While the city and county mayors boast the projects they are undertaking to make Chattanooga more popular, such as the City In A Park initiative or the new Lookouts stadium, our public parks and waterways are getting polluted from all the litter that is left behind by people who use these public spaces but do not take the responsibility of leaving them clean.
I am a mathematics professor and I volunteer with my students to clean up this mess. We get no incentive from doing this, but we do it because we care about our parks and our water and the habitats that thrive within these places.
We have been doing this for over two years now, where we go out by the riverbank along the Tennessee Riverwalk and pick up trash left behind by people who use those spaces for fishing and other leisurely activities.
Our goal was to clean up the entirety of the Riverwalk from the Chickamauga Dam to Coolidge Park, but we keep on visiting the same two to three locations each week because by the time we clean up one place, the other is already trashed.
In order to bring this issue to light, my student volunteers and I met with the Parks And Outdoors director, Scott Martin, last year, on the recommendation of Mayor Kelly, but nothing came of it. They were busy getting grants for their City In A Park initiative, which according to most citizens is just hogwash. Such a project makes sense for densely populated cities like London and NYC that are taking up the initiative, but Chattanooga already has a lot of greenery around, and instead of preserving it, our public officials are busy selling off these lands to developers, thereby resulting in rapid urbanization, while doing nothing to preserve what is uniquely ours.
We are called the Scenic City for a reason and if it is not preserved, then that will become nothing more than a title of the past.
There are laws against littering, but there is no enforcement. Given the recent studies done on PFAS (microplastics) in the water and land resulting from plastic pollution, this matter should be our top priority if we are going to boast the title of Scenic City. Why then is nothing being done about this? Why are fines on littering not increased? Why are the laws not being enforced? When will we do something, if anything, about this problem?
As a citizen of this beautiful city for almost two decades, I urge the citizens to not only fulfil their responsibility to keep our shared public places clean, but also put pressure on our elected officials to do the work they are supposed to. Whether you are leaning right or left, it matters not. We all want clean resources and we all want to see our city and our public places clean and we want our public servants to do their due diligence. Let's at least unite on this matter and do what we can to clean up our parks and waterways. After all, it will only be detrimental to us if we fail to do our part.
Hersh Patel
Associate Professor, Mathematics
Chattanooga State Community College