robinson