Pelham Bay Park Gets Outside Help

Janet Dullinger wrestles with porcelain-berry, an invasive plant from Northeast Asia, while two other Sierra Club volunteers assist her at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx on Wednesday. (Zack Stieber/The Epoch Times)

NEW YORK—“These porcelain-berries are just choking everything to death,” said Janet Dullinger, a middle-aged woman from Minnesota perched in a tree. “I cut the thing with the lopper and then someone else pulls the vines out” she explained, disengaging it from the invasive species’ grasp at Pelham Bay Park on Wednesday.

Volunteers from across the nation, including Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona, traveled to New York as part of a Sierra Club volunteer-vacation.

“Take a little vacation, and do a little service for places like this,” explained Teresa, a retired artist.

The band of about 20 has a Tuesday through Friday work schedule of about five hours each day, and each night after work they go to a Broadway show or concert. They are spending all four days working on clearing invasive species from New York’s biggest park. They stay in a hostel, and have Monday and Saturday off to tour the city.

“The hostel’s really nice,” said Teresa. “They have great meals [and] good food, which is fantastic.”

She and her husband also went on a Sierra Club river rafting trip in Alaska a couple months ago, where they enjoyed food cooked in Dutch ovens stacked on top of each other.

“The secret is you feed people really good stuff and they‘ll work really good, they’ll work hard,” she concluded. “It’s work, and it’s good; you feel good at the end of the day.”

“It’s hard work, it’s dirty work, but it’s work that wouldn’t get done otherwise,” said group leader and New Rochelle resident Richard Grayson, who has been involved with the trips since the 1960s, when he was a teenager.

The group has been bonded quickly, according to Dullinger, “We all work very well as a team considering we just met each other a couple days ago.”

They played a game of “Two Truths and a Lie” on the bus ride over, where a person says three things about themselves, one false, which helped them get to know each other in a fun way.

“I feel like I’m learning a lot from them in terms of work ethic,” said Meredith.

“It’s very good progress,” said an attorney from California who has been volunteering with the Sierra Club almost 10 years, “We have some very good tools, though, and a lot of people with a lot of energy,” despite many of the group being older, or “more mature.”

The Sierra Club, a grass-roots environmental organization founded in 1892 that works to protect communities and wild places, has around 90 volunteer-vacations annually. Most are in the United States, run seven to eight days, including a day or two completely free of work, and typically cost between $300 and $900, not including airfare.